A Study On The Composition Of Avigdor Arikha’s Figure Paintings

In the middle of the 1960s,Avigdor Arikha turned from abstract painting to figurative painting.He used the "decisive moment" skillfully,starting from the point of interest..Whatever,without preparatory research and sketching exercises,the works were all in the strict composition,and revealed the traces of paintings in the limited canvas space vaguely.Rather than a repetition of reality,Arikha’s paintings connected the vanguard of pure abstract modernism with the tradition of observation and painting dating back to the Renaissance.Moreover,he tried to combined observation with painting.Finally,he was known for his realistic and natural approach.This paper focuses on the figure painting works in the period of figurative painting of Arikha.What’s more,the rules of the composition of figure painting are explored from the works after sorting and classifying.The whole research process also includes huge personal sketch practice,some doubts and confusions.I explores the reasons for the formation of Arikha’s unstable composition of figure painting through factors such as the plane form structure of the picture,canvas space and spatial perception.In addition,they are applied it my personal sketch practice.This paper is mainly divided into three parts.The first part summarizes the artistic career of Arikha and the artistic characteristics of the figurative painting period.In order to sum up the unstable characteristic,the second part mainly analyzes the composition paradigm of Arikha’s figure painting from the perspectives of two-dimensional plane composition and three-dimensional space management.Finally,the relevant factors that form unstable compositions are considered and re-applied in the process of figure painting in the studio.