The Art of
Yellow and Green Leaving
Green to Yellow Leaves
Any Goldsworthy (1956- ), British
Sculpture photograph
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, England, 1987
At first glance, the predominant two-color line is deceiving. As it recedes it seamlessly blends from a yellow line on a green line to green line on a yellow base. The two-color line is composed of simple pieces of torn leaves carefully placed so that each leave is perfectly aligned.
WiKi (edited):
Andy Goldsworthy, OBE (Order of the British Empire) (1956- ) is a British sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. From the age of thirteen, he worked on farms as a laborer. He's likened the repetitive quality of farm tasks to the routine of making sculpture: "A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it." The materials used in Goldsworthy's art often include brightly colored flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pine cones, snow, stone, twigs, and thorns. He has been quoted as saying, "I think it's incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole." Photography plays a crucial role in his art due to its often ephemeral and transient state.
He studied fine art at Bradford College of Art from 1974 to 1975 and at Preston Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire) from 1975 to 1978, receiving his BA from the latter. In 1993, Goldsworthy received an honorary degree from the University of Bradford. He was an A.D. White Professor-At-Large in Sculpture at Cornell University 2000–2006 and 2006–2008.
Lime Tree Shade
Amy Katherine Browning (1881-1978), British
Oil on canvas, 42" x 45" (w x h), 1913
Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Colchester and Ipswich, UK
Gift from the family of A. K. Browning
WiKi (edited):
Amy Katherine Browning, born Amy Katherine Dugdale (1881-1978) was a British Impressionist painter. She signed her paintings "A.K. Browning" to avoid any discrimination based on gender.
The second of eight children, she entered the Royal College of Art in 1899 but had to leave in 1901 as she was eldest unmarried daughter and her mother was pregnant. When scholarships allowed her to return to the Royal College, she was the favorite student of Gerald Moira. Moira would send her upstairs to teach the male student painters. She left the college in 1906. She'd become friends with Sylvia Pankhurst. Together, they created an art exhibition for the Women's Social and Political Union at the Prince's Skating Club in 1909. They remained friends and they worked to raise money for the poor during the First World War. Meanwhile, she taught, but also had early success with her painting. In 1913 the French government bought Chequered Shade, which had taken the silver medal when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1913. The French also bought The Red Shawl. When the Paris Salon restarted after the war she returned and exhibited regularly taking the gold medal once. Browning continued exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy and at other international locations.
Browning spent her time teaching to subsidize her painting. She also took commissions including one of Winston Churchill and another of his wife.
Her paintings are in these museums: Musée Baron Gerard, Bayeux, Luton Museum and Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery, Ipswich Museum and Art Gallery, Kelvingrove Museum and the Royal Academy's collection. Portraits of her are held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of Britain.
Landscape at Twilight
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch
Oil on canvas, 42" x 20" (w x h), June 1890
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
WiKi edited:
Near the end of his life, during his last weeks at Saint-Rémy, his thoughts returned to "memories of the North", and several of the approximately 70 oils, including Landscape at Twilight, painted during his days in Auvers-sur-Oise, are reminiscent of northern scenes. In June 1890, he also painted several portraits of his doctor, including Portrait of Dr Gachet, and his only etching. There are other paintings which are probably unfinished, including Thatched Cottages by a Hill.
The month after he painted Landscape at Twilight, July 1890, Van Gogh wrote that he'd become absorbed "in the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea, delicate yellow". He'd first become captivated by the fields in May, when the wheat was young and green. In July, he described to Theo "vast fields of wheat under turbulent skies."
Mountain and Meadow (Vermont)
Milton Avery (1885-1965), American
Oil on canvas, 68" x 60" (w x h), 1960
National Gallery of Art, Gift of Sally Michel Avery
Milton Clark Avery (1885-1965) was an American modern painter. In 1924, he met Sally Michel, a young art student, and in 1926, they married. Her income as an illustrator enabled him to devote himself more fully to painting. They had a daughter, March Avery, in 1932. Art critic Hilton Kramer said, "He was, without question, our greatest colorist. ... Among his European contemporaries, only Matisse, to whose art he owed much, of course, produced a greater achievement in this respect."
Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, 2016 catalogue by Jamie Franklin, curator (edited):
The Averys, Milton, his wife Sally, also an artist, and their daughter March, spent at least six extended summer holidays, between 1935 and 1943, in Vermont. They stayed in the Green Mountains of south-central Vermont at the small adjacent villages of Rawsonville and Jamaica, in the West River Valley. Their Vermont visits were significant in the evolution of Milton Avery's distinctive style.
Avery worked voraciously while in Vermont. The artist noted, "In the country I get up at six o'clock and do a watercolor before breakfast, and three or four more during the day." His process during his summers in the country involved creating watercolors or gouaches, not from life, but based on plein air sketches in graphite, ink, and lithographic crayon. He translated this work into oil paintings in his New York studio during the winter months, sometimes years later. Drawing on his everyday experiences, Avery summarized his approach: "I work on two levels. I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time, I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea."
The Gardener
Georges Seurat (1859-1891), French
Oil on wood, 10" x 6" (w x h), 1882-83
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
MET label:
Although Seurat is best known for his scenes of urban life, many of his paintings of 1881-84 depict rural laborers and landscapes. He initially favored an earth-toned palette reminiscent of the work of earlier painters of the countryside, such as Jean-François Millet. However, the bright hues of this picture reflect Seurat's growing interest in Impressionist techniques and his reading of treatises on color, especially the American Ogden Rood's Modern Chromatics (published in English in 1879, and in French in 1881).
WiKi (edited):
This was painted in 1882-1883, soon before working on his first major painting in 1883, a large canvas titled Bathers at Asnières, showing young men relaxing by the Seine in a working-class suburb of Paris. The following years, 1884-1886 her painted his best-known painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Georges Pierre Seurat (1859-1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist best known for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism as well as pointillism. While less famous than his paintings, Seurat's conte crayon drawings also garnered a great deal of critical appreciation. Seurat's artistic personality combined qualities that are usually supposed to be opposed and incompatible: on the one hand, his extreme and delicate sensibility, on the other, a passion for logical abstraction and an almost mathematical precision of mind. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.
Untitled
Andrew Forge (1923-2002), British
Watercolor on paper, 15" x 22" (w x h), 1996
Private collection of John Meditz
This painting (above) appeared in the Fairfield University catalogue for his exhibition: Andrew Forge: The Limits of Sight, September 25 - December 19, 2020, Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, Connecticut.
Karen Wilken wrote:
Forge's dots have nothing to do with pointillism. The dotting is an end in itself, not a means of description. From a close viewpoint, the fact of the touches of paint dominates. As we read across the surface, we are absorbed by the shimmer of the deliberately placed spots of pigment, captivated by the varied rhythms created by the dispersal of particular colors, and intrigued by the chords, harmonious or dissonant, created by groups of related or opposing hues. But we are always aware of the repetitive action of the artist's hand making each mark, even – or especially – when the swirling rhythms of the dots, which Forge referred to as "drumming," are punctuated by spatterings of short, straight strokes, which Forge referred to as "sticks." The dots and sticks coalesce into a rich, confrontational tapestry, declaratively on the surface of the canvas.
To see the catalogue with his paintings and read more about his art see this clever online exhibition catalogue book HERE.
WiKi edited:
Andrew Murray Forge, an English painter, academic, and art critic, was born in 1923 at Kent England and dies in 2002 in New Milford, Connecticut. In the 1940s he studied art at the Camberwell School of Art in London. From 1950 to 1964, Forge was a senior lecturer at the Slade School of Art in central London, where he met Dorothy Mead in the 1950s, a former member of the Borough Group, when she was a mature student at the Slade. He showed with the London Group of artists from as early as 1950. He formally joined the London Group in 1960, the same year as Mead, and was president from 1966 to 1971. He was succeeded as president by Mead. From 1964 to 1970, Forge was Head of the Department of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in southeast London. From 1971 to 1972, he was a lecturer in the Department of Art at the University of Reading.
Andrew Forge emigrated to the United States and was Visiting Professor at Cooper Union, New York (1973-74), Associate Dean, New York Studio School (1974-75), Visiting Professor (1975-2002). He became Professor of Painting at Yale University (1975-91), Dean of the School of Art (1975-83), and Emeritus William Leffingwell Professor of Painting (1991-94). In 1992, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1994.
In 1950 Forge married Sheila Deane and they had three daughters. The marriage was dissolved and he remarried in 1974 to Ruth Miller.
Roses under the Trees /
Rosiers sous les arbres
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Austrian
Oil on canvas, 43" x 43" (W X H), circa 1905
Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France (temporarily)
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Although Klimt's primary subject was the female body, he painted landscapes. This painting was painted two years before he painted one of his most famous paintings, The Kiss.
The Art Newspaper (edited):
In 2021 France's culture minister announced that France will return this painting by Gustav Klimt, Rosiers sous les arbres (Roses under the Trees) to the heirs of its previous Viennese owner Nora Stiasny, who sold it under duress during the Nazi era.
It was first acquired by the Jewish Austrian industrialist and collector Viktor Zuckerkandl in 1911. After Zuckerkandl and his wife Paula died, it was bequeathed to his niece, Eleonore "Nora" Stiasny. She was forced to sell it for a bargain sum in August 1938, shortly after Hitler annexed Austria to Germany, to Philipp Häusler, a professor acquaintance who was a Nazi party member. Four years later, Stiasny and her family were deported and killed by the Nazis.
The French state acquired the painting for the future Musée d'Orsay in 1980 from Galerie Peter Nathan in Zurich; it had been owned by Herta Blümel, Häusler’s companion, who had inherited it from him. At the time, the French state was ignorant of the painting's provenance.
Laurence des Cars, president of the Musée d'Orsay, said, "Removing such an important painting from the national collections is a heavy decision, which honors our collective commitment to the memory of the victims of Nazi barbarism."
Tree with Bright Green Leaves
Frank Walter (1926-2009), Antiguan
Oil on card, 7" x 9", (w x h)
Ingleby Gallery, Hong Kong
Wiki (edited)
Frank Walter (1926-2009), born Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, was an Antiguan artist, sculptor, photographer, composer, writer, and philosopher. Always shy and reserved, he became a recluse in later life so that he could devote himself to the pursuit of art. Walter achieved posthumous recognition as one of the Caribbean's most significant artists.
He produced over 5,000 paintings featuring landscape, portraiture, and identity, as well as abstract explorations of nuclear energy and the universe. His portraits, both real and imagined include a ballerina's legs in African Genealogy; Hitler in Dipsomaniac; Walter himself as Christ on the Cross; and Prince Charles and Princess of Wales Diana as Adam and Eve.
In 1993, Walter designed and built a house and art studio in the picturesque Antigua countryside above Falmouth Harbour, where he lived until his death in 2009 in peaceful isolation. He sited the structures to enjoy the spectacular views of Sugarloaf Mountain, Monk's Hill, Falmouth Harbour, and the sea, and dwelt in close proximity to nature. Without running water or electricity, Walter grew much of his own food, and lived near his relations who were organic farmers. His home was filled with paintings and sculpture that he made in secrecy and carefully arranged in his house. He was also surrounded by stacks of books on philosophy, law, history, botany, and heraldry. Walter's creative process relied on a multidisciplinary approach and a collection of curios to generate what Walter Benjamin identified in his 1931 essay "Unpacking My Library" as a "dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder."
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