A Painter of Dreams and of Spiritual Idealism 

The principal medium of Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was oil applied with brush and palette knife to sized and primed canvas.  He painted in a very traditional manner, standing at an easel, mixing his paints from tubes on a thumbhole palette.  In essence, he continued to paint this way throughout his long life.

For Chagall, the expressive character of the imagery and color textures took precedence over the quality of the physical support.  Like many artists, Chagall often worked over the surfaces of his easel painting, scraping and scratching with a brush end or other implements to create a rough or topography and a rich texture.   Collage, such an important element in the work of Piccaso, Brague, and other cubist followers, appears very rarely in Chagall's art.

Chagall's art is a lyric of love-love of his native village and his childhood, his parents, his two wives, love of nature and of life itself.  "It is our duty to color our own lives with shades of love and hope.........  In art, as in life, all is possible when conceived in love." he wrote in 1973, at the age of eighty-five.  For Chagall, the essential functions of a painting were symbolic, not formal.  To be sure, he subscribed to the twentieth century notion that a work of art, which is constructed of basic forms and colors, must succeed first of all in visual terms

Chagall was a brilliant colorist.  In his art, the very personal sensibility is communicated, as in poetry, through the arrangement of his particular forms and symbols.  For Chagall the work of art was more than anything else a means to record his sensations, his memories, his mood, his feelings about his life.

The above painting was done with a palette knife by Sanchia Lin at the oil painting workshop with Mr. Lee Kim.   Mr. Lee Kim is a graduate of UCLA, and worked as an industrial and technical artist.  Presently he teaches at El Camino College and Palos Verdes  Art Center.