Year: 2015

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, “Pennsylvania Coal Town”, Oil on Canvas, 1947, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

In the early 1940s, American Realist painter Edward Hopper had a very productive period, in which he painted some of his most famous works, such as “Morning in a City” and “Nighthawks”. During the late 1940s, however, he suffered a period of relative inactivity.  By 1947 when he painted “Pennsylvania Coal Town”, his output had slowed. However, in the 1950s and early 1960s, despite faltering health and several surgeries, Hopper created several more major works, including the 1951 “First Row Orchestra” and the 1952 “Hotel by a Railroad”.

“Pennsylvania Coal Town” portrays a man, tending the yard outside of his house, holding a rake or similar tool. Apart from a plant with green foliage in a large vase, the yard appears bare. The man is staring at something we cannot see, a frequent occurrence in Hopper’s work. Many of his paintings depict people gazing at something unknown in the distance. The interior of the house’s front room can be seen through a large window, showing a lamp and a picture on the wall.

As with many of Hopper’s paintings, light plays an important role. The sunlight is shining directly on the man, and one side of the house, in contrast to the rest of the painting, which is shown in shadow. This gives the impression that it is, either, early morning or late evening. Typical of much of his work, this painting does not tell a story but is a location’s moment in time. It is left to the viewer to imagine what is happening here.

Another recurring motif, in Edward Hopper’s work, is loneliness. Many of his works feature a lone person staring out of a window, or sitting at a coffee table. In this painting the subject appears to be alone; there is no sign of life around him. Even the house does not appear welcoming. “Pennsylvania Coal Town” is a fine example of Hopper’s genius, depicting considerable information in a seemingly simple painting.

Hunting Season

Artist Unknown, (Hunting Season), Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs

This image is from the 1951 Looney Tunes cartoon “Rabbit Fire” starring Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. It was written by Michael Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones, as the first film in Jones’ “hunting trilogy”. It features the first feud between Daffy and Bugs. Released by Warner Brothers on May 19, 1951, it is considered among Chuck Jones’ most important works.

“Rabbit Fire” marked a change in typical animation for its use of dialogue gags rather than physical gags. In this cartoon, Mel Blanc showed his unique voice acting talent by making one character imitate another character’s voice, in this case, Daffy impersonating Bugs and vice versa.

Leonard Koscianski

Leonard Koscianski: Six Paintings

Leonard Koscianski was born in Cleveland, Ohio.  A student of R. Buckminster Fuller, and noted American painter Wayne Thiebaud, he received his Bachelor’s degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and his Master’s degree from the University of California, Davis.

An inspired painter, with an eerie, menacing vision, he has exhibited his much-acclaimed artwork throughout the United States and Europe.  He is represented by the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York, and the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago.  His artwork is to be found in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum, and the Chicago Art Institute.  It has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Art News, Art in America, and Art Forum.

Koscianski is a popular professor and speaker, and the recipient of numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Art’s Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship.  He lives and works in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Leonard Koscianski Contemporary Art website is located at: https://leonardkoscianski.com

Insert Image: Leonard Koscianski, “Summer in the City”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 106.7 x 66 cm, Private Collection

Franz Graf

 

Franz Graf, “Two Boys in a Boat on Lake Mark”, 1920, Oil on Canvas

Born in 1880 in Theresienstadt, Germany, Franz Graf spent his childhood in Leitmeritz, a town on the Elbe River in the northern part of the Czech Republic. He studied from 1889 at the Munich Academy with the painter Nikolaus Gysis, a leading representative of the 19th century Greek art movement “Munich School”.

Franz Graf also was a student of German landscape painter Alexander Marcks and Lovis Corinth, best known for his adaptation of French Impresssionism into his psychologically expressive paintings. Graf was actively working in the Friedenau area of Berlin until 1945 when he moved to Travemünde, a borough of Lübeck, where he died in 1950.

John Neville

John Neville: Fishing, Nova Scotia

John Neville was born in 1952 in Halls Harbor, Nova Scotia. While completing his BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, he studied at the Centre De Gravure Contemporaries, in Geneva, Switzerland. He is both a painter and a printmaker who has exhibited widely in the Maritime Provinces, the Eastern Seaboard, and Scotland.

William Baziotes

William Baziotes, “Cyclops”, Oil on Canvas, 1947, Chicago Art Institute

William Baziotes was an American painter known for his luminous abstractions of biomorphic forms. Though he is considered an Abstract Expressionist, Baziotes’s work remained outside the dominant aspects of the movement. His paintings are in many ways more closely aligned with the early Surrealist works of Mark rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell.

Born on June of 1912 in Pittsburgh, PA, William Baziotes was raised in the town of Reading, PA, where he worked antiquing glass as a young man. Interested in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the paintings of Henri Matisse, Baziotes moved to New York in 1933 to attend the National Academy of Design. During the late 1930s, he worked for the WPA Federal Art Project, both as a teacher and in its easel division.

Baziotes was introduced to Motherwell by the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta in 1941, and had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century in 1944. William Baziotes died on June 6, 1963 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, “Elergy to the Spanish Republic No. 110”, Acrylic with Pencil and Charcoal on Canvas, 1971, Guggenheim Museum

The atrocities of the Spanish Civil War which started when he was twenty-one made an indelible impression on Robert Motherwell. who later devoted a series of more than two hundred paintings to the theme. From Motherwell’s retrospective view, the war became a metaphor for all injustice. He conceived of his series  “Elegies to the Spanish Republic” as majestic commemorations of human suffering and as poetic, abstract symbols for the unceasing cycle of life and death.

Motherwell demonstrates his admiration for French Symbolism with this series of paintings, an appreciation he shared with his fellow Abstract Expressionist painters. Motherwell was particularly inspired by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s belief that a poem should not represent some specific entity, idea, or event, but rather the emotive effect that it produces. The abstract motif common to most of the Energy series, an alternating pattern of bulbous shapes compressed between columnar forms, may be read as an indirect reference to the experience of loss and the heroics of stoic resistance.

The contentious nature of life itself is expressed through the stark juxtaposition of black against white, which is emphasized by contrasting ovoid and rectilinear slab forms. Concerning the Elergy series, Motherwell said, “After a period of painting them, I discovered Black as one of my subjects—and with black, the contrasting white, a sense of life and death which to me is quite Spanish. They are essentially the Spanish black of death contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight.”

Robert John Guttke

 

Robert John Guttke, Untitled

Born in Chicago, Robert John Guttke attended Rockford College in Illinois. Since 1976 he has resided and worked in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Guttke’s initial career  was as an illustrator and sculptor. He later changed to photography as the camera, which had originally been a major tool in his craft, became his means of expression.

The book “ShadowLight”,  published in 1994, contains forty of Guttke’s figurative photographs.  His images were published as note cards by Museum Graphics,  followed by calendars and posters published by numerous graphics companies. Guttke’s photographs appeared in a number of fine art periodicals from Australia to Germany.  In 2008 he had his first solo photography exhibition in San Francisco. Later that year, Robert Guttke resumed his sculpture work, taking on new commissions.

The artist’s site: http://guttkesculpture.blogspot.com

Georges-Pierre Seurat

Georges-Pierre Seurat, “Une Baignade, Asniėres (Bathers at Asnières)”, 1884, Oil on Canvas, 201 x 301 cm, National Gallery, London

Born in Paris December 2, 1859, Georges Seurat’s formal training began around 1875, when he entered the local municipal art school under the sculptor Justin Lequien. There, he made a friend of Edmond Aman-Jean, the future Symbolist painter, and together they entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts run by Henri Lehmann, a disciple of the Neo-Classical painter Jean=Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Seurat attended the Academy from February 1878 until November 1879. The curriculum placed particular emphasis on drawing and composition, and most of Seurat’s time was spent sketching from plaster casts and live models. Seurat spent his free time conducting his own artistic studies and frequently visited museums and libraries throughout Paris.

Seurat also sought instruction from the muralist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose specialty was large-scale classical, allegorical scenes. Seurat’s sketches dating to 1874 include copies of Hans Holbein the Younger drawings, a sketch of Nicolas Poussin’s hand from the acclaimed self-portrait in the Louvre, and figures from drawings by Raphael.

Charles Blanc’s 1867 “The Grammar of Painting and Engraving” and Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s 1839 “The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors”  introduced Seurat to color theories and the science of optics that became central to his thinking and practice as a painter. Chevreul’s discovery that by juxtaposing complementary colors one could produce the impression of another color became one of the bases for Seurat’s Divisionist technique. Seurat also read Ogden N. Rood’s 1879 “Modern Chromatics”, which proposed that artists should experiment with color contrast by juxtaposing small colored dots to see the visual blending effect.

Seurat began to apply his theoretical research to compositions executed between 1881 and 1884, culminating in his first major painting project, the 1884 “Bathers at Asniéres”. This monumental canvas depicted a group of workers relaxing by the Seine and was based on numerous small oil sketches and figure studies. The final composition is an accomplished rendition of the light and atmosphere of high summer. It is largely rendered in a criss-cross brushstroke technique known as balayé and was later re-touched by Seurat with dots of contrasting color in certain areas.