Coloricombo 2024 Week 17
Emerald Green, Indigo, Burnt Orange and Saffron, updated colour mixing
This week I'm in Fes, Morocco teaching on an art retreat. This beguiling and ancient city with it’s UNESCO-recognised Medina at its centre is an inspiring place to be. I'm featuring a work by the Moroccan outsider artist Chaibia Talal and the colours I've chosen strike me as very much the colours that surround me here.
Chaïbia Talal (1929-2004) has to be one of the most famous Moroccan painters of the 20th century, a period where female artists faced incredible barriers in a conservative society. Self-trained, she is well known for her brightly coloured, naïve paintings of women.
Her life story is fantastic. Born in a village near El Jadida, she grew up living in a tent on the banks of the river. When not helping with chores, her free time was spent drawing in the sand and putting together floral wreaths. Never educated and illiterate throughout her life, Talal's childhood ended abruptly when she was married off to a much older man at age thirteen. By fifteen, she had a son and was a widow.
Talal worked as a housekeeper for French families to support herself and her son, Hossein who she was determined would receive an education.
She had been told by a fortune teller that she had a hidden talent and when, in her early thirties, she awoke from a dream where a group of strangers had greeted her gifts of paints and art supplies, her life changed. She took this as the sign she had been waiting for and shortly afterwards went shopping for paints and started experimenting, using her fingers to swirl colours onto pieces of paper and wood.
In the meantime, Hossein had become an artist himself and in 1965 invited the art critic Pierre Gaudibert to his studio. Impressed by Talal's naïve style, he started to represent her and in 1966 her pieces were shown at the Goethe Institut in Casablanca.
This was followed by exhibitions at the Solstice Gallery and at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Her work was shown at several important ‘art brut’ exhibitions in France, Denmark and the Netherlands where strong parallels were seen with the earlier works of the CoBrA group. Whilst her work enriched numerous public and private collections throughout the world, back home the male leaders of Moroccan artistic movements rejected her paintings, stating that they ‘contributed to the underdeveloped image of Morocco’.
These early exhibitions were just the start of the countless displays of her work to come. Talal's work gained recognition both locally and internationally for its raw emotional expression and authentic portrayal of Moroccan life. Her paintings showcased a deep connection to her roots, capturing the essence of her homeland with passion and authenticity.
Read more about Talal here, here and here.
“Composition en Rose et Vert, gouache on paper, Chaïbia Talal, undated
Colour Combination
The colours for this weeks prompt are Emerald Green, Indigo, Burnt Orange and Saffron. Use the #coloricombo colours along with any neutral light and dark colour to create an artwork in any medium and style.
Coloricombo prompts are released once a week on a Monday, and this year I also link each month with a theme. April’s theme is "Coloriflori" - colourful flowers (see below). If you like you can use this as topic, or create in any way as you wish, using the colours in any medium and style.
I love to see what you do with the coloricombo colours. If you'd like to share your work, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod on social media. You're also welcome to post in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts
Colour Mixing Demo
Here’s a demonstration of me mixing this week’s colours, then using them to create a simple artwork. This content is available to everyone.
I've added a colour mixing demo to this #coloricombo today