Door to the See

Door to the See

on Deer Isle in Stonington, Maine on July 28, 2020, painted September 22, 2020, 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.
Private Collection

The view looking down from Church Street, Stonington. What does this have to do with July in the 2023 Maine Lobstering DownEast Calendar?

Strange but True Fact:
The house in the Door to the See painting is not only featured on the cover (month of July) in the 2023 Maine Lobstering Calendar published by DownEast, but was also taken the same summer, 2020, I painted this painting above. It was easy to note the time frame because that summer the house's owner was replacing the ocean facing sliding glass door, and the construction can be seen ongoing in photos I took from the same vantage place, Greenhead, where the calendar cover's photo was shot. The calendar cover photographed is below and on the DownEast web site HERE.

Both Photos by Bruce from Greenhead, Stonington, July 28, 2020

Holiday Pear Pear Pair Peak

Holiday Pear Pear Pair Peak

after a 13" snowfall on the plowed snow by my home on December 19, painted December 25, 2022, 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

Red and Green Art Essay

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Red and Green Art Essay
with a few - touches of Blue

1
Green with Red
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
Lithograph, Edition of 75, 24" x 36" (w x h), 1964

Source, Smithsonian Notes:
Painter Ellsworth Kelly emphasized pure form, color, and spatial unity in a practice that majorly influenced Pop art, Minimalism, and hard-edge and color field painting, along with the development of American abstraction at large. His spare, often irregularly shaped canvases offered a crucial departure from the gestural abstraction that dominated American painting in the middle of the 20th century. He envisioned fine art as a compliment to modern architecture. Since his first retrospective in 1973, at the Museum of Modern Art, Kelly has been the subject of a number of high-profile solo shows at institutions including the Guggenheim, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. At auction, Kelly's art regularly sell for seven figures.

2
Study for Red Green Blue
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
Oil on paper, 32" x 40" (w x h), 1964
Gift of artist, 2008
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

3
Red Green Blue
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
Oil on canvas, 66" x 90" (w x h), 1964
Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1966
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

4
Reds, Greens
John Hoyland, (1934-2011), British
Screenprint on paper, 36" x 24" (w x h), 1969
Tate Museum, London

John Hoyland RA, a London-based British artist, was one of the Britain's leading abstract painters. More on Wiki HERE.

5
Red Umbrella
Milton Avery (1885-1965), American
Oil on canvas, 42" x 25" (w x h), 1945
Princeton University Art Museum

Source, Princeton Notes:
In 1944, Milton Avery abandoned the brushy paint application and detailing of his earlier paintings to create works with smooth, flat areas of broadly modulated, vibrant color. Texture increasingly was conveyed by scratching onto the painted surface with a sharp object, reducing the illusion of depth by calling attention to the picture plane. This technique enabled Avery to move closer toward pure abstraction without relinquishing his fundamental commitment to representation. The resulting spare aesthetic heightened awareness of his sophisticated color harmonies, in which space was articulated less by form than by the subtle relationships among various hues.

6
Reclining and Seated Female Nudes
on a Red and Green Cloth /
Liegende Und Sitzende Weibliche
Akte Auf Rot-Grünem Tuch
Egon Schiele (1890-1918), Austrian
Gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper,
18" x 13" (w x h), 1912
Egon Schiele
Sotheby's 2008 NY auction estimate:
$400,000 - $600,000 USD

Source, Wiki:
In 1907 Egon Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, who generously mentored younger artists. Klimt took a particular interest in the young Schiele, buying his drawings, offering to exchange them for some of his own, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. More on Wiki HERE.

7
The Garden / De Tuin
Jacobus Van Looy (1855-1930), Dutch
Oil, 54" x 38" (w x h), 1893

Source Arthur is a Digital Museum:
Van Looy, a painter and a writer, painted The Garden in the summer of 1893 when he returned from a visit to Paris. Due to the light touch and abrupt cropping, the painting fits in with French Impressionism. In the Netherlands, interest in this was not large at the end of the 19th century. As negative as the newspapers wrote about his painting when it was exhibited in the art society Arti, his colleagues were positive. The then director of Museum Boijmans was "perplexed" by the work and Isaac Israel noted: "It's the best painting there is [in Arti], so there's no question of whether you should have the medal." Van Looy painted the canvas directly outside en plein air. While the expansive flower sea of nasturtiums, slaapmutjes and sunflowers suggests life in the country, the canvas was created in the Amsterdam Pipe, in a garden on the Rustenburgerstraat. The newly married couple lived there in 1892. The woman in the background is Van Looy's wife, Titia van Gelder.

Read More about Van Looy on Wiki HERE (English) or with images HERE (Dutch)

8
Amaryllis
Asada Benji, (1900-1984), Japanese
Watercolor with pen-and-ink outline on thin mulberry paper,
16" x 11" (w x h), Circa 1960-1961
Gift of Professor George Rowley
Princeton University Art Museum

Source, Ronnin Gallery, NYC:
Benji Asada was a Kyoto-based woodblock print artist and painter active in the Sosaku Hanga (Creative Print) movement during the early 20th century. He trained at the Kyoto City School of Fine Arts and Crafts, as well as the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting. Asada regularly exhibited both prints and paintings in national art exhibitions both before and after WWII. In 1959, he received the Minister of Education's Prize at the Second Shin Nitten Exhibition. In 1965, he won the Japan Art Academy Prize and served as an adviser for official fine arts exhibitions. Many of his woodblock prints were published by Uchida Company, though he self-printed some work as well.

Snowy Windy Angling

Snowy Windy Angling

of a spruce tree I'd planted in my yard in 1976, after a 13" snowfall December 17, painted December 20, 2022 7" x 5" (w x h), archival watercolors  Tree: Hansa Yellow Medium (DS), Davy's Grey (W&N), Cobalt Green (W&N), Prussian Blue (W&N), Sky: Cobalt Turquoise (SH), and French Ultramarine W&N) on 140 lb. Fabriano Artist paper, framed.
$300

Found Winter Morning Snow

Found Winter Morning Snow

on my upstairs slope roof bathroom window as the rising sun melted the snow on the window and blue sky emerged, on December 12, 2022, painted December 14, 2022, 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

Watercolor Snow Gallery

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Watercolor Snow Gallery
How Eight Artists Paint
Watercolors of Snow

1
Woods, Snow, and Brook or Road at Bottom
Lois Dodd (1927- ), American
Watercolor and ink, 12" x 9" (w x h), 2004
Princeton University Art Museum,
Princeton, New Jersey
Gift of the artist

Source Wiki:
Lois Dodd is known primarily for her observational paintings of landscapes, nudes and still lives. As the artist stated in an interview, "I would find it, see it, and say 'that's exciting' but I don't want to set things up." It's in her finding and framing of the everyday that something quietly original and deeply felt permeates the work. By painting her immediate circumstances, Dodd rejected the sources that others of her generation took as a given: mass media, popular culture, and the bright surfaces of a comfortable life.

Catching the Light in 2013 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, which traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, was the first career museum retrospective for Lois Dodd. It featured paintings that represented the places and subjects that have mattered most to her in her 60 years as an artist. They include views of New York City's Lower East Side as seen from her apartment windows, imagery from the woods and gardens of Maine, and some winter scenes by her family's home in New Jersey. The exhibition featured about 51 works that ranged in date from the 1950s to 2010s.

See the 2006 catalogue for Lois Dodd Recent Paintings, Winter HERE. See the Catching the Light Museum catalogue HERE. See her Extensive Alexandre Gallery page HERE.

2
Fires of Spring in Big Woods
Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893-1967), American
Watercolor and pencil on joined paper,
29" x 40" (w x h), 1951
Questroyal Fine Art, New York
For sale (2022): $435,000 USD

Gallery notes:
Regarded as one of America's most significant modernist painters, Charles Burchfield was known for his dark, eerie watercolor paintings of Midwestern cities and towns—and the rural landscapes and industrial developments at their edges. Drawing from subjects including design theory, European modernism, and Chinese and Japanese art making, Burchfield developed a unique style notable for its deeply personal symbolic language, distorted forms, and quirky, expressive elements. His early work exudes a sense of whimsy. The artist recaptured this fantastical sensibility in the 1940s, after a period of painting in a more realistic style. Burchfield rose to fame in 1930, when the newly opened Museum of Modern Art staged a show of his early work—the museum's first single-artist exhibition. Since then, he's been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Columbus Museum of Art. Burchfield's work belongs in public collections across the United States and has sold for seven figures at auction. He's art is in the collections of major museums including Tate and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

3
Snow Squall
Charles Herbert Moore, (1840-1930), American
Watercolor and graphite, 9" x 6" (w x h), 1865-66
Princeton Museum of Art, Princeton, New Jersey
Gift of Miss Elizabeth Huntington Moore,
the artist's daughter

Source Princeton notes, edited:
Moore's exquisite watercolor landscapes and nature studies were inspired by the teachings of John Ruskin, who singled out watercolor as the ideal medium with which to celebrate nature—specifically and accurately—as the embodiment of the divine. Created relatively early in Moore's career, while he was living in the Catskill Mountains, Snow Squall captures a wintry landscape at twilight, with the arc of clouds above signifying a passing storm. The same undulating forms reappear in the later and more minutely rendered Mount Washington, where the iconic New Hampshire peak rises above an idyllic valley as observed in late autumn.

4
Eragny sous la neige (Eragny under snow)
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903)
Watercolor on paper, 12" x 8" (w x h), 1872
The Courtauld, London

Source Wiki and ArtUK, B. Luke, edited here:
Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. He "acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists" but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh.
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas, now in the US Virgin Islands but then in the Danish West Indies.
Pissarro'S first forays into wintry scenes was at the turn of the 1870s, where he and Monet stood together just in front of his house in the Parisian suburb of Louveciennes and made paintings of the road of the Versailles.

Later, from the moment Pissarro began renting the house and farm at Éragny, 44 miles from Paris, in March 1884, he was enchanted. "I haven't been able to restrain myself from painting, so beautiful are the motifs that surround my garden," he wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.

Over the following two decades, he repeatedly painted views from the farm and within the local towns and villages, as well as workers in the fields around Éragny.

5
Beside the Kupa River Embankment in Winter
Alfred Freddy Krupa (1871- ), Croatian
Watercolor and ink on paper,
Dimensions: 20" x 15" (w x h), 2018

Alfred Freddy Krupa (1971- ) born in Karlovac, Yugoslavia is a Croatian contemporary painter, master draughtsman, book artist, art photographer, and art teacher. He published New Ink Art Manifesto in 1996. Milica Jovic wrote in her article for Highlark Magazine that Krupa is considered the pivotal figure in the Western New Ink Art movement.

6
January Snow 3
Alison Nicholls, British
Watercolor, 15" x 10" (w x h), 2022

From her web site (edited):
Alison Nicholls is Signature member of Artists For Conservation and the Society of Animal Artists, a member of The Explorers Club and an artist member of the Salmagundi Club. Her art has been exhibited at the Botswana Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. The US State Department used her art to promote the Coalition Against Wildlife Trafficking initiative. She leads Art Safaris in South Africa for Africa Geographic and frequently lectures about art, Africa, wildlife and conservation. English by birth, she lives in Port Chester, New York with her husband, Nigel. See her plein air study and subsequent studio paintings of this scene with her commentary about how she painted them, starting with a plein air watercolor and moving to the studio for two more... HERE.

7
Snow
Lyonel Charles Feininger (1871-1956) German-American
Watercolor and pastel on paper, 13" x 10" (w x h), 1949
Sotheby's 2022 New York auction
estimate $5,000 - $7,000 USD

Source Wiki:
Lyonel Charles Feininger (1871-1956) was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City, traveling to Germany at 16 to study and perfect his art. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He was also a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for magazines and newspapers in the USA and Germany. At the age of 36, he started to work as a fine artist. He also produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid-1950s, but he kept these primarily within his circle of friends. He was also a pianist and composer, with several piano compositions and fugues for organ surviving.

A major retrospective exhibition of Lyonel Feininger's work opened initially at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2011, subsequently at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2012. His painting The Market Church at Halle (1930) was prominently featured in the first three seasons of the iconic television show Bewitched hanging over the desk in Darren Stephens' office.

8
Near Vossevangen, Norway
Arthur Rackham, RWS (1867-1939), British
Watercolor on paper, 11" x 9" (w x h),
Sotheby's 2019 British auction of English Literature,
History, Children's Books and Illustrations,
estimate of four landscape watercolors,
$4,900 - $7,300 USD

Source Wiki and Sotheby's edited:
Arthur Rackham RWS (1867-1939) was an English book illustrator. He's recognized as one of the leading figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration. His work is noted for its robust pen and ink drawings, which were combined with the use of watercolor, a technique he developed because of his background as a journalistic illustrator.

Rackham visited Europe , mainly Germany, Switzerland and Italy, almost every year from the 1890s until well into the 1930s. They were walking holidays accompanied by one or more of his male friends. Up to 1908, five of them, Rackham, Keen, Hamer and two Andrewes brothers, customarily went off together. They called themselves the Funf Verein (The Five Club).

Rackham's 51 color works for the early American tale Rip Van Winkle became a turning point in the production of books. Through color-separated printing, it featured the accurate reproduction of color artwork. His best-known works also include the illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. His work is often described as a fusion of a northern European Nordic style strongly influenced by the Japanese woodblock tradition of the early 19th century. Read more about him and see his children's book illustrations at Wiki HERE.

end

Morning Brings Winter

 Morning Brings Winter

at dawn outside my home on Fort Ridge in Shapleigh, Maine on December 12, painted December 12, 2022 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

Purple Mountains Majesty

Purple Mountains Majesty

on the ponds walk to the view of the Presidential Mountain Range in New Hampshire as seen from the view behind my home of Fort Ridge in Shapleigh, Maine on November 6, 2022, painted December 5, 2022, 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

Trees and Treeless

Trees and Treeless

on the ponds walk through the beech woods behind my home of Fort Ridge in Shapleigh, Maine on November 6, 2022, painted December 5, 2022, 10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$300

Beech Leaves Left

Beech Leaves Left

on the ponds walk through the beech woods behind my home of Fort Ridge in Shapleigh, Maine on November 6, 2022, painted December 5, 2022, 10" x 8" (w x h), watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, framed.
$300

Beech Leaves Leaving Gallery

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The Art of Beech Leaves Leaving
Gallery

1
Transcendence
Geraldine Clarkson, British
Collage textile on board, 30" x 28" (w x h), 2022
NFS

Geraldine Clarkson is fascinated by transformation, changing the form of something.

"It's not turning something into something else, but changing how it appears, presenting it in a different form. This feeling for transformation found its first expression in childhood when, armed with a pair of scissors, glue and a pile of my mother's glossy magazines, I marched enthusiastically into the vast world of collage. It's only in recent years, though, that I'm discovering the creative power of fabric, and how perfectly it lends itself to transformation. And so remnants, scraps, cast-off clothes and worn-out but still-loved pieces of fabric take on a different form through collage and become art. And here I am again with the scissors and glue." - Geraldine Clarkson

See more of her art HERE.

2
Beech Grove I
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Austrian
Oil on canvas, 39" x 39" (w x h), 1902
Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden, Germany

Beginning in the late 1890s Gustav Klimt took summer holidays with the Flöge family on the shores of Lake Attersee, the largest lake of the Salzkammergut region in Upper Austria. He painted many of his landscapes there. These landscapes are the only genre, aside from figure painting, that engaged Klimt. Because of his intense painting focus the locals called him the Forest Demon (Waldschrat).

Klimt's Attersee paintings merit notice. Formally, the landscapes are characterized by the same design and patterning as the figurative pieces. But space in the Attersee works is flattened to a single plane. It's quite possible that Klimt painted them while using a telescope, hence the flattened plane.

3
Buchenwald / Beech Forest
Christian Rohlfs (1849-1938), German
Oil, circa 1900

Christian Rohlfs (1849-1938) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the important representatives of German expressionism. He took up painting as a teenager while convalescing from an infection that was eventually to lead to the amputation of a leg in 1874. He began his formal artistic education in Berlin, before transferring, in 1870, to the Wiemar Academy.

4
Old Beech Tree at the Edge of an Old Forest
Charles Brindley (1952- ), American
Oil on canvas, 24" x 18" (w x h), 2011

Charles Brindley lives and has a studio in Adairville, Tennessee, a small community 35 miles north of Nashville. In 1998 the Tennessee State Museum presented Landscape Vision: Works of Charles Brindley 1980-1997 and in 2007 the Evansville Museum organized an exhibit of his work spanning a twenty year period. His Trees of Myth & Legend, an exquisite brochure, is online as a PDF HERE. The artist's website is HERE.

5
Der Buchenwald / The Beech Forest
Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), Swiss
Oil on canvas, 52" x 40" (w x h), 1885
Museum of Art Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland

Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism which he called parallelism. His art is on the Swiss 50 Franc banknote from 1911 Series Two, Der Holzfäller.

6
Reflection Brooker Creek
Jeff Nabors, American
Oil on Canvas, 30" x 30" (w x h)
$2,045

Jeff Nabors is a BFA graduate of Ohio University. This is the fourth in a series of paintings he's creating inspired by the Brooker Creek Nature Preserve in Pinellas County, Florida. The artist's website is HERE.

7
Autumn in Minnesota - A Walk in the Woods
Luiza Vizoli, American
Oil on cotton canvas
Private Collection
The artist's website is HERE.

8
Wood with Beech Trees
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Dutch
Gouache, watercolor on paper, 22" x 18" (w x h), 1899
Gemeentemuseum den Haag, Hague, Netherlands

After a strict Protestant upbringing, in 1892, Mondrian entered the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam. He was already qualified as a teacher. He began his career as a teacher in primary education, but he also practiced painting. Most of his work from this period is naturalistic or Impressionistic, consisting largely of landscapes. These pastoral images of his native country depict windmills, fields, and rivers, initially in the Dutch Impressionist manner of the Hague School and then in a variety of styles and techniques that attest to his search for a personal style. These paintings are representational, and they illustrate the influence that various artistic movements had on Mondrian, including pointillism and the vivid colors of Fauvism. In 1893 he had his first exhibition. This painting was painted in 1899 many years before his journey onto abstract geometric art.