in the woods and fields and rocks walls behind
my home in Shapleigh, Maine on February 6, 2021,
painted February 14, 2021
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
in the snowy fields behind my home with a
Pearange (a pear|orange) on February 6, 2021,
painted February 8, 2021,
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
in a snowy field
by my home in Shapleigh, Maine,
on February 6, 2021, painted February 8, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
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Color Pair Art of the Day
Orange and Blue
Wiki notes edited:
Sir Terence Ernest Manitou Frost RA (1915-2003) was a British abstract artist, who worked in Newlyn, Cornwall. He was renowned for his use of the Cornish light, color and shape to start a new art movement in England. He became a leading exponent of abstract art and a recognized figure of the British art establishment. At the Barbara Schaeffer Society in New York, 1960 he had his first US exhibition. There he met many of American abstract expressionists, including Marc Rothko who, along with his wife Mel, became great friends. The success contributed to an award of the John Moore Prize for 1965. In 1992 he was elected a Royal Academician and he was knighted in 1998. A retrospective of his work was held in 2000.
Wiki notes edited:
Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, RSA, was a Scottish Colorist painter, renowned for his depictions of the elegant New Town interiors of his native Edinburgh, and for his work on Iona. He was a left-handed painter.
While a student, the President of the Royal Scottish Academy tried to stop him painting with his left hand because: "No artist ever became great who did so." Cadell swiftly replied, "Sir, and did not the great Michelangelo paint with his left hand?" The President did not respond and left the room quickly. A fellow student asked Cadell how he had known that Michelangelo was left-handed. Cadell confessed, "I didn't know but nor did the president."
Cadell spent much of his adult life in Scotland and had little direct contact with many of the new ideas that were being developed abroad. So he tended to use subjects and environments that were close at hand, landscapes, fashionable Edinburgh New Town house interiors, still life and figures in both oil and watercolor. He is particularly noted for his portraits of glamorous women whom he painted in a loose, impressionistic manner, depicting his subject with vibrant waves of color. He enjoyed the landscape of Iona enormously, which he first visited in 1912 and features prominently in his work. From October 2011 - March 2012 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art held a major solo retrospective of Cadell's work, the first since that held at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1942.
Wiki notes edited:
Dorothy Johnstone painted landscapes and portraits, particularly of children, and her style was free and relaxed, whether using oil, watercolor, pencil or chalk. Some of her work is displayed at the National Gallery of Scotland.
Johnstone was born in Edinburgh in 1892. Her father, landscape artist George Whitton Johnstone RSA (1849–1901), encouraged her artistic talents, and at the age of 16 she enrolled as a student at the Edinburgh College of Art. She took Life Class where she revealed her talents at informal portraiture, a genre for which she became well known. In 1914 she became a member of staff at the Edinburgh College of Art. From the summer of 1915, she became a regular annual visitor to Kirkcudbright in Galloway, where she would paint with other female artists including Jessie M. King as part of the Kirkcudbright School.
Dorothy, with her close friends Cecile Walton and Mary Newbery, was a member of The Edinburgh School, which reformed in 1919, a collective of gifted and progressive artists associated with the Edinburgh College of Art. During 1919 she was living in Kirkcudbright where she had an affair with Vera Holme, who would go on to be the Pankhursts chauffeur.
In 1924, at the peak of her artistic career, Johnstone mounted a joint exhibition in Edinburgh with fellow artist Cecile Walton. She married her colleague and fellow group member David Macbeth Sutherland that year. They had a son, Sir Iain Sutherland, in 1925, and a daughter in 1928. As a consequence of her husband's appointment in 1933 as head of Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen, now Robert Gordon's University, and of the marriage bar in place at the time, she gave up her career and her students.
She kept her links with Edinburgh by continuing to exhibit her portraits and landscapes at the Royal Scottish Academy, to which she was elected an Associate (ARSA) in 1962.
Tate notes:
Following the precepts of traditional color theory (based on the segmented color wheel divided into primary, secondary and tertiary colors), Mondrian used the complementary colors orange and blue to remarkably vivid effect. Each color is allowed to dominate a major area of the painting (the church and the sky respectively) but is also repeated within the area of the other.
As Mondrian himself wrote in a letter to the Dutch review De Controleur in 1909, "I believe that in our period it is definitely necessary that, as far as possible, the paint is applied in pure colors set next to each other in a pointillist or diffuse manner. This is stated strongly, and yet it relates to the thought which is the basis of meaningful expression in form, as I see it."
From 1908 Mondrian spent several summers on the Dutch North Sea coast of Zeeland, which provided the inspiration for a number of paintings. He regularly stayed at Domburg, where an avant-garde artistic community gathered, and he found his subjects in the town, along the sea dunes and in neighboring areas. One of these was the small rural village of Zoutelande, whose Gothic church tower has been identified as the subject of this painting.
It's likely that Mondrian made the painting in his studio either while on holiday or once he returned to Amsterdam rather than on the spot, and his memory may have been aided by photographs. Examination of the canvas shows that the artist originally painted Sun, Church in Zeeland on a slightly larger stretcher, setting the tower a little to the left and allowing the beginnings of the spire to be seen at the top. He must have soon rethought this because at a very early stage the canvas was placed on a smaller stretcher and painted areas at the top and right were folded over to make the tower central and exclude the spire. The resulting painting is more frontal and direct than first conceived.
MET notes:
Between 1887 and 1891, Signac spent the warmer months pursuing his two passions, marine painting and boating, on excursions to seaside resorts. One of five views made during a trip to the Mediterranean port of Cassis in April–June 1889, this work was singled out for praise when the series debuted at the Salon des Indépendants later that year. At Cassis, Signac found "White, blue and orange, harmoniously spread over the beautiful rise and fall of the land. All around the mountains with rhythmic curves." Until 1894, he evoked analogies with musical compositions by inscribing each of his pictures with an opus number.
Art UK notes:
Painter, teacher and architect, John Miller was born in London. After National Service he worked at a variety of jobs, before becoming a full-time painter. For a brief period, he was an actor in films, theatre and television and in the early 1950s ran L'Elixir, a coffee bar and restaurant on Richmond Hill, Surrey, with his close friend and companion, Michael Truscott, the potter, picture framer and restorer, as its chef; although it was a success, with the writer Beverley Nichols and singer Eartha Kitt among its clients, it was demolished because of road widening.
He next studied architecture and was articled to the church architects Milner and Craze. In 1958 he moved to Cornwall, settling in the Penwith peninsula, and becoming a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists in 1961, serving as chairman for some years.
His seventieth-birthday show at the Portland Gallery, 2001, was a sell-out, by which time Miller's richly colored pictures of sky, sea and sand, of the Hayle Estuary and of Tresco, Isles of Scilly, had become almost his trademark.
Miller has work in public and private collections around the world. His seventieth-birthday show at the Portland Gallery, 2001, was a sell-out, by which time Miller's richly colored pictures of sky, sea and sand, of the Hayle Estuary and of Tresco, Isles of Scilly, had become almost his trademark.
Wiki notes:
In 1956, Ellsworth Kelly met Robert Indiana, who moved in the same building and they became partners. Indiana became his mentor. They broke up around 1964. One of the reasons was Indiana's use of words in his paintings which Kelly considered such technique not worthy of high art.
Helen Frankenthaler:
"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute."
with two Bartlett pears
on a snow pile behind my home
on February 6, 2021, painted February 8, 2021
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
an Amaryllis blossom from a photo taken
January 31, 2021 photo and painted February 8, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed,
gifted to the givers who gave me
the Amaryllis bulb to grow
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Art of Red Amaryllis
Eight Paintings by Masters
Grace Arnold Albee, Erik Andriesse,
Marc Chagall, Charles Demuth, Henri Matisse,
Michael Mazur, Piet Mondrian, and Leigh Wen
Thomas Eyck, Dutch curator:
Erik Andriesse, a Dutch artist, painted many types of flowers, all bursting with color. He matured early with his first exhibition at age fifteen and died at only age thirty-six.
Dutch novelist, Oek de Jong:
"Why do I admire the work of Erik Andriesse? When I first saw it in the 1980s, his craftsmanship and provocative virtuosity enraptured me, a young artist who just happened to draw and paint beautifully. Which, at that time, the art world found rather disquieting. For me, however, it was liberating. Here and there I saw Erik Andriesse's now classic amaryllises and sunflowers; always so distinctive."
Source: Wiki:
After barely escaping France during WWII in 1941, Jewish Marc Chagall lived in the US until 1947, when he returned to France, where he painted this painting in 1950.
Museum note:
This watercolor was purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art during its first exhibition, at Daniel Gallery in New York, and was one of the first works by Charles Demuth to enter a public museum collection.
Still-life was one of Charles Demuth's favorite genres, and he created works on this theme throughout his career. This drawing of a blooming amaryllis was completed while the artist was convalescing with diabetes in his hometown, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Because of his physical weakness, he was limited to working in watercolor, a less demanding medium than painting, and to subjects that he could easily observe, such as flowers. Demuth drew the amaryllis' form in graphite and then brushed on watercolor precisely, using a blotter to develop the pebbly texture seen throughout.
US State Dept:
Leigh Wen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her B.F.A. from Washington State University in 1984, and from the State University of New York at Albany an M.A. in Fine Arts in 1985 and M.F.A. in 1994. She's exhibited nationally and internationally since early 1980's. In 1979, she won the First Prize in Painting Ten Outstanding Young Talents Competition Taiwan. In 1980, she was awarded Outstanding Merit Young Artists in Asia Now competition in Hong Kong. A break in her career occurred following her marriage in 1985 and the raising of two children. She returned to her career in 1992 by pursuing her M.F.A. at then she has devoted herself to art full time with increasing success and recognition.
Read more about her successful artistic career at the US State Department and see more of her art HERE. The artist's website is HERE.
Source: Wiki:
Grace Thurston Arnold Albee (1890-1985) was an American printmaker and wood engraver. During her sixty-year career life, she created more than two hundred and fifty prints from linocuts, woodcuts, and wood engravings. She received over fifty awards and has her works in thirty-three museum collections. She was the first female graphic artist to receive full membership to the National Academy of Design.
Albee's works are represented in a number of public collections in the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1976, eighty of her works were displayed in a retrospective exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum. The Library of Congress has 23 of her prints in its collection. Her works are also housed the Smithsonian Institution, in the Rosenwald Collection in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the Permanent Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Georgia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Boston Public Library.
"It is in flowers that external feminine beauty manifests itself most effectively." -Piet Mondrian
Catalogue note edited:
Mondrian Flowers in American Collections, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist's body of work in this genre, took place 47 years after his death, at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1991, and subsequently travelled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Published concurrently was the first monograph on this subject, David Shapiro's Mondrian: Flowers, New York, 1991.
Source: Wiki:
While the Nazis occupied France from 1940 to 1944, they were more lenient in their attacks on "degenerate art" in Paris than they were in the German-speaking nations under their military dictatorship. Matisse was allowed to exhibit along with other former Fauves and Cubists whom Hitler had initially claimed to despise, though without any Jewish artists, all of whose works had been purged from all French museums and galleries; any French artists exhibiting in France had to sign an oath assuring their "Aryan" status-including Matisse.
This was painted in 1941 the same year Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer. The surgery, while successful, resulted in serious complications from which he nearly died. Being bedridden for three months resulted in his developing a new art form using paper and scissors.
Source Wiki:
Michael Burton Mazur (1935-2009) was an American artist who was described by William Grimes of The New York Times as "a restlessly inventive printmaker, painter, and sculptor." Born and raised in New York City, he received a bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1958, then studied art at Yale.
Mazur first gained notice for his series of lithographs and etchings of inmates in a mental asylum, which resulted in two publications, "Closed Ward" and "Locked Ward." Over the years, he worked in printmaking and painting. His series of large-scale prints for Dante's Inferno won critical acclaim, and were the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by the University of Iowa in 1994. Later he concentrated on creating large, lyrical paintings which make use of his free, gestural brushwork and a varied palette. Some of these paintings were seen in an exhibition of 2002 at Boston University, "Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, and Pat Steir."
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has acquired a definitive collection of Mazur's prints. Mazur's work is owned by museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, The Fogg Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, Whitney Museum, Yale Art Gallery, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.
Iceland's iconic waterfall painted from
photos and memory on January 30, 2021
22" x 15" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors and permanent white
gouache, selected for light fastness and permanence, and
Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 300 lb. Fabriano
Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white
watercolor paper, framed, $900
Iceland Art Quiz
These paintings of Iceland were
all painted by artists from what country?
A) China
B) Denmark
C) France
D) Germany
E) Great Britain
F) Iceland
G) Italy
H) Japan
I) Norway
J) Sweden
K) United States
Is this a trick question? Yes or no?
About the Art after the Quiz Below
But first the art and location in Iceland...
These paintings of Iceland were all
painted by artists from what country?
E) Great Britain
Is this a trick question? Yes or no?
Yes and no.
No, because it was a straightforward question with a straightforward answer, no tricks. Yes, because by simply asking the question it likely made you pause, Iceland is on the list, are these paintings by an Icelandic artist or not?
About the Art
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1
Snow Drift, Clear Sky (polyptych, panel 4 of 4)
Keith Grant (1930- )
Oil on canvas, 36" x 84" (w x h), 1974
Touchstones Rochdale Collection,
Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England
Keith Grant was born in Liverpool. He attended Willesden Art School then went to the Royal College of Art. A trip to Iceland as a student began an ongoing devotion to landscape painting and a great love of the Arctic region: "It is in the North and only in the North, that I sense the value of my life." Attracted to isolated incidents of nature, a subject that was to inspire him for the majority of his career, Grant sees his work as similar to pages in a diary, documenting his journeys through painting to give the viewer an experience or sense of the untouched parts of the world. This particular work was purchased from a solo exhibition held at Rochdale Art Gallery in 1976 of more than 100 of Grant's works.
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2
Reykjavik from Main Quay,
Frosty Morning, Iceland
Thomas Hennell (1903-1945), English
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 25" x 19" (w x h), circa 1939-1945
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, England
Watercolor painter, draughtsman, writer and poet, Thomas Hennell was born at Ridley, Kent He studied at Regent Street Polytechnic for several years in the early 1920s, then qualified as a teacher. He taught art for several years. He researched his first book, Change in the Farm, in Britain, and Ireland, mainly by bicycle, recording in words and pictures vanishing country crafts and ways.
In 1931 was friendly with artists based in Great Bardfield, Essex. From 1932-5 was treated for psychiatric illness, which he wrote about in The Witnesses. During World War II Hennell was an Official War Artist in Europe and the Far East, dying in mysterious circumstances in Java. The Imperial War Museum holds a large collection of his pictures, which are in many other public galleries. Hennell was a keen student of English watercolor painting and wrote well on it. Although not a great natural draughtsman, he improved his technique to become a fine atmospheric and distinctive watercolorist. Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, held a survey show in 1995.
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3
Breiðafjörður from Vaðsteinabjarg in Hergilsey
Magnus A. Arnson
Oil on canvas, 26" x 40" (w x h), circa 1937
Wardlaw Museum, University of St Andrews,
St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland
Hergilsey is a small Icelandic island on the north shore of Breiðafjörður. The island covers about 30 other islets.
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4
Fractured Landscape
Images of Iceland series
Roy Bizley (1930-1999), British
Acrylic on board, 30" x 23" (w x h), 1991
Gildings Auctioneers, Market Harborough, UK
2018 auction estimate £150 - £200, sold £320, $440 USD
Roy Bizley was an art teacher, teaching at the School of Art in Swindon. In 1964 Roy moved to Leicester for a teaching post at Leicester Polytechnic, which later became De Montfort University. In 1975, following a visit to Iceland, Roy made a large series of paintings, which followed the contemporary abstraction movement of the time, typically using nature derived blues and greens alongside more synthetic colors. He made many return visits to Iceland and undertook a residency in 1995, sponsored by the National Gallery of Iceland. This resulted in a major show of Icelandic landscapes at Leicester's City Gallery, in Granby Street in 1997. Leicester's New Walk Museum also has a large Icelandic painting in its collection. Roy died in 1999, very soon after his school retirement. A major retrospective of Roy's work, paintings, posters and prints, was held at the Trinity House Gallery at De Montfort University in 2000.
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5
Látraströnd, North Iceland
Rob Miller, British
Watercolor on paper, 6" x 7" (w x h), 2015
Látraströnd is on the coast of Eyjafjörður north of the village Grenivík, facing the island of Hrisey. It was named after the northernmost farm, Latrar, abandoned for decades like others in the area except for the southernmost one or two. There is very limited lowland along the coastline and it drops off steeply into the sea.
This was painted on a sailing tour. Rob Miller is the Resident Artist for the Lingholm Estate on the shores of Derwentwater in the Lakes district in northwest England in in the county of Cumbria, UK. He paints often in Spain and Portugal. His art has been featured in Spanish, Portuguese and British publications and he as the featured artist in the Art of England and in Art News. The artist's website is HERE.
Education: Bolton University, BA, a distinction in painting, MA, History of Art. Rob Miller, FRSA, has his studio, Falcon Mill Studios, in Bolton, Lancashire, UK. FRSA, Fellowship of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) judges to have made outstanding achievements to social progress and development. As of 2020 there are 30,000 Fellows.
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6
Snæfellsjökull I
What you have stolen can never be yours
Patti Lean, Scottish
Mixed media on canvas, 67" x 75" (w x h), 2015
Patti Lean lives in the southwest of Scotland, a few miles north-west of Castle Douglas. Patti Lean: "My interest is in notions of northerliness, both real and imagined." The artist's website is HERE.
Education:
2002-05, M.A. in Contemporary Fine Art (part-time). College scholarship award.
1997 - 2001, Cumbria institute of the Arts B.A. (Hons.1st class) in Fine Art.
1994-97, Dumfries and Galloway College. H.N.C./ Foundation in Art and Design.
1982-83, University of Heriot Watt/ Edinburgh College of Art. Post-graduate Diploma.
1983, R.S.A. Preparatory Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
1977-81, University of Edinburgh. B.S. with distinction, Social Sciences.
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7
Processing the Catch, Wharf Scene, Iceland
Alan Sorrell (1904-1974) British
Pencil, ink and gouache on paper, 22" x 15" (w x h), circa 1935
Sorrell made a trip to Iceland in 1934, and drawings inspired by this trip were exhibited at Walkers Gallery, Bond Street, London in 1935.
Alan Sorrell (1904-1974) attended the Royal College of Art in the mid-1920s. During his life Sorrell produced a vast cycle of murals (nearly 20 over a 30-year period). Sorrell is principally remembered today as an illustrator of articles on archaeology for The Illustrated London News and books ranging from Roman Britain to The Holy Bible, more than 15 books over a period of 40 years. Sorrell made numerous journeys to distant lands, painting in Iceland (1934), Greece and Turkey (1954), Egypt and the Sudan (1962).
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8
Hafnarfjörður
Keith Hornblower, British
Watercolor on paper,
limited palette of yellow ochre,
turquoise blue and black, October 2019
The artist's website is HERE and Instagram HERE.
Keith Hornblower conducts art workshops in Iceland. He's an architectural illustrator by profession, a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Illustration. But now he enjoys the freedom of painting fast and loose with a spontaneity out of bounds for an illustrator. His work has been exhibited in galleries and exhibitions. He's a frequent exhibitor at the Mall Galleries with the Royal Institution of Painters in Watercolour, where he was honored with the Schmincke award for an outstanding work.
painted January 21, 2021
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
NFS
at my home on Fort Ridge
in Shapleigh Maine in January 2021
painted January 20, 2021,
5" x 7" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
using self-shot reference photos
painted January 15, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
based on Louisa Matthíasdóttir's
Still Life with Grapefruit and Two Pears,
(below) painted by me on January 7, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
with a grapefruit (Citrus × paradisi) and
a pomelo (Citrus maximus) on snow in my yard
at Shapleigh, Maine on January 7, 2021,
painted January 8, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
a pomelo (Citrus maximus) on snow
in my yard at Shapleigh, Maine on January 7, 2021,
painted January 8, 2021
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
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Grapefruit in Art
by Noted Artists
Harry Brodsky, Paul Gauguin,
Doris Lee, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray,
Susan Jane Walp, Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky,
and Marguerite Thompson Zorach
(a gender balanced group)
Wiki:
Of her life in art, Marie-Louise once remarked, "If you could only paint a single good picture in your lifetime, your life would be worthwhile."
Tate Museum Note:
This was painted in a small hotel in Amsterdam. The artist had traveled there with her mother from their home in Vienna, immediately following the arrival of the Germans in Austria in 1938. In this still life, she posed the objects, including two eighteenth-century Chinese sheep ornaments and some fruit, on an ironing board in the hotel, with the ironing board dictating the unusual oblong shape of the painting. Aside from the sheep, objects whose reassuring familiarity reminded the artist of her Viennese surroundings, this unusual still life is characterized by the rich colors of the grapefruit and by the bunch of grapes.
Read the moving and uplifting notes about her and flight from the Nazis HERE in the "Catalogue Entry" and on Wiki HERE.
Also, Susan Abbott of Vermont, who I took two workshops years ago with, has a posting, Great Art, Lousy Times, that you might find of interest HERE.
Wiki edited:
Man Ray's birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. He was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky (nee Lourie or Luria). He had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie (or Elsie), the youngest born in 1897, shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray. Man Ray's brother chose the surname in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his name.
After living in Paris since 1921, Man Ray was forced to return to the United States due to the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951 where he focused his creative energy on painting. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, a first-generation American of Romanian-Jewish lineage. She was a trained dancer, who studied dance with Martha Graham, and an experienced artists' model. The two married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1948, the Year he painted Five Grapefruits, Man Ray had a solo exhibition at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills, which brought together a wide array of work. In 2013 his 1916 canvas Promenade sold for $5,877,000 at the Sotheby's New York Impressionist and Modern Art Sale.
Christie's notes edited:
By the time Apples, Grapes, Grapefruit was painted, Lichtenstein had firmly established himself as one of the leading figures of the Pop Art movement. With its bold palette, impeccable geometries and finely-calibrated composition, Roy Lichtenstein's Apples, Grapes, Grapefruit stems from the important series of still life paintings that the artist produced between 1972 and 1974. His still life paintings departed from the distinctive cartoon imagery that had brought about his rise to fame during the 1960s. Acquired by Lord and Lady Jacobs directly after its creation, it was held in their collection until this auction.
Lichtenstein's still life objects are reduced to a set of basic circular geometries, the components of Apples, Grapes, Grapefruit, signified purely through shape and color. The reductive, highly stylized appearance was the result of his labor-intensive method. The composition began life as a small-scale drawing, reworked several times before it was projected onto canvas. Here, a second stage of drawing and redrafting took place, always deferring to the original sketch, with colored paper taped into place for reference. It was through this method that stripes replaced his Ben Day dots. They were incorporated into finished canvases from 1969 onward. Ben Day himself had often used lines in his shading system, and Lichtenstein reveled in their disorientating optical quality, claiming that the stripes had the power to alter our perception of color.
Simple Pleasures publisher's book info edited:
Lee was one of the most recognized artists in America during the 1930s and 40s. She was a leading figure in the Woodstock Artist's Colony. Her art reveals an ability to merge the reduction of abstraction with the appeal of the everyday. In so doing, she offers a coherent visual identity that successfully bridges the various artistic camps that formed with the shift in the art world in the post-World War II era.
In 1935 her painting Thanksgiving was awarded the Art Institute of Chicago's Logan Prize and instigated the Sanity in Art movement in protest. Two years later, her painting Catastrophe was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lee's commercial commissions for patrons such as American Tobacco Company, Life magazine, Abbott Laboratories, and Associated American Artists are compelling in both their populist accessibility and in their deceptively sophisticated abstraction.
Simple Pleasures presents Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee, September 2020, the first major assessment of works by Doris Lee is on amazon HERE. Her art from this book on exhibit at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, September 26, 2021 - January 09, 2022 HERE.
Antrese Wood note:
Susan Jane Walp paints still lifes from her home in Vermont. Her compositions expertly balance silent spaces with a powerful geometry that pulls you in and holds you. Her influences range from Piero de la Francesca to Lennart Anderson whom she met and studied with at a summer program run by Boston University during her undergrad years.
Susan Jane Walp:
"In the late 1960s ... to make up credits ... I went to a program at Tanglewood, (Massachusetts) run by Boston University. Miraculously, Lennart Anderson was teaching there. The students from BU were very serious, and only because the beginner class was full, I was placed in Lennart's advanced class. That summer completely changed everything. I saw that my life was going to be devoted to becoming a painter.
Lennart painted in class; he didn't talk much. But I understood that he was teaching an approach to seeing tonal relationships. It was a very sensual, felt response to the motif. It was about discovering the beauty of these relationships and the thrill of translating them into paint. At the time, he was recommending a Dover book by Charles Hawthorne, Hawthorne on Painting, 1960 (on amazon HERE), which we all read and reread."
Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, she received her BA from Mount Holyoke College, followed by studies at the New York Studio School and Brooklyn College. The artist's website is HERE.
Bruce note:
If this is a self-portrait with her daughter, and this would be when her daughter was that age, 10-years old, it's of Marguerite and her daughter, Dahlov. I had the good fortune to cross paths with Dahlov Zorach Ipcar as authors. Dahlov was a fine artist and illustrated thirty children's books. The first time we met was in an elevator at a children's book conference at the University in Gorham, Maine. The last time we met was in Boothbay Harbor, where she signed a copy of The Little Fisherman, by Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon), and illustrated by her. It was a gift going to Iceland for the boy who was the star in my book set in Iceland, Going Fishing.
Wiki notes edited:
Marguerite Thompson Zorach was one of a small group of women admitted to Stanford University in 1908. Rather than completing her degree, she traveled to France at the invitation of her aunt, Harriet Adelaide Harris. Marguerite visited the Salon d'Automne the very day that she arrived in Paris. It was the intention of her aunt that Thompson attend the École des Beaux-Arts, but Marguerite was turned away as she had never drawn a nude from life. Marguerite had no interest in the formulas of academic painting. She chose to attend the post-impressionist school Académie de La Palette, where she was encouraged her to pursue her own interests, to paint in a style that was uniquely her own. She exhibited at the 1910 Société des Artistes Indépendants, and the 1911 Salon d'Automne, both renowned for their modernist themes.
While in Paris, she socialized with Pablo Picasso, ex-patriot Gertrude Stein, Henri Rousseau, and Henri Matisse through her Aunt Addie's connections. At school, the Académie de La Palette, she first met her future husband and artistic collaborator, William Zorach. William admired her passionate individuality, and he said of her modernist Fauvist artwork "I just couldn't understand why such a nice girl would paint such wild pictures."
Back in California in 1912 she gave birth to a son, Tessim Zorach, in 1915, and a daughter, Dahlov Zorach, in 1917, eventually, settling in Greenwich Village. In 1922 they visited Gaston Lachaise at Georgetown, Maine, and later bought a house.
Terra Foundation edited:
Harry Brodsky, a painter, print maker, designer, and teacher, is best known for lithograph images of Philadelphia and the surrounding area made in the 1930s and 1940s. Brodsky made both color and monochrome lithographs of a variety of themes and in a wide range of styles reflecting current trends in American art in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Still lifes, landscapes, city scenes, and interiors showing ordinary Philadelphians comprise his subjects; he also created purely nonobjective compositions. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Brodsky graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art and also attended the University of Pennsylvania.
Foundation Notes edited:
It's believed that Gauguin painted Still Life with Grapefruits, which for many years was entitled Still life with Apples and Flowers, in 1901. Experts came to this conclusion based on the arrangement of objects on the leather trunk, bringing the composition close to other paintings in the same year, and on his confinement to the hospital and subsequently to his studio due to illness, when he had to paint without a model.
His main concern appears not just the arrangement of the objects but the layout of the colors and the creation of harmony. The classic elements of Western still life have been replaced by exotic flowers, peppers and grapefruits.
