Giacomo Balla (1871 – 1958)
Italian painter born in Turin, in the Piedmont region of Italy, the son of an industrial chemist.
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And we must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc.
Use materials (Balla means here clothes, ed.) with forceful MUSCULAR colours – the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens, intense yellows, orange, vermillion – ans SKELETON tones of white, grey and black.
We shall find the abstract equivalent for all forms & elements in the universe, then we shall combine them in sculptural constructions according to the mood of our inspiration.
In the evening I study a fair (for his later painting ‘Luna park in Paris’, he made in 1900, ed.)… …if you could see the pomp and luxury of the merry-go-round and the stands and booths. Everything is decorated in Baroque-style, all gold and silver; there are mirrors, fabrics, and electric lightning. By night the whole thing is fantastic and rowdy. First of all I shall make a small picture and some drawings for illustrations.
They (his former pupils / the young Futurist painters Boccioni and Severini, ed.) did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress.
It (the photo of a moving girl by Jules-Etienne Marey, showed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle and seen there by Balla, ed.) will interest artists because, in it, I have made a special study of the way of walking of this girl, and, in fact, I have succeeded in giving the illusion that she is in the process of moving forward.
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