The Art of Yellow Tulips Essay

The Art of Yellow Tulips
Visual Essay
How eight artists paint spring's yellow tulips
Four Men  /  Four Women

1
Yellow Tulip
Hunt Slonem (1951- ) American
Oil on wood, 8" x 10" (w x h), 2023
For sale: $6,500 USD

Source: Wiki edited
Hunt Slonem was born in Kittery, Maine in 1951, the oldest of four children, his father, a Navy officer and his mother, a homemaker and volunteer. The military family moved every two to three years. Slonem studied at Tulane University, New Orleans and, later, at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine, where he was exposed to artists including Alice Neel and Alex Katz. Today, his work sells for five figures and can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bahrain National Museum, Manama, Bahrain and the Guilin Art Museum, Guilin, China among others.

2
Tulips, Creamer, and Bottles
Christine Lafuente (1968- ) American
Oil on linen, 16" x 12" (w x h), 2017

Source: Wiki edited
Christine Lafuente (1968- ) is an American painter, born in Poughkeepsie, New York, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and teaches workshops on Mount Desert Island, Maine in the summer. She is known for her still lifes and landscapes painted in one sitting. Lafuente' plein air works focus on cityscapes and seascapes.
        Lafuente holds an AB in English from Bryn Mawr College (1991), a Certificate in Painting and Printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (circa 1990s), and an MFA from Brooklyn College (2003). She's had thirty-five solo shows and been honored with a Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal for Achievement in Visual Arts, an Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a Stobart Foundation Grant.
        Lafuente muses, "I have discovered the act of seeing to be itself an aesthetic or poetic act." Her website is HERE.

3
Yellow Tulip
Ivan Kolisnyk (1961-) Ukrainian
Oil on canvas, 12" x16" (w x h)

Source: Saatchi edited
Ivan Kolisnyk, born in 1961 in Ukraine, graduated from Kyiv Polytechnic University in 1984. He lives and paints, a prolific artist, in Cherkasy, Ukraine. His art can be seen on Saatchi HERE.

4
Yellow Tulip #18
Donald Sultan (1951- ) American
Oil and tar on paper, 20" x 20" (w x h), 1980
For sale: $60,000 USD

Source: Wiki edited
Donald K. Sultan (1951- ) from Asheville, North Carolina, is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. With his father's encouragement, Sultan pursued art professionally, earning a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973 and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975. While still in school, Sultan grew dissatisfied with traditional methods of painting and began experimenting in technique, surface, and media, which eventually led him to use industrial tools and materials. He's well known for large-scale still life paintings and the use of tar, enamel, spackle and vinyl tiles. He exhibits internationally in museums and galleries, his works included in museum collections all over the world. A successful honored artist, he lives and works in Tribeca, New York City, Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York and Paris, an apartment on the fashionable Rue Marbeuf, just off the Champs Elysee.

5
Yellow Tulips
Tatyana Ausheva (1966- ) German
Acrylic on Canvas, 16" x 16" (w x h), 2022
$680 USD

Source: Singulart edited
Tatyana Ausheva (1966- ) is a painter and draftsman based in Germany, who exhibits nationally. Her art subjects include flowers and figures. Ausheva cites color as playing a vital role in her pieces, layering and often scraping.

6
Yellow Tulips
Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939)
Oil on canvas, 32" x 32" (w x h), circa 1911-1912
Christies 2024 auction estimate: $300,000-500,000 USD

Source: Wiki and Christie's, 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.
        In Yellow Tulips, Frieseke ingeniously paints the portrait, likely of his wife, as a reflection in a mirror. He shares an intimate moment, as she admires her elaborate shawl. Flowers are rendered on the mantle, reflected in the mirror in the middle distance on the table and in the far distance beyond his sitter.
        Frieseke summarized this particular interest in 1914, saying: "My one idea is to reproduce flowers in sunlight. One should never forget that seeing and producing an effect of nature is not a matter of intellect but of feeling. The effect of impressionism in general has been to open the eyes of the public to see not only sun and light, but the realization that there are new truths in nature."
        He received many awards including two gold medals from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1920 and he also won the popular prize, decided by artists as well as the viewing public. Frieseke was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design (ANA) in 1912, and an Academician (NA) in 1914. He was decorated as a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1920, a rare recognition for an American painter.

7
Botanical Melange 3
Carol Mothner (1943- ) American
Oil on panel, 7" x 7"

Source: Lew Allen Galleries, Mutual Art, ArtNet, edited
Carol Mothner (1943- ), born in New York, paints in detail the ethereal qualities of her subjects in small scale. Carol Mothner studied at the Art Students League New York, NY, the Brooklyn Museum School of Art New York, NY, the Skowhegan School of Painting, Madison, Maine, the School of the Visual Arts New York, NY, and Brooklyn College New York, NY.
        Mothner's subjects include interiors, floral still lifes, landscapes, and portraits, with achieving a reputation for her floral work. Originally an abstract painter, Mothner broke away from her training to pursue realist painting, inspired by Dutch and Flemish masters. She switched from oil painting to tempera for greater accuracy in painting fine lines and also uses graphite and acrylic paint. She's also well known for her egg tempera depictions of small natural objects, especially birds' nests and eggs, which she arranges in circles or grids.
        Mothner lived and worked in the Southwest for more than 50 years, moving to Santa Fe in 1971. Since the early 1980s, Mothner's work has been represented in the collections of museums as well as corporate and private collections. Since 2016 the record price for her art at auction is $4,500 USD for the painting Netherlandish Bouquet, New Orleans Auction Galleries, 2016.

8
Tulips in Spring Sunshine
Alma Thomas (1891-1978) American
Acrylic on canvas, 26" x 30" (w x h), 1969
Christies 2024 auction estimate: $800,000-1,200,000 USD

Source: Wiki and Christie's, edited
Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978) was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C. She's now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century, best known for the exuberant, colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington D.C.'s Shaw Junior High School.
        Having first transitioned into abstraction in the 1950s, Tulips in Spring Sunshine epitomizes her late-in-life stylistic developments that brought her immediate acclaim and recognition. Three years after this was painted, Thomas received a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the first afforded to a Black female artist. Tulips in Spring Sunshine intertwines dashes of energetic colors, invoking the visceral experience of nature re-awakening in the Springtime. The prismatic swaths of paint are further enlivened by the alternating and pulsating columns of color, reminiscent of the rows of blossoming bulbs in a tulip field, as suggested by the work's title. These painterly gestures burst with passion, blooming across the canvas in various shapes that echo the earthly forms Thomas perceived in nature.