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.