While delving into his archives, Penn rediscovered early works on paper that he had made between 1939 and 1942, while he was a young illustrator working for– a job that allowed him to save up enough money to buy his very first camera. Following the MoMA exhibition, Penn returned to his young love, and started to draw and paint as a way to reconnect to the creative spirit that fuelled his life’s work in the final decades of his 70-year career.
Drawing inspiration from the major artistic figures of the 20th century, including Henri Matisse, Giorgio Morandi, and Fernand Léger, Penn’s abstracted works share qualities of character and technique with the photographs, while simultaneously offering a textural layer that film simply cannot. In his final years, Penn became increasingly liberated in his quest to express gesture, line, form and dimension through a delicate blend of mixed media.
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