| Larry Poons | ||
| Birth Date: October 1, 1937 |
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Artist Gallery |
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| Larry Poons was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1937. A musician before becoming a painter, his work over the years has been influenced by his musical training. He started out as a guitar player with a high school “country music” band in Queens. Next he studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music from 1955 to 1957. His interest in abstraction, especially the geometric forms of Piet Mondrian led him to painting, and in 1959, he studied at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.
Poons became a prominent figure in Optical Art and in the Color Field school of painting in New York. His paintings of the 1960s were characterized by dots of color placed according to a horizontal vertical and diagonal and against a rich colored ground. The effect was a sense of movement – which in turn is Optical Art. In 1965 he exhibited with the Op artists. The following year, his art became looser with small colored shapes floating in space. From that time, he changed to expressionism and abstraction.
Poons also created Earth* Art such as his “cracked earth landscapes”. For these he uses layers of heavy impasto to create the effect of flowing lava and craggy plateaus – such as you see here in our painting.
Larry Poons resides in New York City and has maintained a studio in Florida.
*Earth Art also known as Land Art (coined by Robert Smithson) is an art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. It is also an art form that is created in nature, using natural material such as soil, rock, organic media and water with introduced materials such as concrete, metal, asphalt or mineral pigments. Land Art is to be understood as an artistic protest against the perceived artificiality, plastic aesthetic and ruthless commercialization of art at the end of the 1960s in America.
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