Window to Amaryllis III

Window to Amaryllis III

flowering in my living room February 23, 2023, 12" x 9" (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.
$500

Window to Amaryllis III Tidied Up
Bruce McMillan (1947- ), American
Watercolor and Digital, 2023

Tidy Abstract Art Visual Thoughts

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Tidy Abstract Art Visual Thoughts
Tidy Art with
Blue Green Black Red White

Window to Amaryllis III
before being tidied up.

My Painting
Tidied Up in Abstract Thought
Bruce McMillan (1947- ), American
Watercolor and Digital, 2023

1
Tidy
Blue Green Black Red
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
Painted aluminum on wall,
Each panel: 15" x 120" (w x h),
Art: 120" x 111" (w x h), 1989
Ellsworth Kelly Foundation,
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, New York

2
Tidy
Blue, Black, Red, Green
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
Lithograph in colors, 89" x 25" (w x h), 2001

3
Not so Tidy O'Keeffe
Composition
Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), American
Oil on canvas, 45" x 58" (w x h), 1962
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
New York, New York

4
Tidy in Its Own Way O'Keeffe
Red Hills with Pedernal, White Clouds
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American
Oil on canvas, 30" x 20" (w x h), 1936
Christies 2016 auction sold $4,533,000 USD

5
Tidy Hopper
Blue Green Black Red
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
Lithograph in colors, on Arches Cover paper,
#11 of 100 prints, 20 proofs, 20" x 22" (w x h), 1971
Christie's 2017 auction sold $8,750 USD

6
Not so Tidy Hopper
Cape Cod Morning
Edward Hopper (), American
Oil on canvas, 40" x 34" (w x h), 1950
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

7
Nicely Tidy in Maine (Tide unknown)
The Lobster Boat
Stephen S. Pace (1918-2010), American
Oil on Canvas, 36" x 28" (w x h), 1978
Clarke Gallery, Newburyport, Massachusetts

Window to Amaryllis II

Window to Amaryllis II

flowering in my living room February 23, 2023, 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

Window to Amaryllis

Window to Amaryllis

flowering in my Shapleigh, Maine, living room February 23, 2023, 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

Snow Shadows Fort Ridge II

Snow Shadows Fort Ridge II

in the back fields behind my home, painted plein air in snow February 11, 2023, 13.5" x 10" (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.
$500

The plein air set up with the sun setting behind me, temperatures dropping and the watercolors in my palette forming freezing slush, and so that was the time to say finished.

Snow Shadows Fort Ridge I

Snow Shadows Fort Ridge I

in the back fields behind my home, painted plein air in snow February 11, 2023, 12" x 9" (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.
$500

Blue and White and Stripes

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Blue and White and Stripes
in Art
How artists compose these elements.

1
Lake Superior
Lawren Harris (1885-1970), Canadian
Oil on canvas, 50" x 44" (w x h), circa 1923
The Thomson Collection,
Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada

Source Wiki edited:
In May 1920, Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, Franklin Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley, formed the noted Group of Seven. In the fall of 1921, Harris ventured to Lake Superior's North Shore, where he'd return annually for the next seven years. While his urban and Algoma paintings of the late 1910s and early 1920s were characterized by rich, bright colors, and decorative compositional motifs, the discovery of Lake Superior as a source of subject material meant the depiction of what Jackson called a "sublime order". Harris conveyed the spiritual side to the scene through a more austere, simplified style, with a limited palette.

In 1924, a sketching trip with A.Y. Jackson to Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies marked the beginning of Harris' mountain subjects, which he continued to explore with annual sketching trips until 1928, exploring areas around Banff National Park, Yoho National Park and Mount Robson Provincial Park.

In 1930, Harris went on his last extended sketching trip, traveling to Greenland, the Canadian Arctic and Labrador aboard the Royal Canadian Mounted Police supply ship and ice breaker, the SS. Beothic, for two months, completing over 50 sketches. The Arctic canvases that he developed from the oil panels marked the end of his landscape period.

2
Still Life with Blue and White Tablecloth
Louisa Matthiasdottir (1917-2000) Icelandic American
Oil on canvas, 52" x 40" (w x h), 1994
Reynolds Gallery,
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

Source Wiki edited:
Louisa Matthiasdottir grew up in Reykjavik's noted Höfði house, a private residence at that time. It's now best known as the location for the 1986 Reykjavík Summit meeting of President Ronald Reagan of the United States and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union.

She showed artistic ability at an early age, and studied first in Denmark and then in Paris. Her early paintings, dating from the late 1930s, established her as a leading figure in the Icelandic avant-garde community. In these paintings her subjects are painted with a broad brush, emphasizing geometric form.

3
Portrait of Woman
with Blue and White Striped Blouse
William H. Johnson (1901-1970), American
Tempera on paperboard, 22" x 28" (w x h), circa 1940-42
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Source Wiki edited:
Born in Florence, South Carolina, he became a student at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He later lived and worked in France, where he was exposed to modernism. After Johnson married Danish textile artist Holcha Krake, the couple lived for some time in Scandinavia. There he was influenced by the strong folk art tradition. The couple moved to the United States in 1938. Johnson eventually found work as a teacher at the Harlem Community Art Center, through the Federal Art Project.

Johnson's style evolved from realism to expressionism to a powerful folk style, for which he is best known. A substantial collection of his paintings, watercolors, and prints is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has organized and circulated major exhibitions of his works.

4
Untitled
Sam Tchakalian (1929-2004) Chinese American
Monotype, 18" x 12" (w x h), 1987

Source Moderism edited:
Sam Tchakalian's art has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Sam Tchakalian, a painter, printmaker, and teacher, was born in Shanghai, China in 1929. His family relocated to California in 1947 and, after serving in the U.S. Army, Tchakalian enrolled in San Francisco City College, where he received his AA degree in 1950, his BA in 1952, and finally his MFA in 1958. His oil paintings created with a palette knife are complicated reveals of layers of color. They are the signposts of Northern California abstract gestural painting. He taught at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, the College of San Mateo, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and for 35 years at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Kenneth Baker in an exhibition review in 1991 wrote: "For many years Tchakalian has made abstract paintings consisting of broad horizontal bands applied in expansive, undemonstrative, gestures, But Tchakalian is much more a materialist than color field painters like Helen Frankenthaler or Olitski... Part of the art of Tchakalian's work is in leaving every canvas looking as fresh as if he had finished it at one go."

5
Peinture 162 x 130 cm, 9 juillet 1961 /
Painting 162 x 130 cm, July 9, 1961
Pierre Soulages (1919-2022), French
Oil on canvas, 52" x 61" (w x h), 1961
Christies 2020 Paris auction
sold: $5,790,000 USD

Source Christies edited:
Pierre Soulages said, "I do not depict, I paint. I do not represent, I present." Against a bone-white ground, broad strokes of black and Prussian blue build a right-angled structure of bold, rhythmic power. Horizontal beams span the canvas like bird's wings. Pitch-dark bars of black hang to the left, bringing the work into imposing tension. With his scraped scraping technique, Soulages pulls back the still-wet blue and black pigment with drags of a homemade spatula, revealing bright gleams and halos of light. The drama of the painting, which stands as tall as a person, is present.

6
Study for Treatise on the Veil
Cy Twombly (1928-2011), American
Drawing paper, transparent adhesive tape,
wax crayon, pencil, colored pencil, and ink,
39" x 27" (w x h), 1970
The Menil Collection, Houston

Source: Gagosian and Wiki edited:
For Treatise on the Veil (1970) Twombly had in mind a particular piece of musique by composer Pierre Henry from the early 1950s, which amplified the sound of a cloth sheet being torn apart, and relates to the idea of the veil.

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (1928-2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat. His best-known works are large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. His highest work sales price was at a Christie's auction in 2014, $69,600,000 USD.

A 2015 article about and including the huge Treatise on the Veil painting and its twelve studies when they were on exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, on Gagosian is HERE.

7
White lines (vertical) on Ultramarine
Tony Tuckson
Diptych: styrene-based house paint,
polyvinyl acetate and pigments on hardboard,
96" x 84" (8' x 7') (w x h), 1970-73
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Source Wiki:
John Anthony Tuckson (1921-1973) born in Egypt, was an Australia Abstract Expressionist artist, an art gallery director and promoter of native Aboriginal Australian art, and a WWII Spitfire pilot. After major Australian Exhibitions several of his paintings are on permanent display at the National Gallery of Australia.

8
Woman in Striped Dress
Édouard Manet (1832-1883), French
Oil on canvas, 33" x 69" (w x h), circa 1877-1880
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

Source Guggenheim notes:
Manet's endeavor to capture the flavor of contemporary society extended to portraits of barmaids, street musicians, rag pickers, and other standard Parisian types that were favorite subjects of popular illustrated literature. Since the subject of Woman in Striped Dress is unidentified, conjecture that she might be the French actress Suzanne Reichenberg remains purely speculative. It's tempting to view this portrait as Manet's rendering of one such type: the fashionable Parisian bourgeois woman, complete with Japanese fan.

Minneola Space

Minneola Space

as a snow life in my snowy yard on January 28, 2023, painted February 5, 2023, 10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors,  selected for light fastness and permanence, and wax resist, on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$300

Orange Circling in Your Space

From Minneola to
Orange Circling in Your Space
with

1) Joan Miró
2) Alexander Calder
3) Andy Warhol
4) Bauhaus
5) Etel Adnan
6) Kenneth Noland
7) Arthur Dove
8) Joseph Albers

* Orange and Reddish Orange

1
The Red Sun
Joan Miró (1893-1983), Spanish
Oil on canvas, 1950

The striking red sun is a symbol found in much of Miró's art, a more detailed version was painted two years previously in 1948. Miró (1893-1983) liked to reduce detail to a minimum, while still allowing each object to be identifiable. The large bright circle dominates the composition, stretching to two thirds of the width and height of the painting.

2
Derriere Le Miroir #201 / Behind the Mirror #201
Alexander Calder (1898-1976), American
Lithograph, 11" x 15" (w x h), 1973

Source Wiki edited:
This lithograph is my the well-known sculptor, Alexander Calder, the third in a generation of noted Philadelphian sculptors. The Philadelphia Museum of Art offers a view of works by three generations of Alexander Calders. From the second floor window on the east side of the Great Stair Hall there is behind the viewer Calder's own Ghost mobile, ahead on the street is the Swann Memorial Fountain by his father, A. Stirling Calder, and beyond that is the statue of William Penn atop City Hall by Calder's grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder.

3
Sunset
Andy Warhol (1928-1987), American
Screenprint in a unique color combination on wove paper,
34" x 34" (w x h), #43 of 470, 1972
from the total edition of 632 unique impressions,
one of 472 impressions used by architects for
the Hotel Marquette, Minneapolis
Sotheby's 2022 auction estimate, $80,000 - $120,000 USD

Source Wiki edited:
Warhol had a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Compared to the success and scandal of Warhol's work in the 1960s, the 1970s were a much quieter decade, as he became more entrepreneurial. He produced screen prints for a hotel chain, one seen above. In 1975, he published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. An idea expressed in the book: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."

4
Bauhaus, 1919
Bauhaus Exhibition Poster, Orange Circle

Source Wiki edited:
The Bauhaus School was founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969) in Weimar, Germany. It was grounded in the idea of creating comprehensive artwork in which all the arts would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, modernist architecture, and architectural education. The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Staff at the Bauhaus included prominent artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy at various points. The Nazis disbanded the school in 1933.

5
Planéte 37
Etel Adnan (1925-2021), Lebanese-American
Oil on canvas, 10" x 13" (w x h), 2020

Source Wiki edited:
The painting above was painted in 2020 when Etel Adnan was 95-years-old. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Besides her literary output, Adnan made visual works in a variety of media, such as oil paintings, films and tapestries, which have been exhibited at galleries across the world.
In 2017, Adnan's work was included in "Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction," a group exhibition organized by MoMA, which brought together prominent artists including Ruth Asawa, Gertrudes Altschul, Anni Albers, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, among others. In 2018, MASS MoCA hosted a retrospective of the artist, titled "A yellow sun A green sun a yellow sun A red sun a blue sun", including a selection of paintings in oil and ink, as well as a reading room of her written works. The exhibition explored how the experience of reading poetry differs from the experience of looking at a painting. She died at the age of 96 in 2022.

6
Sunwise
Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), American
Oil on canvas, 76" x 76" (w x h), 1960

Source Yars Art, edited:
Noland, one of the best know color field painters, first began making and exhibiting his iconic Circle series, square canvases featuring concentric circles in various saturated colors, during the late 1950s. His work attracted international attention in 1964, when it was included in Greenberg's Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and his paintings also appeared in the Venice Biennale. He lived his last years in Port Clyde, Maine.

7
Red Sun
Arthur G. Dove (1880-1946), American
Oil on canvas, 28" x 20" (w x h), 1935
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Phillips Collection notes edited:
Red Sun, painted in 1935 during Arthur Dove's five-year stay in Geneva, New York, is a visual representation of the moment at sunset that hovers between light and dark. It accompanies Morning Sun, completed the same year. The sun is a powerful force in the landscape, this time as a large red-orange orb with a spiraling line of force that hovers over the hills and patterned fields. Its vibrant red radiates, conveying the sun's intensity at the end of the day. Red Sun, like its companion painting, attests to Dove's increasingly rich color and awareness of the interplay of heat and light of landscape at his home in Geneva, New York.

8
Homage to the Square: Confident
Josef Albers (1888-1976), German-American
Oil on Masonite, 24" x 24" (w x h), 1954
SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Gift of Anni Albers and the Josef Albers Foundation

Source Wiki edited:
Josef Albers, a German-born artist and educator, was the first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, headed Yale University's department of design, and is considered one of the most influential teachers of the visual arts in the twentieth century.

Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition, especially in the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with nested squares. Usually painting on Masonite, he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded the colors he used on the back of his works. Each painting consists of either three or four squares of solid planes of color nested within one another, in one of four different arrangements and in square formats ranging from 16" x 16" to 48" x 48" (w x h).

A Lemon Pear Pair

A Lemon Pear Pair

on the snow on my yard, taken on January 28, 2022, painted on February 3, 2023, 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