Telesforas Valius Essay

Telesforas Valius was the youngest of his family, born July 10, 1914 in Riga, Latvia. Being born in a Lithuanian family, the family returned to Lithuania in 1918. Telesforas entered the Kaunas Art School after being encouraged by his art teacher in grade school. Telesforas studied woodcuts in Japanese when he took his brief visit to Paris. Telesforas worked in art his whole life after school, beginning with his part time job as an artist at Kaunas Textile Company. Later in 1942 he became a teacher at Vilnius Art Academy as well as the head of the Department of Printmaking. He continued with his art career in Toronto when he became a teacher at Central Technical School, Western Technical Commercial School, Winston Churchill Collegiate, and University of Toronto, teaching the art of printmaking. Wood engraving was primarily part of Telesforas’s early work. His work started becoming more abstract when he started to add color to his work. He later died …show more content…
Telesforas uses the crowd leading to the funeral with the cross and the shovels as the works focal point. He uses the white outlining to put the focus on the situation at hand. It grabs us in almost instantly to focus on what is going on in the piece. The focal point of the shovels leads us to focus on the group from the funeral and the cross. It grabs you into the picture and invites you into the funeral the second your eyes notices the piece. The focus point allows you to take a step into the frozen moment. Black and white is the predominate color scheme of Teleforas’s work. While you may think that the black and white wouldn’t do much for the piece, it actually enhances the art really well. With the piece being focused on a funeral, the black adds the grieving emotion to the photo. The black makes the photo “dead” and allows us to feel the death as well. The white highlights for more of a focus on the piece. The white leads you into the story of the