Bengal Tiger in Marsh - Original oil on canvas - 78 x 113 in.

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Daniel Maffia
Bengal Tiger in Marsh - Original oil on canvas - 78 x 113 in.

About the Item

After completion of his Master of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in NY, Maffia established an international reputation for his award-winning portraits which appeared on the covers of many major magazines. Maffia has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Rutgers University, Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute. Twenty six years ago Maffia decided to concentrate solely on fine art, splitting his time between his studios in Provence and Hingham. His oil paintings have been exhibited in galleries in France, New York and throughout the U.S. Now, as a mature artist, Maffia’s ambition and creativity drive him to explore new dimensions of expression, reveling in the freedom of being at the height of his considerable ability. Maffia’s paintings have a subject matter that is traditional and quiet, and yet they rivet one’s attention. The answer to the impact of his dramatic presentations must be found in the artistic means through which the intensity of the emotion is conveyed. Of course, his subject matter is carefully chosen to be compatible with the ideas he wishes to express, but his means of expression are as abstract as any non-subjective painting could be. Maffia paints animals in landscapes or water in attitudes of repose, but vigilant and cautious. They are self-conscious animals that are aware of an audience. They steal sly glances, as if challenging the viewer’s reaction, and may be animals with means to fight back (claws or beaks) or a passive cow that tests one’s reaction to exposed sexuality. Maffia’s light is a filtered light emanating as much from the subject itself as from reflections. The animals float like lanterns in a tropical, moist, thick atmosphere. In nature, as in Maffia’s art, lighting stirs feelings and sustains moods. His paintings are permeated with green, the color of death in human beings and the color of life in plants, but his plants have flashes of hot color suggesting flesh and human life. His paintings make the viewer aware of the abundance, diversity and persistence of the natural world; of air, earth, and water; and of the transient and precarious quality of the life of men and animals where individual life is short. Plants and animals move in a continuum of life, yet detached and individual, claiming their space for the brief moments of their cycle. Maffia is obsessed with the idea of reflection. That is, reflection not only in the visual sense of mirror images, but also as reminiscences and contemplation of earlier times and earlier artists, as well as personal reverie. The visual reflection (in these recent paintings, reflections on the surface of water) provides a Neoplatonic chain of being between reality, the painted image, and the reflection of the painted image: an extension of life from reality through its many reinterpretations (the equivalent of the Hindu concept of life reproduced in gradually diluted forms to infinity). Maffa knows the power of the center. His need to place the subject of his painting at the place of greatest impact is so strong that it is placed in the middle ground with unambiguous foreground and background. Maffia consistently paints a border around his paintings and occasionally highlights the corners of the border to create an illusion that the canvas itself is bowl-shaped with its subject at the concave vortex. He emphasizes the centrality of his composition by creating circular foreground structures of lily pads. These cosmological patterns lie flat in the picture plane and depict an ideal universe with the ruler at the center, belying the randomness of nature. His animals move away while looking back, pivoting around the center. His foregrounds are insubstantial, penetrable pools of water, while his backgrounds are sold thickets of impenetrable plants. Barricaded in the environment, the figures are fixed in the center, with no direction to move except down through water, in contrast to the plants that free themselves from water in an upward exuberance. This closed garden (the “hortus conclusus” of Renaissance painting) has long been a symbol of purity and innocence and of the idyllic protection of the womb.

Creator:
Daniel Maffia (1937, French)
Dimensions:
Height: 78 in (198.12 cm)Width: 113.25 in (287.66 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
Mid-20th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Birmingham, MI
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU94113275911