Month: February 2015

Dorothy Hardy

Mabel Dorothy Hardy, “Odin and Ferris”, 1909, Lithograph

This image is one of her three illustrations from “Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sages” written by H. A. Guerber and published by George G, Harrap and Company, London, a now defunct publisher of high quality illustrated books.

Born in 1868, Mabel Dorothy Hardy was an illustrator who was known for her popular equestrian prints. She also did a series of black and white animal illustrations for Strand Magazine which appearred in  their first issue of January 1891. Dorothy Hardy died in 1937.

Léopold Survage

Léopold Survage, “Composition with the Cock with the Faces with the Hands”, Early 1900s, Watercolor, Location Unknown

Léopold Frédéric Léopoldowitsch Survage, known as Léopold Survage, was a French painter of Russian-Danish-finnish descent born in Finland. In 1901 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Here hs was introduced to the collections of modernist painters Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Survage exhibited in 1910 with the Jack of Diamonds avant-garde group in Moscow. The first showing of his work in France was at the  1911 Salon d’Automne, an annual exhibition in Paris.

In 1913, Survage produced abstract compositions using color and movement to evoke a type of musical sensation. Entitled Rythmes colorés, he planned to animate these illustrations by means of film to form “symphonies en couleur”. He saw these abstract images as flowing together, but he exhibited the ink wash drawings separately at the 1913 Salon d’Automne and the 1914 Salon des Indépendents

Survage moved after 1917 to Nice and, over the next eight years, produced highly structured oils and works on paper linked together by a series of leitmotifs. These  repeating groups of symbolic elements, such as man, sea, building, flower, window, curtain, and bird, weere arranged as if they were protagonists in a series of moving images.

Toward the end of the 1930s, as a result of his contact with surrealist painter André Masson, Survage became increasingly charmed by symbols and mysticism. The curvilinear forms that had previously dominated his compositions came, once again, under the control of geometric structure.

Huo Beiren

 

Hou Beiren, “Mountain Temple”, 2016, Ink and Color on Paper, 33 x 59 Inches, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, California

Hou Beiren was born in 1917 in Liaoning Province.  A painter, scholar, author and poet who studied painting with Huang Binghong and Zheng Shiqiao, Hou Beiren’s art works embody the traditional Chinese literati spirit.  Yet, Hou Beiren has adapted his style to today’s contemporary world. Hou Beiren is considered one of China’s last living master literati artists.  His poetry pays homage to literati artists and poets of Chinese history and redefines the ancient form of literati painting style.

While in China, Hou Beiren was already a prolific writer. When Hou Beiren left China in 1949 and moved to Hong Kong for seven years, in addition to his artistic pursuits, he became one of the active leaders in the development of Hong Kong’s modern Chinese literature movement. He published several books and many articles under the names Hou Beiren (侯北人), Duan Muqing (端木青) and Hou Haiyu (侯海域). Hong Kong is also significant historically as the city where Hou Beiren and Zhang Daqian began their decades-long conversation, discovery and individual style development of “splash color ink” in Chinese painting.

As a resident of California since 1956, Hou Beiren made many trips to Yosemite Valley and other local natural sites for inspiration. There, he began to incorporate new innovations such as “wild cursive” (狂草) brush strokes, contemporary abstract structures, and a vibrant, contemporary color pallet.

The Ghost Ship

Artist Unknown, (The Ghost Ship), Computer Graphics, Film Gif

“She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars.”

― Valerie Martin, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

Joseph Radoccia

Four Paintings by Joseph Radoccia

Joseph Radoccia is a painter, whose body of works have explored his interest in various forms of intimacy. Born in the small town of Hornell, NY, Radoccia was artistically inclined since childhood and was always excited by the prospect of drawing  He went on to hone his artistic ability, receiving his BFA in Graphic Design from Buffalo State in 1982 and his MFA in Painting from the University at Buffalo in 1985. In that year, Radoccia was featured in a group exhibition at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. Future exhibitions soon followed at Hallwalls and the Burchfield Penney Art Center

Deciding to pursue a professional career as a painter, Radoccia moved to Brooklyn, NY in the late 1980s. Surrounded by the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic, particularly to the LGBTQ community, Radoccia began to express his feelings, through his paintings and sculptures, on the raising levels of fear and prejudice he was witnessing and to make a statement on the importance of public awareness.

Despite the success of this work within the art community, Radoccia felt it was starting to negatively impact him and perpetuate the negative tropes that already existed surrounding AIDS. He returned to his original love of painting, and began to explore themes of identity, love, fear and sexual expression. Many of these artistic explorations mirrored Radoccia’s own exploration into himself and his identity. He began exhibiting with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and some of his works remain in the gallery’s permanent collection.

Radoccia longed to make a home that mimicked the peace and serenity that he experienced on trips to Madagascar. In 2011 he moved to Beacon, NY, in the heart of Hudson Valley where he currently resides. He has now concentrated on portrait works, continuing to explore the themes of intimacy that has prevaded his entire body of work.

Images of Joseph Radoccia’s work and contact information can be found at the artist’s site located at: https://www.joeradoccia.com

Wilfredo Lam

Wilfredo Lam, “The Jungle”, 1942-1944, Gouache on Paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Wilfredo Lam was born in Sagua La Grande, Cuba, of mixed Chinese, European, Indian, and African descent. Strands of Afro-Caribbean religious practices such as Santería filtered into his upbringing and would come to greatly influence his art. In 1916, he moved to Havana, where he began sketching the tropical plants at the botanical garden. By 1923, Lam had completed his studies in painting. That same year, feeling a distaste for academia and a passion for painting out-of-doors and in the street, he moved to Spain.

In Spain, Lam experienced European artistic practices firsthand, working and studying with radical, nonconformist painters and absorbing early influences from the works of Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. He moved to Paris in 1938, where he met Pablo Picasso who became his friend and supporter, introducing him into his circle of Cubists and other avant-garde artists. In 1939, Lam met poet and founder of Surrealism André Breton and became associated with the Surrealist movement. Working mainly in gouache he began painting fantastical figures with fragmented, geometrical bodies, often with a combination of human and animal parts and faces resembling the African carvings.

Lam painted “The Jungle” during a flowering of interest in Afro-Cuban traditions by writers, artists, and intellectuals  Back home in Cuba and already immersed in African art, Lam began to frequent Santería ceremonies where Africans living in Cuba  overlaid their own traditions onto Catholicism, while they continued to practice their religions, such as Voodoun, in secret, hidden settings as the jungle that crowds Lam’s painting.

In “The Jungle”, Lam blends Afro-Cuban and African artistic and cultural traditions with the European modernist movements of Cubism and Surrealism. At nearly eight feet high by just over seven-and-a-half feet wide, this gouache on paper and canvas composition can feel immersive, or engulfing. Four part-human, part-animal figures, with exaggerated hands and feet and faces recalling African masks, stand side-by-side. In Cubist fashion, their bodies are fragmented into individual parts that do not seem to fit together logically. With their fantastic appearance, they seem as if they could have sprung from the artist’s dreams.

The figures seem to simultaneously emerge from and merge with a dense wall of vegetation composed of thick, banded stalks suggestive of the sugarcane that grew in the fields the slaves worked. The rightmost figure holds a pair of shears, a possible reference to harvesting, while the leftmost figure, with its horse-like features, could be seen to hint at one of the spirits in Afro-Cuban mysticism. Since Lam chose a palette of blues and greens, with touches of yellow and white, this could be read as a moonlit night scene, or as taking place during the day, under the cover of the deep shade of the jungle.

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent, “Mountain Stream”, 1912-1914, Watercolor and Graphite on Off-White Wove Paper, 34.8 x 53.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“Mountain Stream” is one of Sargent’s most dazzling images based on the theme of flowing water. This exhibition watercolor, which the artist sold to the Metropolitan Museum, differs from his many anonymous views of streams in its inclusion of a bather, which suggests a specific time and place. However, its precise setting cannot be identified; in the early 1910s, when this watercolor was probably made, Sargent painted in the Alps of France, Italy and Austria.