Description

This book concentrates on Henri Matisse’s mother and her influence on his eventual career. It looks at Henri Matisse’s inspiration as a young boy, beginning with a spread depicting the gray, clammy French village in which he grew up.

But while it is cold and damp outside, Matisse’s mother fills the interior of their home with light through pattern and color. She paints natural scenes on plates, allows her son to mix and experiment with paint, and covers every possible surface with color.

From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/03/27/what-were-reading-the-iridescence-of-birds-a-book-about-henri-matisse/

“The book is beautiful to behold, and there is a tender message under the story. As Matisse’s mother allows him to mix her paints and arrange the fruit and flowers she had brought from the market, an undercurrent of inspiration becomes clear — that what our children experience on a day-to-day basis can become, some day, the very thing they draw upon to create beauty as adults. This book is more than an introduction to art history for children, it is an important reminder that childhood, however fleeting, can inspire greatness.”

It reminds us that as parents, we are literally shaping up the way our child sees the world everyday. What we allow and do not allow have a definite impact on our child’s self-esteem and capacity to grow. So we should keep our actions in check because this little life is not waiting for a specific moment, it is building itself day by day, second by second.

Pictures taken from: https://www.hadleyhooper.com/

From the book’s back cover:
“My Mother loved everything I did” Henri Matisse

Why do painters paint the way they do? Do they paint the way they see or what they remember? The great painter Henri Matisse’s story may have some answers.

Henri Matisse was born in December 1869 in a far northern gray small town in France. There was little sun and natural light, but Henri grew up with color and painted places that his mother brought into the leaky cottage. She put colorful red rugs on the broken dirt floors ones and on the walls. His father gave him pigeons pieces, and Henri watched their colors change as they moved.

He began to paint as a young man when he was in the hospital and his mother brought him a paint set.

“I got my sense of color from my mother.” be once said.

After studying art in Paris, Matisse began to paint with strong, bright colors and bold forms and patterns. It became his own style and and he was part of a group of painters known as the Fauves the French name for “wild beasts”. They pained about their feelings and emotions rather than exactly how things looked. Matisse had great success and influenced the course of modern art. In his old age he began to work with paper cutouts, but be also worked with pencil or charcoal when he was too ill to paint.

He always loved birds and kept them bis whole life. He had many artist friends, and before be died at age eighty-four in 1954 he gave his beloved birds to his friend, the artist Pablo Picasso.

His paintings, sculptures. and cutouts can be seen in museums all over the world.

In writing this book, I think I found the answer to the question that inspired it. Henri Matisse painted what he saw and what he be
remembered—he painted his feelings and he pained his childhood.