Tulip Family Three

A Twelve Minute Painting

Tulip Family Three

Timed from start to finish, 12 minutes, of potted tulips from my grocery store, outside at home in Shapleigh, Maine on March 18, 2024, painted March 22, 2024, 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 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$150

Tulip Intimacy

Tulip Intimacy

blooming in a pot from the grocery store set on my home railing in Shapleigh, Maine on March 18, 2024, painted March 21, 2024, 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 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$400

Tulips Going Up

Tulips Going Up

live and growing, from the grocery store, set on my home railing in Shapleigh, Maine on March 18, 2024, painted March 20, 2024, 12" x 9" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence on 140 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$400

Art of Yellow Tulips Part I of II

The Art of Yellow Tulips
Part I of II

A blooming collection as seen and painted by artists
from various centuries, various countries,
various backgrounds and both genders.

1
Parrot Tulips and Leaves Design
Arthur Ewart Brown (1906-1981) British, Scottish
Gouache on off-white laid paper, 12" x 19"(w x h), 1933
Gift of Dr. Denman Waldo Ross, Cambridge, MA, 1934,
who was Director of the MFA Boston for 33 years.
The Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Source various online:
Arthur Ewart Brown was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1906 and completed his journey through life in London, England in 1981. He painted botanical art, four originals in the collections of the Harvard Art Museums.

2
Illumination
Heidi Woodhead, Australian
Oil on canvas, 48" x 48" (w x h), 2023
$6,000 AUD / $3,900 USD, sold, private collection
Handmark Gallery, Hobart, Australia

Source various, Handmark, Artist website, and more:
Heidi Woodhead, a photo-realist oil painter, trained and worked as a forensic crime scene examiner with the Tasmanian Police Force for 11 years. She gained an eye for detail, and an understanding of the shades of life and the fleeting nature of beauty, themes she explores in her art. "I return to floral and botanical themes because I see them as a metaphor for life: exquisite, but often imperfect beauty that is impermanent, transient, tenuous. I strive to capture that beauty before it decays, and to find the glimmer of light in the darkness." Heidi is a self-taught artist, exhibiting since 1998. She lives in South Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

3
Yellow Tulips
Alex Katz (1927- ) American
Silkscreen, Limited Edition of 50, 77" x 48" (w x h), 2014

Source Wiki edited:
Alex Katz's 50 edition screenprint was made in 2014. It's based on his Tulips 4, 16" x 10" (w x h), his huge oil painting painted by him when he was 86 years-old. It's in the collection of MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. It's huge size is typical of Alex Katz. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art. Since 1951, his work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally.

4
Still Life of Tulips
Poul Nielsen (1920-1998) Danish
Oil on canvas, 28" x 23" (w x h), 1954
$6,000, Charish, San Francisco

Source Charish edited:
Poul Nielsen first studied painting at the Freiberg Technical School in Germany. After WWII he studied at the Danish Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen. He subsequently painted and studied throughout Europe and, later, as his palette continued to lighten, spent more time in Egypt and Greece. Nielsen exhibited widely with success and was the recipient of many medals, prizes and juried awards. His works are held in private and public collections including the Oddsherreds Art Museum, Asnae, Denmark.

5
Yellow Tulips in a Tall Vase
Gary Bukovnik (1947- ) American
Watercolor on paper, 22" x 30" (w x h), 2018
Private collection

Source artist website and Steven Scott Gallery edited:
Born and educated in Cleveland, Gary Bukovnik has lived in San Francisco for more the last thirty ply years. Primarily using watercolor, monotype, and lithograph, he creates floral and culinary images. Bukovnik's watercolors and monotypes are the subject of a book by Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1990. The New York Metropolitan Opera commissioned him to create a poster commemorating their 1990-91 season. In the early 2000s he was Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome was an artist-in-residence at the Michigan Institute of Arts in Kalamazoo in 2010.
        Bukovnik's work is in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Library of Congress; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
        Solo exhibitions of Bukovnik's work have been mounted by the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, and the Gallery at Lincoln Center, New York, among others.

6
Tulips (Flower Study)
Myra Butterworth (1899-2002) American
Watercolor with graphite on wove paper, 9" x12" (w x h), 1933
The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Source various edited (listed in at the National Gallery as no know biography for artists in the collection):
Myra Butterworth Newswanger (1899-2002) of Philadelphia was an accomplished artist, her style compared to Mary Cassatt. Her art is in collections of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the national Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. She was married to Vernon Kiehl Newswanger (1901- 1980) from Fairfield, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, known for Amish theme painting. Although the Newswangers' talent took them around the world, they returned to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania where their family lived since the 1700's. Their son, Christian (Xtian) Newswanger, who turned down scholarships to Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania to study art with his father, a professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, later, received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to study at the National Art Academy in Dusseldorf, Germany.

7
Yellow Tulips
Le Pho (1907-2001) Vietnamese
Oil on canvas, 29" x 21" (w x h), 1998 in Paris
Sotheby's 2021 Hong Kong auction
sold $945,000 HKD / $121,000 USD

Source: Wiki edited:
Le Pho (1907-2001) was a Vietnamese painter. From 1925 until 1930, Le Pho studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi. He earned a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied for the next two years under the instruction of Victor Tardieu, a friend and companion of Henri Matisse. Upon returning to Vietnam he taught at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts de l'Indochine in Hanoi.
        In 1937 he gave up his professorship to return to Paris as a part of the International Exposition in Paris as both a delegate and a member of the exposition's jury. In 1938, he had his first one-man show in Paris, a show which marked the beginning of his successful artistic career in Europe. He would go on to show his art across France in Paris, Nice, Lyon, and Rouen, as well as in Morocco, Brussels in Europe, and in New York.

8
Tulips
Victoria Huntley (1900-1971) American
Color lithograph, 10" x 13" (w x h), 1931
Printed by George C. Miller (American, 1894-1965)

Source Wiki edited:
Victoria Ebbels Hutson Huntley (1900-1971) was an American artist, and printmaker. She grew up in New York City, and studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art and the Art Students League of New York. She was awarded First Prize in Lithography in the International Graphic Art Show at the Chicago Art Institute. In 1933 her lithograph, Koppers Coke, was awarded First Prize in Lithography in the National Exhibition of the Philadelphia Print Club.
        She taught at the Birch Wathen Lenox School, a college prep school in Manhattan, from 1934 to 1942. Later in the 1940s she was Resident Artist at the Pomfret School college prep school in Connecticut. In 1939, she painted a mural, The Packet Sails from Greenwich, at the post office in Greenwich, Connecticut, and another, Fiddler's Green, in Springville, New York as part of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts.
        Her papers are held at the Archives of American Art. In 1942 she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. Her work is represented in the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Chicago Art Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum.

Art of Yellow Tulips Part II of II

The Art of Yellow Tulips
Part II

A blooming collection as seen and painted by artists
from various centuries, various countries,
various backgrounds and both genders.

9
Yellow Tulips in a Ceramic Jug
Catharine Constance Cooper (1868-1960) British
Oil on canvas, 24" x 18" (w x h)
Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Bushey, Hertfordshire, England

Source various online:
Catharine Constance Cooper (1868-1960) was a British artist known for her still life and trompe l'oeil paintings.

10
Tulips - Yellow #3
Mary Koga (1920-2001) American
Chromogenic print, 14" x 9" (w x h), 1984
The Art institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Source Wiki:
Mary Koga, born in Sacramento, California in 1920, was an avid photographer since she was a child. However, she concentrated on social work and received a BA in 1942 from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master's degree in 1947 from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.
        During World War II she was incarcerated in the internment camp at Tule Lake for a year because of her Japanese ethnicity. After working in social work from 1947 to 1969, eventually teaching as an Assistant Professor for Field Work at the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration, 1960-1969, Koga concentrated on photography. She studied at the IIT Institute of Design and received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973. She went on to teach photography at Columbia College Chicago for seven years.
        The Floral Forms series was begun in 1972 and went on into the 1990s. Done in both color as well as black and white, the images are delicate close-ups of mostly single flower heads, artfully arranged in the studio with tightly controlled lighting. On occasion, she over exposed and used multiple exposure to emphasize the structure and/or color.

11
Tulip
Emile Galle (1846-1904) French
Pencil and watercolor, 21" x 17" (w x h), circa 1863
Musee d'Orsay, Paris France

Source Wiki:
Emile Galle (1846-1904), born and died in Nancy, France, was a French artist and designer who worked in glass. He's considered to be one of the major innovators in the French Art Nouveau movement. He was noted for his designs of Art Nouveau glass art and Art Nouveau furniture, and was a founder of the Ecole de Nancy or Nancy School, a movement of design in the city of Nancy, France.
        At 16-years-old he went to work for the family business as an assistant to his father, making floral designs and emblems for both earthenware and glass. In his spare time he became an accomplished botanist, studying with the director of the Botanical Gardens of Nancy and author of the leading textbooks on French flora. Emile collected plants from the region and from as far away as Italy and Switzerland. He also took courses in painting and drawing, and made numerous drawings of plants, flowers, animals and insects, which became the subjects for decoration.
        When he took over the family glass business, by 1889 he had over three hundred employees. His own office and studio was in the center of the complex. He trained the designers himself, and sent them watercolors of floral designs he made in the gardens of his residence. Galle ordered his designers to use only real flowers and plants as their models, though they could take some liberties in the final design. He wrote in 1889, "It is necessary to have a pronounced bias in favor of models taken from flora and fauna, while giving them free expression."

12
Tulipes / Tulips
Louis Boitte (1830-1906) French
Watercolor on paper, 9" x 16" (w x h), 1860
Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France
Donated by Alice Boitte, 1959

Source various:
French architect Louis Francois Philippe Boitte known as Louis Boitte (1830-1906) was the chief architect of the Palais de Fontainebleau. His wife, Zelia Lenoir, was a painter. He is also known for his drawings made in Italy, Greece and Turkey, professional visions of architects of that time. In close collaboration with Albert Lenoir , he also designed the plans for the cenotaph of General de Lamoriciere erected in 1869 in the cathedral of Nantes , a monument with which the sculptor Paul Dubois was associated. In 1959 his family bequeathed to the National Museum of the Chateau de Fontainebleau an important collection of numerous drawings and projects, which was transferred in 1986 to the Musee d'Orsay.

13
Tulips
Harry Sternberg (1904-2001) American
Color screenprint, 9" x 17" (w x h), 1937
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Source: Wiki edited:
Harry Sternberg (1904-2001), was an American painter, printmaker and educator. In 1931, his work was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art for the first time. He was appointed in 1933 to the staff of the Art Students League of New York where he would remain an instructor for the next 35 years. Sternberg was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936, and spent the year studying the conditions of workers in coal mines and steel mills. His drawings, etchings and paintings depicting life in industrial America influenced his subsequent post office mural designs. In 1966, he retired from the Art Students League of New York and the Sternbergs moved to Escondido, California, where he established a studio and continued to work as an artist and an educator for 35 more years. Between 1969 and 1978, he participated in The Orme School Fine Arts Festival, known as the dean of the festival, exposing high school students to the work and instruction of professional artists.
        He died in Escondido, California, in 2001 at 97 years-old. In 2000, his life and work were celebrated by a major retrospective exhibition: No Sun Without Shadow: The Art of Harry Sternberg at the Museum-California Center for the Arts, Escondido, California. He was the author of three art books, Composition: The Anatomy of Picture Making, Pitman, 1958, now in print by Dover, Woodcut, Pitman, 1962, and Silk Screen Color Printing, McGraw-Hill Books, 1942. In 1990 he published a collection of prints: Sternberg: A Life in Woodcuts, one of which depicts his painting of the noted Lakeview post office mural.

14
Untitled (Yellow Tulips and Lilacs)
Alfred Hesse (1904-1988), German
Oil on cardboard, 39" x 27" ( w x h), circa 1920s-1930s
The Arts Collection of Dresden, Germany

Source various edited:
Born in 1904, Alfred Hesse was predominantly influenced by the 1920s, a time of recovery and introspection after the First World War. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919. Surrealism was the predominant expressive mode of the 1920s, and was aided by the liberalism of Germany's Weimar Republic, which was an environment that allowed for remarkable creative flowering.
        Since 2002 The Arts Collection of Dresden, Germany has the largest holdings of Alfred Hesse's works in a public collection, almost 500 works including paintings, watercolors, pencil, pen and ink drawings and mural designs. His close home plays an important role in his work; among the watercolors and occasionally other works on paper, there are numerous scenes from the Elbe Valley, Saxon Switzerland and the Eastern Ore Mountains. Occasionally, he also painted still lifes like this one.

15
Tulips
William House (1928-2015) American
Oil on canvas, 46" x 35" (w x h), circa 1959
David B. Werbe Memorial Purchase Prize,
Annual Exhibition for Michigan Artists, 1959
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan

Source Eskywell edited:
Frederick William "Bill" House (1928-2015) was a lifetime Detroit area resident, spending the last forty five years of his life in Grosse Pointe. It was in a Lincoln Park grade school where his teacher, Mrs. Kute, recognized his artistic talent. By chance Mrs. Kute also taught Bill in high school where she encouraged his artistic endeavors and spoke to his parents about his skills.
        Bill mastered the clarinet and saxophone. It was those skills that served him well, playing in the Artie Shaw U.S. Navy band after World War II. He was a fine arts major at the Detroit Society of the Arts Crafts,(now Detroit's College for Creative Studies, graduating in 1952. He worked as an illustrator and taught at his alma mater, finishing as Professor Emeritus. Throughout his professional working life, he amassed a body of work, a clear, direct, representational style has resonated well with art buyers.

16
Tulip
Donn Russell (1929-2018) American
Silkscreen, artist's proof, 7" x 19" (w x h), circa 1980s
$195 USD

Source various online:
Born in Boston in an artistic family, Donn Russell attended the Boston Museum School, then Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Design and the Art Students League in New York City. His first public acclaim came winning a top award at a National Academy of Design Annual, followed by success at the Hartford (CT) Atheneum, Silvermine Artists, the New Museum, Audubon Artists, and others. In 1979 he set up his print gallery on Old South Wharf, Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, his summer base. He also had a studio in Greenwich Village, New York City. His work has been exhibited solo and in group gallery and museum shows in the US and abroad, has been featured in art and architecture publications, and as illustrations in the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time, Life and Fortune.

Last Snow Study

Last Snow Study

the view looking south from my home in Shapleigh, Maine on Mar 11, 2024, 14" x 11" (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 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$500

Last Snow for Four Foreseeing Spring

Last Snow for Four Foreseeing Spring

the abstracted view looking south from my home in Shapleigh, Maine on Mar 12, 2024, 17" x 13.5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence on 140 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$800

See my 2017 abstracted view of this scene HERE. 

Last Sliver of Snow

Monet and Me

Monet and Me
That Sky Shape in the Trees
by Bruce McMillan

I painted a series of paintings in my back fields in different seasons. I was intrigued by a certain shape of a sky space in the trees. It was prominent in my watercolors. After this, while researching art in various Monet series, I stumbled upon his Morning on the Seine (Matinee sur la Seine) series of twenty-two paintings. I was amazed that he'd also been intrigued by that same unusual sky shape in his trees. It was a focus in each one of his of his series of twenty-one paintings. I was astonished.

On different continents and over a hundred years apart, Monet and I had both been drawn to the same fluid moving shape of the sky in a break in the horizon's trees. This shape is the focus of our art, independently seen and unknowingly painted in every one of our series of paintings.

1
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 36" x 32" (w x h), 1897
Painted in Giverny, France
Christies London auction
sold $18,500,000 USD (14,397,500 GBP)

These are four of the twenty-two canvases Claude Monet painted of Matinee sur la Seine (Morning on the Seine) in summers of 1896 and 1897. The setting was a brief journey from his home, taking the artist just a few moments to get there, where the Epte tributary feeds into the Seine River in Giverny.

2
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 37" x 32" (w x h), 1897
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Looking upstream on the Seine into the rising sun, on the left is the Giverny bank and on the right is the Ile aux Orties, a small wooded isle. Trees on both sides dominate the scene, those on the left Giverny bank are full.

3
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 36" x 35" (w x h), 1897
White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
NW Washington, District of Columbia

Monet usually started his paintings on the bateau-atelier, his specially designed studio-boat, , which he left anchored mid-river for the duration of the summer, rowing out to it each morning in a skiff, before completing the paintings on dry land in his studio.

4
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 36" x 35" (w x h), 1897
Christies NY 2017 auction sold $23,375,000 USD

The art critic Maurice Guillemot, who came to Giverny to interview Monet in the summer of 1897, described one early-morning session: "3.30 a.m. His torso snug in a white woolen hand-knit; his feet in a pair of sturdy hunting boots with thick dew-proof soles; his head covered by a battered brown felt hat, with the brim turned up to keep off the sun; a cigarette in his mouth (Monet) pushes open the door (of Le Pressoir), walks down the steps, follows the central path through his garden and comes to the river. There he unties his rowboat moored in the reeds along the bank, and with a few strokes reaches the bateau-atelier at anchor. A local man who accompanies him, unpackages his stretched canvases and the artist sets to work."

5
The Sky Arrived

in the back fields behind my home in Shapleigh, Maine painted plein air May 27, 2021, 18" x 14" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $900. Also online HERE.

Also used as the postcard to promote Maine Audubon's 2021 Brush with Nature plein air event.

6
Summer Sky Summer Field

on a ponds walk behind my home on July 1, 2020, painted July 6, 2020, 10" x 8" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $300, also online HERE.

Also used in Carol Douglas' Watch Me Paint art class posting, "How did you get that color?" featuring my watercolors and my palette concluded with an assignment for her students to paint from my painting.

7
Fall Sky Space Study 1

with autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 2022, 10" x 8" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $300, also online HERE.

8
Fall Sky Space Study 2

with autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 2022, 10" x 8" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $300, also online HERE.

Winter Sun Sets

Winter Sun Sets

Painted plein air in the fields behind my home on Feb 27, 2024, 7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence on 140 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$200

My palette and setup on the snow.

The view...

Future Museum Notes:
Winter Sun Sets was painted plein air in February, 2024. It portrays the artist's command of watercolor and design, simplicity to abstract while staying based in reality. The use of the extra white watercolor paper, the only white on the watercolor artist's palette, is evident not only in the snow, but also in the separation of color areas, and especially as the bright sun, the focal point of the scene. Since this was painted quickly, plein air, this white-line effect was done to keep each color separate and distinct while the colors dried. Whereas, in the sun and the winter bare trees, the artist used wet on wet color. There is a blending of colors, orange and yellow around the sun, brown and blue across the bare woods, a gradation. The conscious use of the sun's color and the tonal range, from the white crisp-edge center to the yellow glow and then blending to orange, keeps the eye centered on the lightest part of the sun and its glow. Regarding applying the watercolor, the artist's well known use of mostly flat brushes is evident in the pointed strokes blue snow shadows sweeping sideways across the snow.

The artist stated: "This was painted small and fast since at the end of this winter plein air session the sun was setting. There wasn't enough time to paint a large watercolor. Plus the setting sun was taking away not only the light but also the only warmth that was keeping my fingers from freezing and my wet watercolor paints thawed and drying, not freezing."

The Sun in Art Visual Essay

The Sun in Art Visual Essay

1
Sunset
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) American
Screenprint in a unique color combination
on wove paper, 34" x 34" (w x h), 1972
Sotheby's 2022 auction sold, $119,700 USD

Source Sotheby's general research edited:
Produced in 1972; this screenprint impression is number 43 from the total edition of 632 unique impressions, one of 472 impressions used by architects Johnson & Burgee for the Hotel Marquette, Minneapolis, with the Hotel Marquette Prints ink stamp on the verso, published by David Whitney. In addition to his many variations in color screenprints of Sunset in 1972, Warhol also did many variations in color screenprints of Mao.

2
This
Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) American
Oil on canvas, circa 1958-1959

Sources Wiki and Yares Art edited:
Kenneth Noland was born in 1924 at Asheville, North Carolina. In his early teens, he visited Washington D.C. with his father, and was awed by the astonishing holdings of the National Gallery of Art, inspiring his pursuit to paint. In the early 1950s he met Morris Louis in D.C. while teaching night classes. He became friends with Moris Louis, and after being introduced via Clement Greenberg to Helen Frankenthaler and seeing her new paintings at her studio in New York City in 1953, both Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis adopted her soak-stain technique of allowing thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases.
        Noland's large-scale Circle canvases, such as This (circa 1958-59), caused a stir when he first introduced them to the art world in the early 1960s. Noland revisited the circle motif in the late 1990s, producing a series of relatively intimate hard-edge compositions with vibrant concentric circles, and heightened color relationships, often employing iridescent hues. This painting, titled This, was exhibited in 2017 at the Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal - Montreal, Canada.
        Noland died at his home in Port Clyde, Maine, in 2010 at the age of 85 with his fourth wife of sixteen years, Paige Rense, on her fourth marriage, too.

3
Coucher de soleil bronze-violet /
Sunset in Bronze-Purple
Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) Swiss
Oil on canvas, 29" x 21" (w x h), 1911

Sources Historia Arte and Flashbak and HAL open Science edited:
Felix Edouard Vallotton (1865-1925) was a Swiss painter, printmaker, a novelist, a playwright, a restorer of paintings and an art critic. As an artist he's associated with Pierre Bonnard, Jean-Edouard Vuillard and their Paris-based Les Nabis art group. Les Nabis (Hebrew for The Prophets) were inspired by the decorative, post-Impressionist, bold, flat style of Paul Gauguin and the simple clarity of Japanese woodblock prints. At some point Valloton was dubbed "the singular Felix Vallotton" by Thadee Natanson, co-founder of the avant-garde cultural journal La Revue blanche, for which the artist created stylish woodcuts and graphics, often satirizing the fashion-conscious Parisienne and the city's street life. Felix Vallotton wrote an autobiographical novel, The Murderous Life (La Vie bleue), written between 1907 and 1908 and published posthumously in 1927. His protagonist, an art historian, is an antisocial killer in love who probably gawked at sunsets as sublime as this one.

4
Sunset: Lake Wesserunsett I
Alex Katz (1927- ) American
Screenprint, edition of 60, 40"x 36" (w x h), 1972
Printed by Chiron Press Inc.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Source Wiki edited:
Lake Wesserunsett is in Madison, Maine. In 1901, Lakewood Summer Theatre opened in East Madison on the western side of Lake Wesserunsett. Since 1967 it has been the official summer theatre of Maine, and the oldest continually operating summer theatre in America. Every year from early June to mid-September, Alex Katz moves from his SoHo loft to a 19th-century clapboard farmhouse in Lincolnville, Maine. A summer resident of Lincolnville since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with Maine's Colby College.
        In 1965, Katz embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. This was made in 1972, seven years into this. Katz would produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut. He produced over 400 print editions in his lifetime. The Albertina, Vienna, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hold complete collections of Katz' print works. Katz's work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions worldwide.

5
Sunrise over Water (Study)
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), American
Acrylic and graphite pencil on plastic mounted on paper,
7" x 5" (w x h), circa 1981
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Source Wiki edited:
Roy Lichtenstein, a noted American pop artist, produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek style with exaggerated dots and lines seen in comics. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style.
        An oil painting of a sunrise sold for $16,405,000 USD. This study for Sunrise over Water is a simple small acrylic sketch, unlike his precise finished works. His most expensive painting is Masterpiece, which was sold for $165,000,000 USD in 2017.

6
Sun Sets, Sand Brightens, Sky Opens the Other Way
Liu Kuo-sung (1932- ), Taiwanese
Horizontal scroll, ink and color on paper,
91" x 58" (w x h), 1969
Art Museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Source Wiki and museum notes edited:
Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong), born in China in 1932 is renowned for his landscape paintings that pioneered a new approach to traditional Chinese ink wash painting. A cofounder of Taiwan's Fifth Moon Group, which drew on Western Modernist trends to revolutionize Chinese art, Liu rose to prominence after graduating from the National Taiwan Normal University. His Space series of celestial bodies, influenced by iconic Earth photographs captured by the Apollo 8 space mission, are among his most coveted works, with some selling for more than $128,000 USD. Liu's meditative canvases reflect a distinct engagement with paper that involves collage, tearing, and marbling, techniques that harmonize unusual textures with his fluid brushwork. His work is exhibited in more than 70 museums around the world, including the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Palace Museum, Beijing. He is also a writer on contemporary Chinese art.

7
Sun on the Lake
Arthur Garfield Dove
Oil, wax, and resin on canvas, 36" x 22" (w x h), 1938
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Museum notes edited:
Painted at Seneca Lake, New York in 1938, after living and working for a number of years in the artistic centers of New York and Paris, Dove returned to his childhood home of Geneva, New York. He found inspiration in the landscape around him, focusing particularly on the relationship between air, water, and light. Dove sought out formal and color relationships and his compositions often bordered on the completely abstract. However, in Sun on the Lake his subject is simplified but recognizable.
        Dove painted Sun on the Lake in the last year he lived in Geneva, New York, 1938. At this time, Dove based many of his compositions on small watercolors which he sketched out of doors. One, also called Sun on the Lake and also made in 1938, was likely used as a study for this oil. The images are closely related, but Dove used to advantage the qualities of each medium: in the watercolor, the white of the paper evokes the sun's rays dancing on the water's surface, whereas in the painting, Dove employed lighter blues to suggest light on the lake. See Dove's 9" x 6" (w x h) Gouache study for Sun on the Lake at the Boston MFA HERE.

8
Sun Setting, Denmark
William H. Johnson (1901-1970) American
Oil on burlap,25" x 21" (w x h), circa 1930
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Museum notes edited:
The swirling colors and blocky brushstrokes of Sun Setting recall the work of Vincent van Gogh, one of William H. Johnson's favorite painters. Johnson often viewed the scenes he wanted to paint through a concave fish lens that distorted the terrain into unnatural shapes and wobbly horizons. He used this optical effect as a starting point, and painted the countryside so that the land expressed the resilience and strength of Denmark's people.
        William H. Johnson (1901-1970) is considered a major American artist. Born in South Carolina to a poor African-American family, Johnson moved to New York at age seventeen. He produced hundreds of works in an eclectic career that spanned several decades as well as several continents. Although Johnson enjoyed a degree of success as an artist in the US and abroad, financial security remained elusive. It was not until very recently that his work received the attention it deserves. After his death, his entire life's work was almost disposed of to save storage fees, but it was rescued by friends at the last moment. Over a thousand paintings by Johnson are now part of the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Field Edge Color

Field Edge Color

in a field behind my home Shapleigh, Maine painted plein air on Feb 27, 2024, 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 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$150

The plein air setup in the snow.

Spring Colors Bared in February

Spring Colors Bared in February

in the back fields behind my home painted plein air on Feb 27, 2024, 14" x 11" (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 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.

$500

My Palette

The Plein Air Setup

The Plein Air View

Purple Two Visual Art Essay

Purple Two Visual Art Essay

1
Aallottaret / Spirits of the Waves
Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) Finnish
Oil on canvas, 57" x 46" (w x h), 1909
Private collection

Source Wiki and Sotheby's edited:
Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was a friend of Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) Finnish. Sibelius may have been inspired by Akseli 1909 painting to compose in 1914 The Oceanides (in Finnish: Aallottaret / Nymphs of the Waves). Sibelius' original working title was Rondeau der Wellen / Rondo of the Waves. The Finnish premiere of The Oceanides was on Sibelius's fiftieth birthday celebration, December 8, 1915 at the Great Hall of the University of Helsinki with Sibelius conducting the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.
        Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) was a Finnish painter, printmaker, illustrator, architect, designer and graphic artist. His work is considered an important aspect of the Finnish national identity. In 1894, he moved to Berlin to oversee the joint exhibition of his works with the works of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.
        In 1908 Gallen-Kallela and his family moved to Paris. However the city and the new direction art was being taken didn't feel hospitable. He painted Aallottaret / Wave Girls in 1909. In May 1909 they moved much further away to Nairobi in Kenya. He was the first Finnish artist to paint south of the Sahara. He painted over 150 expressionistic works there. They returned to Finland in February 1911.

2
Nude in Dappled Sunlight
Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939), American
Oil on canvas, 51" x 38" (w x h), 1915
Private collection

Source Wiki edited:
Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939) was an American Impressionist painter who spent most of his life as an expatriate in France. An influential member of the Giverny art colony, his paintings often concentrated on various effects of dappled sunlight. Frieseke discounted his formal art education in France, referring to himself as self-taught. He felt that he had learned more from his independent study of artists' work than he had from his academic studies, including his studies time at Academie Carmen under James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Though Whistler's influence is evident in Frieseke's early paintings, with close tonalities. Among his many awards he was decorated as a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1920, a rare recognition for an American painter. His art is in the collections of most major museums.

3
Hall of the Mountain King
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) American
Oil on canvas, 30" x 30" (w x h), circa 1908-1909
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,
Bentonville, Arkansas

Source Museums Notes edited:
Born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877, Marsden Hartley came back to Maine in the last six years of his career. Hartley's creative genius found root and eventually full maturity in Maine. The State was formative to his emergence onto the American and international art stages, as well as the location of the culminating achievement of his distinguished career. Marsden Hartley took a modern approach to landscape. He wasn't interested in depicting nature with scientific precision or reproducing a scene with great accuracy. He wanted to convey the energy and power of mountains by using a more abstract style. His thickly applied brushstrokes and bright palette of pinks, blues, yellows, oranges, and whites draw our attention to the paint itself. The format of the landscape is also inventive, as he chose a square composition rather than a conventional rectangular one.

4
Morning Haze
Leonard Ochtman (1854-1934) Dutch-American
Oil on canvas, 40" x 30" (w x h) 1909
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Source Wiki edited:
Leonard Ochtman (1854-1934) was a Dutch-American Impressionist painter, born in Zonnemaire, Netherlands 1854 and died at Cos Cob, Connecticut in 1934. His family moved to Albany, New York in 1866 twelve-years-old. Although he took classes at the Art Students League of New York in 1879, he was primarily self-taught, specializing in landscapes. Ochtman and his wife, accomplished American Impressionist painter Mina Fonda Ochtman (1862-1924), moved to Mianus, Connecticut in 1891, where they became founding members of the Cos Cob Art Colony. Other members of the colony included John Henry Twachtman and Childe Hassam. Ochtman was also a founding member of the Greenwich Society of Artists. Ochtman's daughter, Dorothy Ochtman (1892-1971), studied under her two artist parents and became an accomplished painter of still lifes.

5
La Route / The Road (in Cailhau, France)
Achille Lauge (1861-1944) French
Oil on canvas, 20" x 16" (w x h), 1893
Christies 2017 British auction:
$1,024,000 USD (809,000 GBP)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Source various edited:
Achille Lauge was a French Neo-Impressionist painter known for his depictions of light-filled landscapes. He was born to a farming family on in 1861 in Arzens, France. Achille began his studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Paul Laurens. During his studies, he was particularly influenced by the paintings of Paul Signac, Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro. When his father died he settled where he grew up Cailhau, choosing to lead a simple painting life in contact with nature. He continued exploring pointillism. His orientation toward a new way of painting, associated with a poetry of his own, gives him the dimension of a national artist.

6
Folded Rocks, Dunmanus Bay (Ireland)
Elizabeth O'Reilly (1957- ) Irish
Oil on panel, 15" x 10" (w x h), 2013
Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, Maine

Source artist's website:
Irish-born, but Brooklyn based since 1986, Elizabeth O'Reilly received a B. Ed. from the National University of Ireland and a M.F.A. from Brooklyn College, New York. She has participated in residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation, Ireland, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming and the Ragdale Foundation, Illinois. She's taught at colleges in New York City, including Parsons School of Design, Brooklyn College, and Pratt Institute, and at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Maine. She also taught watercolor and collage at The National Academy School. She showed at the Caldbeck gallery in Rockland, in the summer of 2020 with Lois Dodd. O'Reilly's work is found in collections including the State Department, Washington D.C.; The Office of Public Works, Ireland; the Memphis Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee; and the Ogunquit Museum in Ogunquit, Maine. O'Reilly is represented by the George Billis gallery in Chelsea, NY, and the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland Maine. A documentary on her work, "Ealaiontoir That Saile" (An Artist Abroad) was shown on Irish television in 2002. Her website is HERE.

7
Untitled (Purple Petunia)
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) American
Oil on canvas board, 7" x 7" (w x h), 1925
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Source Wiki edited:
This was painted in 1925, the year after she married Alfred Steiglitz. Prior to her marriage to Stieglitz, O'Keeffe's drawings and paintings were frequently abstract, although she began to expand her visual vocabulary from 1924 onward to include more representational imagery "usually taken from nature and often painted in series". She painted her first large-scale flower painting, Petunia, No. 2, in 1924 and it was first exhibited in 1925. Then, in 1925 she moved into a 30th floor apartment in New York's Shelton Hotel. She began a series of paintings of the New York skyscrapers and skyline.

8
Abstract
Sophie Harpe (1895-1981) American, born in Canada
Oil on canvas, 30" x 24" (w x h), circa 1950
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California

Source Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California edited:
Sophie Elaine Harpe (1895-1981) is known for Abstraction, modernist-leaning landscape and figure painting. Born in Quebec, Canada in 1895, in 1897, the family immigrated from Canada to the United States, where they settled in New Jersey, and in 1905 they became naturalized citizens. She graduated from the New York School of Applied Design for Women and pursued further study in the field of architecture at Columbia University.
        In 1918, she moved to California, initially to Berkeley, where she continued her work in the design field. From Berkeley she traveled to Europe, where she studied both design and fine arts at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts and L'Academie Julian in Paris, France. She then returned to California and settled in Los Angeles, where she worked as an art instructor at the Heart College, establishing the school's first art department. During her residency in Los Angeles, she designed sets for the motion picture industry, concert and theater venues, and, most notably, the Hollywood Bowl.
        In the mid-1930s, returning to Northern California, she obtained a master of fine arts degree from Stanford University and was appointed to the school's faculty. In addition to her work at Stanford, she was known for the independent classes she taught in design and interior decoration. In 1939, she left Stanford for a position as art instructor and department chair at Monterey Union High School. After she retired in 1960, she continued to paint, design, and exhibit her work around the Bay Area. In 1981 she passed away in Carmel, California at 86-years-old. She was a member of the Hollywood Art Association and the Carmel Art Association.