The cubist movement in art continues to influence 21st-century painters.
In the early 20th century, a modern art movement was founded by the painters Pablo Picasso and George Braque, which was dubbed "cubism." This artistic movement was named for the interest these painters, working on a two-dimensional surface, had in representing a three-dimensional image. They achieved this end by breaking the image into different angles, which were combined to create a single fragmentary image.
D.M. Ross
Cubist-inspired landscapes and seascapes are the subject of much of Mr. Ross's artwork. Born in Australia in 1953, Ross received no formal artistic training but has followed his "creative urge" since early adulthood. He credits the "great cubists" as his major artistic influence. His work uses the cubist technique of breaking an image down into a variety of angles or perspectives to very detailed effect. Often his image is broken into so many perspectives that the overall impression of the image is abstract rather than recognizable. His paintings of buildings and seascapes capture the essence of the subject matter while simultaneously offering a cubist perspective on the subjects.
Trish Toro
Trish Toro is an artist without formal training but whose self-taught works are high influenced by the cubist style. Her early works emphasize faces and figures whose features are represented in the flattened cubist manner. These paintings have the angular geometric quality of the cubist work of the early 20th century. Today, her work even appears to recreate the subject matter of early cubist still life paintings, showing guitars, bottles, sheet music and bowls of fruit as the earlier artists did. In 2010 works such as "Jubilation," "Integrity" and "Nuance," Ms. Toro moves beyond any recognizable image into abstract cubist representations.
Robin Brisker
The paintings of Robin Brisker, a New Zealand artist born in 1954, tend toward the abstract rather than the figurative. His work is highly influenced by the cubists George Braque and Juan Gris. Differing perspective points of view are represented by different blocks of color in his work, which gives them a checkerboard quality. He often superimposes a more traditionally rendered figure over a cubist-style background. His abstract paintings are reminiscent of cubist still life paintings yet have been abstracted to the degree that the subject matter remains unclear. The viewer, in this case, is left with a interesting compilation of colorful shapes, outlined with strong black lines.
Roswita Szyska
Ms. Szyska lives and works in Chicago. Her artistic statement reveals her debt to the cubist Pablo Picasso and his investigation of the human figure. Her art appears to superimpose the angular, geometric representations of cubism over the top of many of her painted figures. She emphasizes how the play of light seems to create a variety of perspectives when looking at a figure from various angles. Ms. Szyska also makes liberal use of the "primitive" quality that cubist artists took from African tribal masks in her rendering of facial features.
