Fall Sky Space Above

Fall Sky Space Above

An oil painting with the autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 27, 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.
$450

Fall Sky Space Study 3

Fall Sky Space Study 3

with the autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 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

Fall Foliage Art by Noted Artists

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Fall Foliage Art by
Noted Artists
Carl Sprinchorn, Wolf Kahn, Alma Thomas,
Werner Drewes, Tom Thomson,
Maurice de Vlaminck, and
Georgia O'Keeffe

Five works in art museums, one in a private collection, and one auctioned at Christies, Nov 8, 2022, for $15,275,000 USD after an estimate of $4,000,000 – $6,000,000 USD Note: The artist, deceased 36 years previously, of course realized none of the this money. Details below...

1
Gloria October, Shin Pond, Maine
Carl Sprinchorn, (1887-1971), American (born in Sweden)
Oil on canvas, 34" x 26" (w x h), 1946
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine

I can look at this painting for hours, a favorite of mine.

Carl Sprinchorn made his first visit from Manhattan to north-central Maine in 1910. It was at the invitation a family friend to visit Monson, where there was a small community of Swedish immigrants. In the winter Monson was home to camps of loggers. He return to visit Monson and other locales in the North Maine Woods over the next thirty years. He spent most of his time there between 1942 and 1952. Sprinchorn's paintings, drawings, and watercolors from the Maine woods became his most popular works.

2
Green, Orange and Gray
Wolf Kahn (1927-2020), American (born in Germany)
Pastel on paper, 1997
Private Collection
Wolf Kahn was a resident of New York City, but during the summer and autumn, lived at a farm he and his wife, painter Emily Mason, bought in 1968 in West Brattleboro, Vermont. Maine's coastline interested him during vacations to Deer Isle Maine with its visual effects. In the late 1960s the coastal foggy conditions influenced a shift in his painting. Years of his monochromatic work with varying tonalities reformed to intense color. Kahn reminisced, "I began to let the color come through on my canvases . . . my pastels were always intense, and finally my painting caught up with them."

3
Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze
Alma Thomas (1891-1978), American
Acrylic on canvas, 50" x 40" (w x h), 1973
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Alma Thomas, an African-American artist and teacher, lived and worked in Washington, D.C.. She's recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century, best known for exuberant, colorful, abstract paintings created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School. In 2021, years after her passing, a museum sold a Thomas painting for $2.8 million.

4
Sunlit Forest (Autumn Forest)
Werner Drewes (1899- 1985), American (Born German/Poland)
Color Woodcut,
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Werner Drewes, a painter, printmaker, and art teacher, is one of the founding fathers of American abstraction. He was one of the first artists to introduce concepts of the Bauhaus school within the US. In addition to oil painting and teaching, he was a prolific printmaker. Drewes produced at least 732 fine prints, including 269 etchings and dry-points, 30 lithographs, 14 cello-prints, a lone silkscreen, and 418 woodcuts, of which 255 were in color, the one above a woodcut example.

5
The Pool
Tom Thomson (1877-1917), Canadian
Oil on canvas, 32" x 30" (w x h), 1915-1916
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

Tom Thomson, during his brief 40 year life, produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas, including the one above. Although he died before the formal establishment of the Canadian Group of Seven, Thomson is often considered an unofficial member and his art is exhibited with the Group's art. He enjoyed and painted in the outdoors, his last few years in the wilds of Algonquin Park, a provincial park Ontario, Canada, where this painting above was painted.

6
Autumn Landscape
Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), French
Oil on canvas, 22" x 18" (w x h), circa 1905
MoMA, Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Maurice de Vlaminck, a French painter, is one of the principal figures in the 1904-1908 Fauve movement, united in their use of intense color. He was one of the Fauves at the controversial 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition. In his landscape paintings at this time he ignored the details, the landscape expressing mood through color and brushwork, like this one above.

7
Autumn Leaf II
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American
Oil on canvas, 21"x 32" (w x h), 1927
The Paul G. Allen Collection
Christies NY Auction Nov 2022,
Estimate: $4,000,000 - $6,000,000 USD, Sold: $15,275,000 USD

Georgia O'Keeffe painted the art above in 1927, the year same year the Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of her work. This was two years before O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico. She and Alfred Stieglitz, married in 1924, lived primarily in New York City but spent their summers at his father's family estate, Oaklawn, in Lake George in upstate New York, likely where this art was painted or inspired.

On November 9, 2022, achieving $1.5 billion in sales in a single evening, "Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection" was the biggest art sale in auction history. Pursuant to Mr. Allen's wishes, the estate dedicated all proceeds from these sales to philanthropy. Christies, with its commission, is not a philanthropy. The paintings are in private collections, investments for a few, and not shared in museums where all could enjoy this fine art. See this fabulous collection as an online flip book HERE.

A Murder of Rocks to Crow About

A Murder of Rocks to Crow About

on the far side of Peaks Island at Picnic Point, Portland, Maine, painted plein air October 30, 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.
$150

Breeze on the Piscataqua

Breeze on the Piscataqua

Gundalow Piscataqua sailing on the Piscataqua River between Kittery, ME and Portsmouth, NH at 5:00 pm October 7, 2022, painted October 21, 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 Sails Sailing Essay

Watercolor Sails Sailing
How noted watercolor artists paint sailboats.

All of these watercolor artists approach their paintings differently from my watercolor.

Can you spot what's different? (Answer below)

1
Three Scudding Sailboats
Charles Sydney Hopkinson (1869-1962), American
Watercolor on paper, circa 1935-1940
Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA

Charles Sydney Hopkinson (1869-1962) was an American portrait painter and landscape watercolorist. He maintained a studio in the Fenway Studios building in Boston from 1906 to 1962. He was one of the most successful and sought after portrait painters in America during the first half of the 20th century. He was the house portraitist at Harvard University. Among his sitters were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Calvin Coolidge, Lewis Perry and John Masefield. In the course of his 60 year career he created more than 700 portraits including two of United States presidents, four of Supreme Court Justices and 65 of university presidents, deans and professors. He was also part of the team of artists selected by the National Art Committee in 1919 to paint portraits of the delegates to the Versailles Peace Conference.

Watercolor was a medium that Hopkinson experimented with and enjoyed throughout his career. Working outdoors with rapid, broken brushstrokes, Hopkinson's watercolors are direct and spontaneous, fresh reactions to the scene around him. While his compositions can seem deceptively simple, each was thoughtfully conceived and painted with careful attention to depth and perspective.

2
Southend - The Pleasure Yacht
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), American
Watercolor on paper,  14" x 17" (w x h), circa 1882-1884
Smithsonian national Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler studied in Paris and eventually moved to London. He learned watercolor technique as a boy and occasionally used it for preparatory studies early in his career, says Lee Glazer, director of the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College. "But despite the tremendous popularity of watercolor in the British art world, and Whistler's ultimate desire for success within that art world, he never seriously embraced watercolor until the 1880s."

That's when he painted this and others in the Southend of London, historically a rural village at the south of the parish of Lewisham, Kent. During the time Whistler painted his 1880s watercolors it remained undeveloped until after the First World War. It's now a residential suburb, with some large retail stores, within the built-up area of London.

3
Two Sailboats
Winslow Homer  (1836–1910)
Watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper, 17" x 8" (w x h), 1880
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA

Homer's skill as a watercolor painter grew during his second long sojourn in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1880, when his work became breathtakingly fluid and impressionistic. Exploiting the texture of the paper and the range of transparency in his pigments, Homer used techniques like scraping to add highlights to his boldly simplified compositions.

4
Racing Sails
Milton Avery (1885-1965), American
Watercolor, transparent and opaque, and graphite paper,
35" x 23" (w x h), 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

"He was, without question, our greatest colorist. ... Among his European contemporaries, only Matisse—to whose art he owed much, of course—produced a greater achievement in this respect." - Art critic Hilton Kramer

5
A Boat near Santa Marta, Venice
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), British
Watercolor on paper, 13" x 9" (w x h), 1840
Tate Museum, London, England

In August 1840 Turner crossed the Channel to Rotterdam, and travelled up the Rhine on what was to be his last journey to Italy, the country that had inspired so much of his work. His destination was Venice, where he arrived on August 20th. Venice was then a city of crumbling palaces, fitting Turner's typically Romantic fascination with the decline of once great civilizations. He spent two weeks in the city, staying at the Hotel Europa. He made an extensive series of richly colored watercolors of every part of this serene city. They show Venice under a variety of atmospheric conditions, from the haziness of dawn to the crisp sunlight of midday, and finally the coloring of twilight and the setting sun.

Editor and critic Charles Lewis Hind wrote that it showed "the way [Turner] worked, when painting for his own pleasure, not for exhibition – green water, violet hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny sail – lovely."

6
Venice
George Elbert Burr (1859-1939) American
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 9" x 6" (w x h), 1900
Smithsonian American Art Museum

George Elbert Burr is considered one of the finest of the early 20th-century American etchers. His prints are in a number of prominent collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Museum, the French National Print Collection, Luxembourg Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona. and the Congressional Library in Washington, D.C.

7
Sailboat
Edward Hopper (1882-1967), American
Watercolor and graphite on paper,
4" x 5" (w x h), circa 1900
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Edward Hopper graduated from Nyack High School in 1899. The next year he painted this sailboat. In school he'd dreamed of being a naval architect, but after graduation he declared his intention to follow an art career. Hopper's parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income. In developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Hopper was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He later said, "I admire him greatly...I read him over and over again."

Hopper began art studies with a correspondence course in 1899. Soon he transferred to the New York School of Art and Design, the forerunner of Parsons School of Design. There he studied for six years.

8
Idle Sails
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 21" x 14" (w x h), 1913
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Sargent painted more than 2,000 watercolors, from the English countryside to Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Each destination offered pictorial stimulation and treasure. Even at his leisure, in escaping the pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless intensity, often painting from morning until night. In the last decade of his life (1915-1925), he produced many watercolors in Maine, Florida, and in the American West, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.

His late works suggest Sargent painting purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and fountains. This watercolor, Idle Sails, was inherited by his sisters, Mrs. Francis Ormond (Violet Sargent) donating it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art upon in 1950.

Sargent's first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was in 1905 in London. In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1927 Evan Charteris wrote: "To live with Sargent's watercolors is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, the refluent shade and the ambient ardors of the noon."

Answer:
All of these watercolor artists painted their sailboats from afar. They painted as observers and not participants of sailing. None of them painted their watercolors from the perspective of being aboard a sailboat, as I did. Surprisingly, few artists choose the sailing perspective from aboard a sailboat.

Steady on the Piscataqua

Steady on the Piscataqua

Captain at the helm on the Gundalow Piscataqua sailing on the Piscataqua River between Kittery, ME and Portsmouth, NH, October, 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

-or fundraising through the Gundalow Company, 60 Marcy Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801.

Catching the Sun

Catching the Sun

Lateen gundalow sailing on the Piscataqua River Kittery, ME and Portsmouth, NH at 5:00 pm October 7, 2022, painted October 21, 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

-or fundraising through the Gundalow Company, 60 Marcy Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801.

Piscataqua on the Piscataqua

Piscataqua on the Piscataqua

Lateen gundalow sailing between Kittery, ME and Portsmouth, NH October 7, 2022, painted October 21, 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

-or fundraising through the Gundalow Company, 60 Marcy Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801.

Stóri Dímon in Markarfljót 1

Stóri Dímon in Markarfljót Study 1

in Iceland on September 1, 2022, painted September 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.
$175 - SOLD

Stóri Dímon in Markarfljót 2

Stóri Dímon in Markarfljót Study 2

in Iceland on September 1, 2022, painted September 25, 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

Stóri Dímon in Markarfljót

Art of Grandfather and Grandson with poem

Stóri Dímon in Markarfljót Study 3

in Iceland on September 1, 2022, painted September 25, 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 - Private Collection

1
Stóri Dímon in Markarfljót Monochrome
(Grandson) Finn McMillan (Oct 8, 2002 - ), American-Swiss
Watercolor on paper, 7" x 5" (w x h)
Private Collection

Full Color as Monochrome

2
Finn's desire was to paint this in black and white as a watercolor. I showed him how to paint this as in black and white, while using full color, and he did. He used Burnt Sienna and French Ultramarine together to paint warm blacks and Paynes Gray Bluish and Quinacridone Purple to paint cool blacks, which are subtly seen in the art.

3
Finn walking by Stóri Dímon on the flat black river valley before painting.

Photo of Stóri Dímon in the wide Markarfljót river valley on September 1, 2022.

4
Colors Still There
by Bruce McMillan

On a wide, flat plain
of stone black lava,
a peak withstood

a glacial till stream
through time, to stand tall
in sun, all good.

We discover it
again, again, with
the likelihood

that painters could sketch
and paint this icon,
as many would,

generations of
painters, in colors
they understood.

All text, photos and art © 2022 Bruce McMillan

Hurricane Earl Surfs Marginal Way

Hurricane Earl
Surfs Marginal Way

painted at the Perkins Cove Plein Air Event, in Ogunquit, Maine on September 10, 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

The morning plein air setup

High Tide Perkins Cove

High Tide Perkins Cove

Painted at the Perkins Cove Plein Air Event, in Ogunquit, Maine on September 10, 2022 14" x 11" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough watercolor paper, framed, $500 USD for sale at my art blog, theartofbruce.blogspot.com

Bruce McMillan, sketching and painting by a bush on the south side of Perkins Cove during the 2nd Annual Perkins Cove, Ogunquit, Maine Plein Air Event on Saturday September 10, 2022, photo by the event's photographer.

The scene that day while painting.

Watercolor Artists...Red...Essay

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Watercolor Artists

Approach Red Buildings
Visual Essay

featuring watercolors of
Richard Sargent, Georgina Klitgaard,
Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth,
Thomas Hart Benton, and
William Traylor

1
Red House
Richard Sargent (1911-1978) American
Watercolor on paper, 10" x 14" (w x h)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Richard Sargent, born in Moline, Illinois in 1911, received his art education at the Corcoran School of Art and the Philips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. He also worked with Ben Shahn. Sargent painted many cover paintings for The Saturday Evening Post. His illustration works are feature good humor and insight into human frailties. He also illustrated for Fortune, Woman’s Day, American Magazine, Photoplay, and Collier’s magazine. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators in New York, and for many years, lived and painted in Spain.

2
Ice House, Nantucket
Georgina Klitgaard (1889/1893-1977) American
Watercolor, graphite and charcoal on paper, 20" x 14" (w x h), 1930
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Georgina Klitgaard (born Berrian), an American artist, was known for panoramic landscape paintings of scenic New York from a bird's-eye view perspective. Her work was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, on April 14, 1929, and in The Art Digest, on November 1, 1929. She painted three murals in United States Post Offices during the Great Depression. She graduated from Barnard College, and also studied art at the National Academy of Design.

3
Cobb's Barns and Distant Houses
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 30" x 22" (w x h), 1931
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Edward Hopper was renting Burly Cobb's house when this was painted during the Depression. It's in South Truro, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Hopper sold 30 paintings in 1931, including 13 watercolors. The following year he participated in the first Whitney Annual, and he continued to exhibit in every annual at the museum for the rest of his life. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first large-scale retrospective.

4
Houses with Red
Charles Demuth (1883-1935) American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 14" x 10" (w x h), 1917
The MET Art Museum, New York, New York

Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was one of the leading artists during the American Modernism era. He was distinguished for intimate watercolors and cubic architectural paintings. Demuth studied art at Académie Julian in Paris, where he was welcomed into the avant-garde art scene and met other American Cubism artists like Marsden Hartley. He illustrated plays and novels such as Émile Zola's Nana. Demuth later employed a cubist technique by painting industrial factories with complex structural planes, leading him to becoming a pioneer for the Precisionist movement.

5
House in Cubist Landscape
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) American
Watercolor and charcoal on paper, mounted on board,
8" x 12" (w x h), circa 1915-1920
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Thomas Hart Benton was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His work is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, the region in which he was born and which he called home for most of his life. He also studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there. He summered for 50 years on Martha's Vineyard.

6
Man in Blue House with Rooster
Bill Traylor (1853-1949) American
Opaque watercolor and graphite pencil on board,
12" x 16" (w x h), circa 1939-42
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

William Traylor was an African-American self-taught artist from Lowndes County, Alabama. Born into slavery in 1853, Traylor spent the majority of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper. It was only after 1939, following his move to Montgomery, Alabama, that Traylor began to draw. At the age of 85, he took up a pencil and a scrap of cardboard to document his recollections and observations. From 1939 to 1942, while working on the sidewalks of Montgomery, he produced nearly 1,500 pieces of art.  Traylor now holds a central position in the fields of self-taught-artists and modern art.

Morning Tide Marginal Way

Morning Tide Marginal Way

with the rising sun over surf from Hurricane Earl, painted at the Perkins Cove Plein Air Event, on September 10, 2022 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 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$500

Hazy warm morning on Marginal Way, Ogunquit, Maine for painting at the 2nd Annual Perkins Cove Plein Air Painting Event

The plein air setup

Sea and Sun 6 Artists Essay

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Watercolor Sea and Sun
by Six Artists Essay
Fairfield Porter, Joseph Mallord William Turner,
Violet Oakley, Martin Mower, John Marin,
and Wendy Klemperer

How watercolor artists
paint a body of water and sun
while looking directly into the sun
during sunrise.

1
Sunrise
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) American
Watercolor and graphite on paper,
22" x 30" (w x h), circa 1974-1975

From Hirschl and Adler Gallery:
Fairfield Porter did his best work during the last fifteen years of his life. His style loosened somewhat, and he incorporated more abstract forms and colors and recorded a freer and more immediate impression of his subjects. In his lifelong pursuit of realistic, non-abstract subjects, however, Porter was far ahead of his time, particularly in painting portraits of his family and friends, a genre that wasn't taken seriously by the art world until years later.

Sunrise is one of three studies done in preparation for Porter's color lithograph Sunrise. It's an impressionistic view of the sea and sky taken from the beach near Porter's Southampton home.

2
Sunrise: Whiting Fishing at Margate
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) English
Watercolor on paper, 20" x 15" (w x h), 1822
Tate Museum, London, UK

Tate catalogue (edited):
"Although described by Finberg as a sunset, this atmospheric color of the sun low over the sea has been tentatively linked by Eric Shanes to the 1822 watercolor Sunrise, Whiting Fishing at Margate (private collection). The sun in the finished composition is noticeably off-center to the left, clear of the cliffs occupying the right-hand half of the horizon, and Turner seems to be experimenting with a variation in asymmetrical placement."

3
Study of Sun and its Reflection on Lake George
Violet Oakley (1874-1961)-American
Watercolor on paper
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Gift of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2015

From Woodmere Art Museum (edited):
Violet Oakley (1874-1961), during the American Renaissance, a period of cultural renewal at the turn of the twentieth century, was the most renowned woman in the cultural life of the country, achieving international fame when she was commissioned to create a monumental series of murals in the new Pennsylvania State Capitol. The Philadelphia Public Ledger asserted that "the history of art in America probably records no greater distinction awarded to a woman than the selection of Miss Oakley to perform so important a work."

At a time when women artists usually concentrated on domestic themes, a prominent art critic observed that... "[Oakley's] vision of life moved outward in ever-widening circles, embracing the striving of all men and women..."

Oakley, a role model for aspiring female professionals for two decades before women won the right to vote, supported higher education for women by designing works of art for Bryn Mawr College, Vassar College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She was the second woman appointed to the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In her later years she fashioned a role for herself as an activist promoting gender and racial equality, international government, and world peace. She drew portraits of the delegates to the League of Nations and the United Nations. Admired as a public intellectual as well as an artist, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in Literature from Delaware College in 1918, and an honorary doctorate in Law from Drexel University in 1948.

4
Sun Spots (Stonington, Maine)
John Marin (1870-1953) American
Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 20" x 17" (w x h), 1920
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

From John Marin Part 1, A Stylistic Analysis by Sheldon Reich, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1970 (edited):
John Marin spent the summer of 1920 in Stonington... The motif of the sun had always obsessed Marin... [The sun spots] are like a the after-image caused by staring into too long into a brilliant sun... Stylistically, the most significant factors in Sun Spots are a clarity and simplicity of composition... Sun Spots... a Maine landscape, is a relatively abstract statement by Marin.

5
Nahant Shore /
Seascape, Mahomet Shore (Massachusetts)
Martin Mower (1870-1960) American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 7" x 5" (w x h), circa 1896
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA

Martin Mower, born in Lynn Massachusetts, painted in oil and watercolor and pastel. He sketched drawings, as well as worked in stained glass and photography. He was a friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner, who included nine Martin Mower paintings and drawings in her Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Also included in the ISG displays is some of their correspondence from 1923 with a mention of Martin's wife. "Dearest Mrs. Gardner, Evelyn and I are immeasurably cheered and delighted by the gift from you..." Martin and his wife, Evelyn Mower, lived at 6 Craigie Circle, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died at 90-years-old in Vancouver, British, Columbia, Canada.

6
The Ship, Seascape #4
Wendy Klemperer (1958- ) American
Watercolor on paper, 2019

Wendy Klemperer earned a bachelor's in biochemistry at Harvard before moving to NYC to pursue art full time, earning a B.F.A. in sculpture at Pratt Institute in 1983. She's an accomplished metal sculptor.

In 2019, she was an artist at sea with a scientific research team at the University of New Hampshire. Her three-week artist residency at sea led to pencil sketches of the crew members highlighting the collaborative nature of scientific research, and her watercolors of the sea and ocean life celebrated the scientific and experiential rewards of conducting environmental research outdoors. Her watercolors from her time aboard the ship were displayed at the UNH Museum of Art.

Wendy Klemperer was born in 1958 in Boston, and raised in Cambridge and Watertown. She explored her passion for animals and nature during summers spent at her grandmother's country house in New Hampshire. Her sculptures are exhibited across the United States. While doing this essay I realized I've driven by a sculpture of hers on the way to Maine Audubon, and osprey and nest on Martin's Point Bridge in Falmouth, Maine. Wendy Klemperer lives in Brooklyn, NY and Nelson, NH.

Wendy Klemperer's website is HERE.