Cornel Brudașcu

The Paintings of Cornel Brudașcu

Born in the Sălaj County village of Tusa in 1937, Cornel Brudașcu is a Romanian painter who began his career under the his country’s former Communist regime of the 1960s. He studied painting at the Universitatea de Artă şi Design in the north-western city of Cluj-Napoca. Over the course of his career, Brudașcu’s work gradually progressed into gestural compositions that melded figurative forms with abstraction.

After his university graduation in 1962, Brudașcu began to establish an impressive body of work. However, while there were opportunities for exhibitions in the 1960s, there was no established art market in Romania. In the 1970s, the only decade in which the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu allowed cultural exchange with the West, Brudașcu and other artists became acquainted with contemporary American art through Western magazines, reading rooms, and informal networks. Publications, such as Germany’s “Popcorn” and London’s “Oz”, offered images of counter-culture music and art movements beyond the Iron Curtain.

As a member of Romania’s 1970s avant-garde painters, Brudașcu experimented with solarized photography and created a series of Pop Art paintings, photo- based portraits of friends as well as figures appropriated from magazines. These works gained him international recognition in 2015 due to their inclusion at the Tate Modern’s “The World Goes Pop” in London. Both the Centre Pompidou and Musee d’Art Moderne at the Ville de Paris have works from this series in their collections.

Following his Pop Art images, Cornel Brudașcu made a radical shift away from his previous work. This change was the result of new visual elements and a more personal approach to his paintings’ themes and genres. At unspecified times over a period of fifteen years, Brudașcu created a collection of simple graphic sketches and small, untitled paintings with dark burgundy hues. He interwove those works with male figurative paintings of a post-impressionist style that were tinged with a distinct homoeroticism. This painterly series of figurative works bear witness through their dream-like compositions to his slow, poetic journey of gay affirmation.

As with many other Romanian artists, the subject of hero and anti-hero is a dominate theme in Brudașcu’s paintings. Influenced heavily by the works of El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) who reached his artistic maturity in Spain, Brudașcu’s fluid expressionist style inspired the many master-class students who attended his studio to be independent in their thinking and work. Throughout his career, Brudașcu’s oeuvre has maintained a balance of intimacy and cultural commentary that has united local Romanian histories with broader art movements.

Cornel Brudașcu has continued to exhibit his work since 2005. Among his solo exhibitions were shows at Galeria Plan B in Berlin, the VNH Gallery in Paris and Spatiu Intact in Cluj, Romania. His paintings have been presented in group exhibitions in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Bucharest, New York, Ostrava, and Leipzig, among others. Brudașcu continues to live and work in Cluj-Napoca as a teacher at the internationally renowned Fine Arts School of Cluj.

Notes: Galleria Plan B has a biography and a selection of Cornel Brudașcu’s work at its website: https://www.plan-b.ro

The online Frieze Magazine has an article on Cornel Brudașcu by art and culture writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen at its site: https://www.frieze.com/article/cornel-brudascu

A second article on Cornel Brudașcu by Kristian Madsen, that includes several images from various stages of his work, is located at The Clavert Journal site: https://www.plan-b.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cornel-Brudascu-The-Calvert-Journal-2017.pdf

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Cornel Brudascu”, Color Print, The Calvert Journal 2017, United Kingdom

Second Insert Image: Cornel Brudașcu, Untitled (Faces on Red Field), 2024, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 40 cm, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Cornel Brudascu, Untitled (Figure/Blue Lines), 2019, Oil on Canvas, 51.8 x 47.9 cm, Allison Jacques Gallery, London

Elia Tomás

The Paintings of Elia Tomás

Born in Italy, Elia Tomás is a talented visual artist currently based in Madrid. His first memories of art originate from his uncle who painted landscapes that, although devoid of any human element, remained full of personality. After achieving a degree in psychology, Tomás decided to begin a new chapter in his life. After thirty-two years of life in Italy, he relocated in 2011 to Spain, distancing himself from everything he knew to pursue his own unique style of art.

Tomás’s work focuses on the human element; the narratives of his subjects are expressed through portraiture, both individual and group. The majority of his work examines the concept of self-discovery through relationships and memories, both personal and of others. Within a continuous process of redefinition, the subjects of Tomás’s paintings either search backwards in time for those aspects they lack or live with intense intimacy in the present. Included within that process of self-discovery is an examination of masculinity and what that concept means personally and to society.

Elia Tomás defines his painting as synthetic in that each canvas is developed from a carefully de-contextualized set of photographic material; the photos are either self-produced or contained with private or historical archives. Tomás places emphasis on the style of his brushwork to create balances between faithful depictions and abstractions. He often alters faces and bodies with the brushwork to evoke the attention and emotions of his paintings’ spectators. Tomás’s color palette has developed throughout his career from an earlier blue-toned palette to a more chromatically complex one with some emphasis placed currently on yellows and pinks.

Tomás has consistently exhibited his work over the years, the initial public showing being the 2010 “Landing Point” at Palazzo Ducale in Genova. His paintings have appeared in both solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Albania, and the United States.

Notes: Unless noted as private collection, all works by Elia Tomás are in the collection of Elia Tomás/Saatchi Art Gallery.

Original work by Elia Tomás can be obtained through Saatchi Art Gallery: https://www.saatchiart.com/EliaTomas

The Elia Tomás website is located at: https://eliatomas.com

Bottom Insert Image: Elia Tomás, “Hiding the Tracks No.1”, 2011, Acrylic on Canvas, 116.8 x 96.5 cm, Private Collection

Edward Melcarth

The Artwork of Edward Melcarth

Born at Louisville, Kentucky in January of 1914, Edward Melcarth was an American painter, photographer and sculptor who developed his own style, Social Romanticism, a Renaissance-influenced attempt to describe man’s idealized view of himself. Active in the post-World War II art scene, Melcarth spent most of his career in New York City where he painted and sculpted images of blue-color workers, sailors, hustlers, and tradesmen.

Known for his emotionally evocative and heroic portrayals of the male figure, Melcarth focused his work on masculinity, portraiture, religion and contemporary American culture. His images of working-class men showed their grit, brute strength and determination to overcome difficulty. At the same time, the images were visual vehicles that examined gay male desire in a society that found it socially unacceptable. Melcarth’s paintings ranged in size from smaller portraits to large-scale, complex scenes of interacting figures accentuated with light and shadow.

Edward Melcarth, born Edward Epstein, was the son of the wealthy Jewish couple, Edward Epstein Sr. and Eva Ehrmann. His grandfather was the noted Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey distiller Hilmar Ehrmann. Melcarth’s uncle was activist lawyer and author Herbert B. Ehrmann; his aunt Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic activist and first president of the League of Women Voters.

Eva Ehrmann, after the 1920 death of her husband, remarried in 1926 to Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks, who was a Member of Parliament. The family moved to the United Kingdom where Melcarth spent his early formative years. To pursue his interests and a career, he studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London; painter Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris; and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In February of 1936, Melcarth rejected his family’s Jewish religion and changed his last name from Epstein to Melcarth, possibly a variation of Melqart, a protector god of ancient Semitic people. Although he considered himself both a communist and openly gay, he was briefly married in Paris from 1939 until the divorce in 1944. During World War II, Melcarth traveled with other American volunteers in 1943 to Persia where they constructed air strips for the allied forces. In 1944, he served as a seaman in the United States Merchant Marines until the end of the war. Melcarth returned to the United States in the fall of 1951 and taught briefly at Kentucky’s University of Louisville.

In February of 1952, Edward Melcarth traveled to Italy where he resided for a period at Venice’s Casa del Tre Oci, a modern neo-Gothic palace on the island of Giudecca. Melcarth returned to the United States in November of 1952 and made New York City his primary residence. His acquaintances and friends included writers Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, photographer Thomas Painter, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, artist Henry Faulkner, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and businessman Malcolm Forbes, who established a major collection of Melcarth’s work.

In 1957, Melcarth created a ceiling mural depicting theatrical muses for the newly renovated Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, originally the Globe Theatre, on 46th Street in Manhattan. Beginning in 1967, Melcarth worked on a two-year project of trompe l’oeil murals and sculpted busts for the rotunda at the luxurious Pierre Hotel that faces New York’s Central Park. The painted Italian landscape murals included mythological figures and couples viewed between illusionistic columns.

Edward Melcarth relocated to Venice in 1970 where he lived until his death from cancer at the age of fifty-nine in December of 1973. Throughout his career, he taught at the University of Louisville, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University, the University of Washington, and New York’s Art Students League. Melcarth received both a grant and the Childe Hassam purchase award from the Institute of Arts and Letters, Chicago Art Institute’s Altman Prize, and the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Award.

Notes: Edward Melcarth’s papers, correspondence, and writings are housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/edward-melcarth-papers-7865

An article by museum curator Hunter Kissel entitled “Illuminating the Underrepresented: Presenting Edward Melcarth” can be found at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3cc8a11aef1d1735f564f7/t/5cf29f0ad328900001e55860/1559404302304/IlluminatingTheUnderrepresented.pdf

The bi-monthly literary and history magazine Gay & Lesbian Review has an interview between writer Taylor Lewandowski and painter Richard Taddei, a former student and friend of Melcarth, on its site: https://glreview.org/article/richard-taddei-on-his-mentor-edward-melcarth/

Gilbert Lewis

The Portraits of Gilbert Lewis

Born at Hampton, Virginia in September of 1945, Gilbert Braddy Lewis was an American artist and art therapist. Over a span of five decades, he created portraits of friends and acquaintances, a collection of work that included an intimate series that represented the gay male experience in Philadelphia’s LBGTQ community.

Gilbert Lewis began his art training at the early age of seven and pursued the arts throughout his teenage years. After relocating to Philadelphia at the age of eighteen, he began studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under such noted painters as Walter Stuempfig, Franklin Watkins, Hobson Pittman, and printmaker and muralist Morris Blackburn. Lewis was committed to his training and became particularly focused on the careful observation and life drawing taught in the curriculum of Thomas Eakins. After completing his certificate program in 1967, Lewis was awarded the eminent Cresson Traveling Scholarship, a two-year scholarship which enabled him to travel to Italy and study the Sienese and Florentine Renaissance artists.

Upon his return to the United States, Lewis enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1974. Lewis received his Masters Creative Arts Therapy degree at Philadelphia’s Hahnemann University in 1978. He obtained a position as art therapist at the Manchester House Nursing Center in Medea, Pennsylvania where he worked from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The animated qualities in Lewis’s portraits of the seniors with whom he worked is evidence of the warm relationships he established with the residents.

Fascinated by youth and aging, Gilbert Lewis’s work focused on the beginning and the end of adulthood. While working at Manchester House during the day, he was creating gouache, watercolor, charcoal and graphite portraits of young men in the city at night. These portraits express Lewis’s attentiveness to convey the wide eyed awkwardness of those young men who sought both guidance and trust in their artistic relationship with him. Each sitter was encouraged to dress and pose themselves in a way that they would feel most comfortable. Frequent conversations were normal between artist and sitter; many of his models would bring their own music choices to the studio.

Lewis painted models every night from Monday to Friday. His models, often tall and slender, were usually portrayed directly looking at the viewer with a slightly awkward vulnerability. Using a soft color palette, Lewis would sometimes paint his figures against solidly-colored backgrounds. Not overly concerned with realism, Lewis was drawn towards the ethnographic approach to the detail and the sense of longing found in American frontier painter George Catlin’s depictions of the indigenous peoples on the Great Plains of the 1830s.

Gilbert Lewis taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s certificate and continuing education programs. He also supported himself throughout his entire career by working at Philadelphia’s art supply stores, including Blick Art Materials, South Street Art Supply, and Pearl Art and Craft Supply. Gilbert Lewis died at the age of seventy-eight on the seventh of December in 2023 at the Belvedere nursing home in Chester, Pennsylvania, from complications caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

Gilbert Lewis’s first solo exhibition was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art’s Peale House Gallery in 1981. He had numerous solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, among which were the Rosenfeld and Noel Butcher galleries. His largest exhibition, “Becoming Men: Portrait Paintings by Gilbert Lewis”, was presented in 2004 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. Lewis’s work can be found in the permanent collections at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.

“One of my motivations in painting has been to celebrate the beginning of adulthood for the young and the final period of life for the old,” Gilbert observes. “What struck me is that both young men and the old are ignored by society. Despite our ostensible focus on youth, young men are in a sort of nether world, no longer teenagers and yet not full adults. They’re in transition with no established identify and no real place in society.” —Gilbert Lewis

Notes: The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art has a short article written by Christian Bain entitled “Becoming Men: Portrait Paintings by Gilbert Lewis” in which Lewis discusses his work process and motivations for painting: https://leslielohman.org/exhibitions/becoming-men-portrait-paintings-by-gilbert-lewis

The WilliamWay LBGT Community Center in Philadelphia has a collection of paintings by Gilbert Lewis on its site located at: https://www.waygay.org/gilbert-lewis-1

Anthony Rullo was a portrait model who posed at least sixty times for Gilbert Lewis between 1986 and 1996. Rullo’s memories of Lewis and his mentorship are contained in a Visual Arts article by Peter Crimmins for Philadelphia’s WHYY newsletter: https://whyy.org/articles/gilbert-lewis-remembered-as-artist-mentor-to-phillys-gay-80s/

Second Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, “Nude- Composition in Red and Green”, January 1985, Gouache on Board, 111.8 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, “Seated Man with Shell”, circa 2020, Pastel on Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Gilbert Lewis, Untitled (Young Man Standing with Legs Spread), 1987, Gouache on Paper, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Kyle Dunn

The Artwork of Kyle Dunn

Born in 1990, Kyle Dunn is an American artist who creates sensuous and psychologically complex scenes on canvas and panels. His work is a meld of theatrical elements and personal introspection that explores those relationships between the artist and his subject, two people in love, and the individual and society.

Kyle Dunn received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Sculpture in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. A modernist with a classical style, he began his career as a painter with a prolific series of images on canvas. In 2016, Dunn returned to his sculptural roots and created a visual language that employed three-dimensional elements constructed of epoxy resin, plaster and relief foam panels.

Dunn’s domestic tableaux and still lifes are staged, highly stylized images that include trompe l’oeil and bas-relief. All of his paintings contain a wealth of detail; your attention is drawn to the many thoughtfully placed objects that fill the canvas and surround its protagonists. Within Dunn’s melodramatic scenes, figures are staged in a variety of positions and activities that are open to the viewers’ own interpretations. His figures are often presented in solitary moments of self-reflection or scenes of domestic intimacy.

The lighting of each scene is an important component of Kyle Dunn’s work; the theatric lighting style of both horror and noir films is evident in his paintings. In many of Dunn’s paintings and bas-relief works, light comes from a strong, external source, located either from above or below, or the side through a window or open doorway. Blocks of sunlight flood into rooms in such images as “Hyacinth and Pears” and “Devil in the Daytime”. Scenes, such as “Midday” and “Downward Dog” present strong contrasts between light and shadow, an effect that highlights the scene’s subject and increases the drama of the depicted moment.

Kyle Dunn’s work was included in the 2022 “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection”, an exhibition of work housed by Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent exhibitions include a series of colorful nocturnal scenes in a successful April/May 2023 solo exhibition, entitled “Night Pictures”, at New York City’s P.P.O.W. gallery on Broadway. In June of 2024, Dunn had a solo institutional show, entitled “Matrix 194”, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival structure in Connecticut. His solo exhibition “Devil in the Daytime” is currently on view from February 8th to March 29th in 2025 at the Vielmetter Gallery in Los Angeles.

Dunn has shown work in many international venues including the Marlborough Gallery in London, Amsterdam’s GRIMM gallery, the Maria Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, and Berlin’s Galerie Judin, among others. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Hong Kong’s Sunpride Foundation in Kowloon, and the X Museum in Beijing, China.

Notes: There is an excellent 2019 interview, entitled “Ghost World”, between Jessica Ross of Juxtapoz Art & Culture and Kyle Dunn located at: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/kyle-dunn-ghost-world/

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program has a personal and well-documented December 2020 Visiting Artist Lecture by Kyle Dunn located on YouTube under the title: “Kyle Dunn: Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series”.

Top Insert Image: Justin J. Wee, “Kyle Dunn, Brooklyn Studio”, 2021, Color Print, Galerie Magazine

Second Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Into the Crevasse”, 2019, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster and Foam Panel, 121.9 x 175.3 x 5.1 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Kyle Dunn, “Window”, 2020, Acrylic on Epoxy Resin, Plaster, and Foam Panel, 162.6 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm, Private Collection

Jacques Sultana

The Artwork of Jacques Sultana

Born to a judge and his wife at a Breton village in 1938, Jacques Sultana was a French contemporary, post-war painter, graphic artist and designer who worked during his career in a combination of Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles. He was a prolific painter and produced a large number of photo-realistic canvases throughout his career depicting both clothed and nude male figures.

Expelled from the family home at the age of twenty-two due to his homosexuality, Sultana decided in 1963 to relocate to Paris where he found residence in the 16th arrondissement. During the 1970’s, Sultana created a remarkable series of graphite drawings centering on male nudes and employing surrealist or psychedelic motifs. Of these, his 1975 graphite on paper “L’Oiseau Rare” is considered one the best in the series.

After a period as an art teacher, Jacques Sultana began working in 1978 as a graphic designer and illustrator. He created fashion trade advertisements for several clients, among which was Eminence, a French manufacturer of men’s swimsuits and underwear. Sultana also created illustrations for the distiller Pernod and automobile manufacturer Renault as well as the French Ministry of the Navy for which he illustrated all the service’s military outfits.

Beginning in 1994 until his death, Sultana devoted himself entirely to painting, most often male nudes in a hyper-realistic and often homoerotic style. He died at the age of seventy-four on the twenty-fourth of July in 2012 at his longtime 16th arrondissement home in Paris.

A retrospective of Jacques Sultana’s work, entitled “Jacques Sultana, Pentre Hyper-Réaliste”, was held in March to April of 2022 at Paris’s Galerie du Passage in coordination with the publication of an art book of the same name. Sultana’s work can be found in many private collections including the collections of Pierre Passebon and Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Notes: There is a dearth of biographical information on Jacques Sultana’s life as well as details on his paintings. If anyone has more information, please share it. I am particularly interested in the time he spent in Paris and the titles of his work.

Top Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “La Pantalon Rouge”, 2001, Oil and Acrylic on Masonite, 63 x 38.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Tendresse”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jacques Sultana, “Marche de Soho”, 1997, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Derek Jarman: Film History Series

Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Film Scene Gifs, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA)

Born in Northwood, Middlesex in January of 1942, Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English artist, film maker, costume and stage designer, writer and poet, and gay rights activist. His film career began with experimental Super 8mm shorts and developed into such mainstream films as the 1986 historical drama “Caravaggio” and the 1989 “War Requiem”, that featured Laurence Olivier’s last screen performance.

As an author, Jarman published several works: a poetry collection entitled “A Finger in the Fishes Mouth”; two diaries, “Modern Nature” and “Smiling in Slow Motion”; two treatises on his art and films, “Chroma” and “The Last of England (aka Kicking the Pricks)”; and the 1984 “Dancing Ledge”, an autobiography of his life until the age of forty.

The son of Royal Air Force officer Lancelot Elworthy Jarman and Elizabeth Evelyn Puttock, Derek Jarman received his elementary education at the preparatory Walhampton School and Dorset’s Cranford School, a progressive boarding and day institution. Beginning in 1960, he studied Art and English at King’s College, London, which was followed in 1963 by four years of study at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art. In the 1970s, Jarman embraced his homosexuality and became a public figure for the gay rights campaign.

Jarman’s first venture in film making was a series of experimental shorts filmed with Super 8mm film, a format he used frequently throughout his career. Among these films are the 1984 “Imagining October, an examination of art and politics at the end of the Cold War; 1985 “The Angelic Conversation”, an arthouse drama of homoerotic images combined with Judi Dench’s readings of Shakespeare sonnets; and 1990 “The Garden”, an arthouse allegory that examined the suffering and ostracism of a gay male couple during the AIDS crisis. “The Garden” was entered in 1991 into the 17th Moscow International Film Festival.

As a stage set and costume designer, Derek Jarman did the design work for the 1968 Sadler’s Wells Opera production of “Don Giovanni” at London’s newly renovated Coliseum in the West End. He was chosen as the production designer for director Ken Russell’s 1971 historical horror-drama “The Devil’s”, a controversial film for which Russell received the Best Foreign Director Award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. Jarman’s work with this film, as well as his work on Russell’s 1972 “Savage Messiah”, gave him a transition into mainstream narrative filmmaking.

Jarman’s debut film was the 1976 “Sebastiane”, a story spoken in ancient Latin dialogue about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. This film featured some of the first positive images of gay sexuality in British films. “Sebastiane” was influenced by films from the Italian arthouse oeuvre, particularly the cinematic style of Frederico Fellini. In 1977, Jarman began shooting scenes for the 1978 “Jubilee”, a heavily punk-influenced film that transports Queen Elizabeth I forward in time to an England troubled by the unemployment and rising inflation of the 1970s. Now considered a cult classic, the film was adapted in 2017 as a play for the Manchester Royal Exchange Theater.

After several years of preparation, Derek Jarman directed his next film, the 1979 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. His original adaptation was intended for a stage play; however, he ultimately decided to proceed with a film adaptation. Seeking a balance between the aspects of theater and film, Jarman reworked the text so it would capture the mystery of the original without the theatrics. Inspired by films produced by Hammer Film Productions, Jarman utilized voice-over narration, costumes from muliple eras, sounds of heavy breathing, and blue camera filters to create a film that was well received upon its release.

Jarman learned his HIV-positive diagnosis on the twenty-second of December in 1986. An outspoken advocate of gay rights, he openly spoke publicly about his condition and his struggle with the virus. Despite his illness, Jarman continued making both mainstream films and Super 8mm shorts. In 1987, his arthouse film “The Last of England” was released. This film dealt with the loss of English culture in the 1980s and the formation of the Section 28 Local Government Act that banned any “promotion” or discussion of homosexuality and thus stifled LGBT support groups.

Derek Jarman’s 1989 “War Requiem”, produced by Scottish novelist and director Don Boyd, brought Laurence Olivier out of retirement for his last screen appearance. For its soundtrack, the film used noted composer Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”, a work he wrote for the consecration of the Coventry Cathedral. Violent war footage and poetry written by war hero Wilfred Owen were overlaid on the score. While filming his 1990 “The Garden”, Jarman became seriously ill but managed to complete the work. This arthouse film was loosely based on Christ’s crucifixion; however, the film’s protagonist is a gay male couple whose idealistic existence is interrupted by arrest, humiliation, torture and death.

Now working in a simpler format due to his failing health, Jarman directed his 1991 “Edward II”, a romantic historical drama based on Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 play of the same name. This was followed by the 1993 experimental comedic-drama “Wittgenstein” based on the life of philosopher and professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose life and career were affected by periods of depression. By 1993, Jarman was dying of AIDS-related complications that had already rendered him partially blind and only able to see in shades of blue.

Despite his advancing illness, Derek Jarman completed his 1993 “Blue”, a single screenshot of saturated blue color with a background soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner. Over the soundtrack, Jarman and some of his long-time collaborators described Jarman’s life and artistic vision. “Blue” made its debut at the 1993 Venice Biennale and later became part of the collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Collection, and the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis. Jarman’s final film was the 1994 “Glitterbug”, a documentary of his life as seen through home movies, that was posthumously aired on BBC Two’s episodic television show “Arena”.

Jarman died on the nineteenth of February in 1994 at the age of fifty-two at London’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. His body is interned in the graveyard at St. Clement’s Church, Old Romney, Kent. A blue English Heritage plaque honoring Derek Jarman’s life was placed at the site of his live-in studio at London’s Butler’s Wharf in 2019.

Notes: After his HIV-positive diagnosis, Jarman made the decision to leave London for a period and bought a small fisherman’s cabin, Prospect Cottage, on the beaches of Dungeness, Kent, with an inheritance received from his father. Using his creative energy, Jarman created a sculpture garden from discarded metal engine parts and local coastal plants. After his death, Prospect Cottage was purchased in 2020 through an Art Fund campaign and is now a public site overseen by the UK charity Creative Folkestone. Jarman’s archives from the cottage were placed on a long-term loan to the Tate Museum Archive.

An 2023 article by artist and curator Robert Priseman for “ART UK”, entitled “Derek Jarman’s Garden: A Heart of Creativity”, examines Jarman’s life at Prospect Cottage: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/derek-jarmans-garden-a-heart-of-creativity

“FILM London” has a short 2024 article on Jarman’s life and the Jarman Award for emerging artist filmmakers that was instituted in 2008: https://filmlondon.org.uk/flamin/about-derek-jarman

Alastair Curtis wrote an excellent 2023 article for “FRIEZE’ magazine on Derek Jarman’s final film “Blue” and its adaptation into a stage production: https://www.frieze.com/article/derek-jarman-blue-now-2023

Top Insert Image: Trevor Leighton, “Derek Jarman”, 1990, Bromide Fibre Print, 36.7 x 29 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Caravaggio”, 1986, Cinematography Gabriel Beristain, Cinevista (USA), Umbrella Entertainment (Australia)

Third Insert Image: Steve Pyke, “Derek Jarman”, 1983, Bromide Print, 37.6 x 38 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Fourth Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Sebastiane”, 1976, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd

Fifth Insert Image: David Thompson, “Derek Jarman”, 1992, Toned Archival Print on Kentmere Paper, 34.5 x 27.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Bottom Insert Image: Derek Jarman, “Jubilee”, 1978, Cinematography Peter Middleton, Cinegate Ltd

Trevor Southey

The Art of Trevor Southey

Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Africa in 1940 to parents of colonialist Dutch descent, Trevor Jack Thomas Southey was a celebrated Mormon painter, print maker, sculptor and educator. His heritage can be traced to European colonists who settled in Cape Town, South Africa in the seventeenth-century. Southey’s work celebrated the human form and sought to transform humanity by challenging viewers to rediscover their inner soul.

Trevor Southey’s early interest in art developed during periods of rheumatic fever that often confined him to bed with only pencils, paper, and art books from the school library. His formal art education began with studies at the Brighton College of Art in Sussex, England. A year later, Southey studied at the Natel Technical College in Durban, South Africa where he met and was baptized by Mormon missionaries. In the early 1960s, he served as a Latter Day Saints missionary with the organization’s South Africa Aid program.

Retaining his African and European origins, Southey emigrated to the United States in 1965 and studied at the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he earned both his Bachelor and Master Degrees. Southey taught art education at the university and became a founding member in 1966 of the highly significant Mormon Art and Belief Movement, an artist organization that was active until 1976. During his teaching career, Southey worked to establish a Mormon art form through his use of Latter Day Saint theology.

Despite his homosexuality, Trevor Southey married psychotherapist Elaine Fish, the daughter of Jesse Fish and Lucile Cottam, in 1967 after a brief courtship of several months. In an attempt to conform to the teachings of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the couple settled down in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, built a homestead in Alpine and raised four children. Southey along with artists Neil Hadlock, Dennis Smith and Gary Ernest Smith founded a small artist community in Alpine during the 1970s.

Southey resigned from Brigham Young University’s faculty in 1977 and began to pursue a personal artistic career. Coming to terms with his homosexuality, Southey divorced Elaine Fish in 1982 after fifteen years of marriage and found himself excommunicated on the outskirts of Mormon society. Thirty years later, Southey’s reputation as an artist prompted an invitation to once again join the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

As a figurative Realist, Trevor Southey used the depiction of the physical body to portray the soul, a method employed frequently by painters and sculptors of the Renaissance period. He expressed human spirituality through commonplace figures of an ethereal nature in scenes that combined realism and personally related allegories. Southey’s work, focused on the Rocky Mountain area, examined environmental issues that effected the land particularly those concerns that dealt with urban planning. In 1985, he relocated his Salt Lake City studio to San Francisco where Southey’s artwork achieved both critical and popular success. His four children from his annulled marriage later joined him in San Francisco.

During the 1990s, Southey became an accomplished stained glass designer, sculptor and print maker. His many intaglio etchings exhibited the same elegance and delicate draftsmanship of his paintings. Southey’s “Full Bloom” intaglio series began as a pencil drawing of a woman he knew from church. In its final form, this successful series of etchings became a universal symbol of resurrection and the cycle of life. Fully established now as an artist of note, Southey received commissions for both paintings and sculptures throughout the United States and the United Kingdom .

Trevor Southey did a series of illustrations for several books of poetry by writer, playwright and lecturer Carol Lynn Pearson. These include the 1976 “The Growing Season” and the 1987 “A Widening View”, both published by Bookcraft in Salt Lake City, as well as the 1967 “Beginnings” published by Trilogy Arts in Provo, Utah. Southey, along with Brigham Young University Professors Clyde W. Robinson and Donald R. Marshall, participated in a 1979 panel discussion with authors Diane Leigh and Brett Parkinson on the nature of art in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. This dialogue was later published in the Fall 1979 edition of “Century II”, the Brigham Young University journal for its College of Humanities.

In 2013, after a decade-long battle with prostate cancer and a recent diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, Southey returned to Salt Lake City, Utah to be cared for by friends and relatives. His four children also relocated to be by his side. Trevor Southey died, at the age of seventy-five after a year at the Salt Lake City hospice, on the twentieth of October in 2015. His funeral service was held at the Dumke Auditorium of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Southey’s work can be found in many private collections and both public and corporate institutions.

“ It made itself most known in my work. Even that work long preserved within the seeming sanctity of a subject like the traditional family would reflect that shunned part of my being. Works done innocently, once they were complete still held the whole truth within them. Perhaps no painting revealed that more clearly than Prodigal. Often while I refused to acknowledge this, others could read it quite clearly. Prodigal was conceived from Jesus’ parable of reconciliation and familial love. I feared the sensuality of this work, and indeed, it was gently declined by the clients. At its conception and execution, that sensuality was naive and even innocent, as was the deeper implications of content. Other works follow as a celebration of this new personal “home,’ this integration, the comfort of finally being one within oneself and one within a new society. Some of these images are almost embarrassingly overt, though that was by no means my intention.”

Trevor Southey, Gay, Excerpt from Warnock Fine Arts: Trevor Southey

Notes: Trevor Southey attracted controversy in 1981 with his “Flight Aspiration”, a painting of a flying nude man and woman that was part of a mural commissioned for the Salt Lake City International Airport. The mural was removed after protests by the American Family Association, a national anti-pornography group led locally by Romola Joy Beech, a well known Latter Day Saints conservative activist. After five years in storage at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, “Flight Aspiration” was placed into the museum’s permanent collection in 1986.

Duane Jennings, a long-time friend of Southey and author of the two-volume series “Stumbling Blocks and Stepping-Stones”, wrote a short article on the artist’s life for the online site “Affirmation: LBGTQ Mormons Families and Friends”: https://affirmation.org/trevor-southey-1940-2015/

The Affirmation site also has an article by Seba Martinez that discusses Southey’s personal experience in marriage, excommunication from the Church of the Latter Day Saints, and break-up of family bonds due to a loved one being homosexual: https://affirmation.org/pbs-documentary-mormons/

Selected for the LDS Film Festival, Nathan Florence’s 2022 film, “Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey”, is a narrative documentary on Southey’s life and work. This film contains film clips of Southey with his work. “Bright Spark” can be found in its entirety on the PBS/MPT site: https://www.pbs.org/video/bright-spark-the-reconciliation-of-trevor-southey-ld2x8l/

The Trevor Southey website is located at: http://www.trevorsouthey.com

The Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art site has a presentation of Trevor Southey’s large-scale painting series “Warriors” for viewing and purchase: http://www.trevorsouthey.com/warriors/index.html

Second Insert Image; Trevor Southey, “Yuri”, 2000, “Warrior” Series, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm, Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art

Third Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Transition”, 1980, Edition of 77, Etching, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Russ”, 1990, Prismacolor Pencil Drawing on Silkscreen, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Charles Henri Ford: “Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone”

Photographers Unknown, Better Watch Out for the Next Cyclone

And you may not have hair as curly as the alphabet
but if your googoo eyes were a bundle of germs
there’d be an epidemic
With your greenhorn complexion
and your grasswidow ways
you’d make a butcher kill a granite cow
and weigh the gravel out for hamburger.
I mean you’d start the eskimos stripteasing,
give dummies the shakes,
get  flyingcircuses  to  crawl  on  their  hands  and  knees.
No I wouldn’t put it past you.
Just let somebody set you on the fence,
by  gosh  foulballs  would  be  annulled
and home-runs the rule.
The weather forcast that overlooked you, baby,
sure better watch out for the next cyclone,
seeing how my uptown’s flattened,
and  my  downtown  a-waving  in  the  wind.

Charles Henri Ford, I Wouldn’t Put It Past You, The Breathless Rock, Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems, 1972, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles

Born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi in February of 1908, Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, and artist whose career spanned and influenced twentieth-century’s modernist era. In his lifetime, he exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, published over a dozen collections of poetry, directed experimental films, and edited the American literary and surrealist art magazine “View”.

Charles Henri Ford was the first of two children born into the southern Baptist family of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford. He acquired his formal education at Catholic boarding schools in the American South and had one of his first poems published by The New Yorker magazine in 1927. Ford became part of the modernist literary movement with the publishing of his monthly “Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms” in 1929 and 1930. The magazine introduced new talents such as authors James Farrell and Paul Bowles as well as published submissions by such writers as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams.

Through “Blues” magazine, Ford communicated with the young novelist Parker Tyler who introduced him to both the poetry and men in the Village areas of Manhattan. Together they collaborated on a novel, “The Young and the Evil”, a fragmented account of bohemian gay life, drag balls and cruising. After his magazine ceased publication, Ford traveled to France and became a member of Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris. Through Stein, he became acquainted with members of the American expatriate community which included such artists and writers as Natalie Clifford Barney, Kay Boyle, Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes.

Ford had a brief affair with Barnes and traveled with her to Tangiers, Morocco where, while waiting for the publication of “The Young and the Evil”, he typed Barnes’s completed novel “Nightwood” for its publication. Ford returned in 1934 to Paris where he met Russian-born surrealist painter and designer Pavel Tchelitchew, a former Stein protégé whose work was gaining recognition. This creative and loving relationship developed into a strong, though occasionally tempestuous, bond that lasted for twenty-three years. In late 1934, Ford and Tchelitchew left Europe and returned to New York City where they settled into an East Side penthouse.

In 1938, Charles Henri Ford published his first full-length book of poems “The Garden of Disorder” which contained an introduction written by author William Carlos Williams. Influenced by the poetic works of Jean Cocteau, Ford felt that poetry had a relationship with all forms of art, be it a novel, essay or theatrical production. His poetry is easily noticed for its surrealistic format of short spurts of words; however, he also adapted his style to political poetry such as the work he published in the American Marxist magazine “New Masses” , at that time a politically oriented journal which covered anti-lynching and equal rights for women.

In 1940, Ford and Parker Tyler collaborated on the avant-garde and surrealist art magazine “View”, a quarterly publication that established New York as a center of surrealism. The magazine interviewed local artists as well as the many European surrealists who had fled the war in Europe. Contributions to the magazine came from many prominent artists including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marc Chagall and René Magritte, among others. A publishing imprint of “View” magazine, View Editions, was established to publish monographs and volumes of poetry, two of which were André Breton’s 1946 “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares” and Ford’s 1959 “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”.

Charles Henri Ford and Tchelitchew moved in 1952 to Europe where they continued their artistic careers. Ford had a 1955 photography exhibition “Thirty Images from Italy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, followed by a 1956 solo exhibition of drawings and paintings in Paris. In July of 1957, Pavel Tchelitchew, now a United States citizen, died at the age of fifty-eight in Grottaferrata, Italy, with Ford by his bedside. His body was taken to Paris and interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Ford returned to New York City in 1962 and began to associate with the underground filmmakers and artists involved in the Pop movement. He began to experiment in collage images and created a series of lithographs with spliced-typefaces, acid colors, and pop culture images. A visual form of concrete poetry, these “Poem Posters” were exhibited in 1965 at New York’s prominent Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on Madison Avenue. In the latter part of the 1960s, Ford focused on directing his own films, the first of which was the 1967 “Poem Posters”, a documentary of his recent exhibition, later entered into the Fourth International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgium. Ford’s second film, the 1971 “Johnny Minotaur”, was a surrealistic film-within-a-film that combined Greek mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur with erotic imagery of male anatomy and sexuality. Only one surviving print of the film is known.

Charles Henri Ford relocated in the early 1970s to Nepal where he purchased a house in Katmandu. In 1973, he hired local teenager Indra Tamang to cook and be his photography assistant. Tamang became basically Ford’s surrogate son, caretaker, and artistic collaborator for the rest of Ford’s life. They toured India and the Mid-East, resided for a period in Paris and Crete, and finally relocated to New York City. Ford purchased an apartment for himself and Tamang in The Dakota, a building that faced Central Park and was well known for its artistic tenants among whom was the actress Ruth Ford, Charles’s sister. Settled in the city, Ford created a series of art projects incorporating his collage materials and Tamang’s photography.

In the 1990s, Ford edited an anthology of articles previously published over the seven-year history of “View” magazine. Published as “View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940-1947”, the 1992 volume’s introduction was written by Ford’s longtime friend, author and composer Paul Bowles. In 2001, Ford published selections from his diaries in a volume entitled “Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957” that covered the period from his father’s death to the death of Tchelitchew. In the same year, he participated in a two-hour documentary on his life, entitled “Sleep in a Nest of Flames”, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis for Symbiosis Films 2000.

On the twenty-seventh of September in 2002, Charles Henri Ford died in New York City at the age of ninety-four. In his will and testament, Ford left some paintings and the rights to his co-authored novel “The Young and Evil” to Indra Tamang. Ruth Ford died in August of 2009 at the age of ninety-eight; she bequeathed her and her brother’s apartments to Tamang who had been both companion and caretaker. In 2011, Tamang carried Ruth and Charles Ford’s ashes to Mississippi where they were buried in Brookhaven’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

Notes: Charles Henri Ford’s 1991 “Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems” is available in its entirety on the Document.Pub site: https://dokumen.pub/out-of-the-labyrinth-selected-poems-0872862518-9780872862517.html

An exhibition review entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Love and Jump Back” by Demetra Nikolakakis for “Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture” magazine can be found at: https://museemagazine.com/culture/2021/2/25/exhibition-review-charles-henri-ford-love-and-jump-back

The Artforum magazine has an informative 2003 article, written by Michael Duncan, on Charles Henri Ford and his association with novelist Parker Tyler and artist Pavel Tchelitchew: https://www.artforum.com/columns/charles-henri-ford-165330/

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative site has short articles with stills on Charles Henri Ford’s two experimental films “Poem Posters” and “Johnny Minotaur”: https://film-makerscoop.com/filmmakers/charles-henri-ford

Matthew D. Kulisch, one of three curators for the Backwords Blog, wrote an article for the site entitled “Charles Henri Ford: Association and America’s First (Queer) Surrealist Artist” : https://www.backwordsblog.com/single-post/2016/10/12/charles-henri-ford-association-and-americas-first-queer-surrealist-artist

The September 2024 issue of Noah Becker’s “White Hot Magazine” has an article entitled “Love and Jump Back: Photography by Charles Henri Ford at Mitchell Algus”, written by Mark Bloch: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/henri-ford-at-mitchell-algus/4984

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Charles Henri Ford”, 1930-1940, Gelatin Silver Print, 26.4 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Gerald Malanga as Orpheus)”, circa 1965, Photolithograph, Image 98.4 x 68.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Third Insert Image: Robert Geisel, “Charles Henri Ford, The Dakota, NYC”, 1989, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Charles Henri Ford, “Poem Poster (Soul Map / Jayne Mansfield), circa 1965, Photolithograph, 99.1 x 69.2 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Charles Henri Ford (and Indra Tamang), The Dakota, NYC”, 1997, Gelatin Silver Print, 27.9 x 35.6 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Richard Stabbert

The Artwork of Richard Stabbert

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1959, Richard Stabbert is an American painter, author and researcher. A self-taught artist, he creates small intimate paintings inspired by the memories of people, both past and present, who made an impression on his life. Depicting the casual and positive experiences in life, Stabbert’s sentimental and often whimsical work presents an idyllic retreat from the speed and commotion of the industrial world.

Born to German immigrant parents, Stabbert spent time in his early years on the beaches of the New Jersey shoreline, a period in his life that provides both inspiration and reference for his work. Stabbert’s later summer experiences in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as the time he spent in Paris also serve as influences in his work. His paintings are known for their simple details, bold color composition and equally strong foregrounds and backgrounds, similar characteristics to those works in the Naïve genre.

Richard Stabbert’s acrylic and chalk paintings, almost gestural in execution, evoke a casual spontaneity and relaxed sensuality. He creates his work through a limited color palette that is dominated by pink and blue tones. Central to the compositions are Stabbert’s male figures constructed simply with broad, almost impasto, brushwork heightened by strokes of deep black and shaded areas of lighter grays. The background vistas in his work have a flat rendering style composed of simplified details and expanses of tonal primary colors.

Stabbert’s paintings have been included in the 2011 edition of “100 Artists of the Male Figure: A Contemporary Anthology of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture”; the 2011 “The Art of Man: Volumes 1-6”, a special anthology edition that includes artist interviews and work from six quarterly journals of “The Art of Man”; and Firehouse Publishing’s 2014 “Vitruvian Lens – Edition 5: Fine Art Male Photography”.

One of Richard Stabbert’s first solo exhibitions was “Été”at the Les Mots à la Bouche, an established bookshop and gallery in Paris. He also presented his work in the 2011 “Memories of Moments” held at New York City’s BrianRiley1ProjectSpace, a Broadway creative hub that provides a platform for artistic visions. Other gallery exhibitions include those at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Brooklyn, New York; Asbury Park’s APEX Gallery in New Jersey; Provincetown’s Ray Wiggs Gallery in Massachusetts; the Sidetracks Art Gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania; and Red Bank’s Susan Berke Fine Arts in New Jersey.

Stabbert is the author of the 2013 “Provincetown Memories: Paintings and Words” published in two editions through North Carolina’s Firehouse Publications. This work presents Stabbert’s simple sensual paintings alongside a personal journal of self-discovery, love, and intimate memories of both the beauty and freedom experienced during Provincetown summers.

In addition to many private collections, Richard Stabbert’s paintings are housed in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. His work is now available through Provincetown’s Art Love Gallery located at: https://www.artlovegallery.com as well as Galerie MooiMan in Gronigen, Netherlands: https://www.mooi-man.nl

Richard Stabbert’s website, which includes new works and gallery contacts, is located at: http://rstabbert.com

Second Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Carry”, 2021, Acrylic and Chalk Paint on Canvas, 22.8 x 30.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Craig”, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 20,3 x 30.5 cm

John Eric Broaddus

The Artwork of John Eric Broaddus

Born in New York in 1943, John Eric Broaddus was an artist who worked in several mediums including painting, illustration, and performance art. He was one of the prominent figures of the New York City art scene throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

John Eric Broaddus was one of the most creative and innovative artist to approach the book form. He was a pioneer in the field before the book, as a physical art piece, became an accepted genre of the contemporary art world. Not concerned with the integration of text and image, Broaddus used the pages of books as scaffolds for his colored, cut-out visual esthetic effects. His work is different from other book artists as his creations are unique, not limited editions or multiples.

Broaddus’s 1979 “Meridian Passage” is a volume of hand painted pages in acrylic, tempera, watercolor and ink combined with abstract cut-outs. This volume is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor. Broaddus’s 1982 “Xylocaine” was a volume whose pages were altered with acrylic, ink, glitter, tempera and watercolor and then overlaid with cut-out xeroxes. “Xylocaine” was the first artist book purchased by Robert and Ruth Sackner, prominent collectors who had previously focused on collecting only works of concrete and visual poetry.

John Eric Broaddus’s 1983 “France I” was constructed from a found geographical codex of over a hundred pages that was altered with paint, ink, colored pencil, glitter and sculptural cuttings. Through the use of clever cutting, a photograph of children would appear on the other side of the leaf as a gigantic statue within a dark blue abstraction. For his two-volume 1985 “Above the Trees”, Broaddus used two identical books with spray-painted pages on which were added stuck-on images, drawings and intricately cut-out shapes. This work’s elaborate, vividly-colored and highly sculptural pages demonstrated his interest in both detail and drama.

Broaddus was known for his theatrical scene sets, among which were those for the Provincetown Playhouse’s 1988 production of Justin Ross and John Epperson’s “I Could Go on Lip-Synching”. However, he was better known for the highly original costumes, constructed of found objects, that he wore for his art performance work. Broaddus would appear in his costumes on the streets of New York and in such iconic places as Studio 54 and Xenon, two of the city’s most famous nightclubs. In November of 1974, he made an appearance in a white oriental costume, carrying a bamboo umbrella, at avant-garde artist Charlotte Moorman’s 11th Avant-Garde Festival held at Shea Stadium in the New York borough of Queens.

A vibrant and pioneering artist who contributed to the artistic history of New York City, John Eric Broaddus died from AIDS at the age of forty-seven in 1990. His artwork is housed in many private collections and the world’s major art institutions including London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Spain’s National Library in Madrid, and the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, among others.

A limited edition artist book, entitled “Spin 1/2 : Books, Paintings and Memorabilia by John Eric Broaddus” was published in conjunction with the 1990 exhibition of his work at the Center for Book Arts on 27th Street in Manhattan. In addition to its multi-colored silkscreen illustrations, a forward introduction was written by Jan van der Wateren, the Keeper and Chief Librarian of the National Art Library at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

The award-winning short documentary “Books of Survival: The Art of John Eric Broaddus” was produced and directed by Gabriella Mirabelli under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Released in 2000 with screenings worldwide, the film reconstructs the artist’s life through intimate interviews with close friends, family and collectors of his art.

Notes: A collection of John Eric Broaddus’s papers, reviews of his work, interviews, symposium records, and memorabilia are housed in the ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa. Correspondence and artist greeting cards are contained in the Archival and Manuscript collection of Northwestern University’s McCormick Library.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus in Costume”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Broaddus, 11th Avant-Garde Festival, Queens, New York”, 1974, Color Print, Mixed Media Performance Documentation, Estate of John Eric Broaddus

Adrian Lee Kellard

The Artwork of Adrian Lee Kellard

Born at New Rochelle, New York in January of 1959, Adrian Lee Kellard was a gifted American artist known for his uniquely-styled woodcuts and sculptures of religious and often homoerotic imagery. Although many of his works have a practical utility, each of Kellard’s creations holds a story, either a historic religious account or a personal circumstance.

Adrian Kellard was one of six children born into the working-class Irish-Italian Catholic family of Adrian Kellard Sr, a detective lieutenant, and Ordie Figliuzzi, a teacher at the local elementary Catholic school. In the early 1980s he attended the State University of New York, Purchase where he studied under Judith Bernstein, an American painter whose provocative works explored the connections between the political and the sexual. Kellard received his training in woodcuts and printmaking through his studies with internationally-known Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi. Through the SUNY Empire State Program, he relocated to New York City and apprenticed under multi-media artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, a gay activist whose work incorporated queer and Catholic iconography.

Kellard’s work was influenced by an eclectic group of artists among whom were American modernist artist Marsden Hartley, impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, and Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. His innate connection to the Catholic faith also exerted a strong influence on the themes of his work. Combining his Catholicism with his own homosexuality, Kellard utilized the figurative style of Byzantine iconography and the woodcut techniques of German Expressionism to examine the turbulent issues of the 1980s, particularly the suffering and deaths caused by the AIDS epidemic. Recurring images in his woodblock works depicted the suffering of Christ and the compassion exhibited to others by the Christian saints.

Although trained by Antonio Frasconi in the traditional techniques of woodblock printing, Adrian Kellard created a unique approach to printmaking and woodcutting. Instead of using the carved woodblock to print repetitive reverse images, he filled in the recesses of the woodblock with paint to create relief sculptures. Kellard would often combine these woodblock reliefs with found materials from his Upper West Side area of Manhattan to form large hanging or free-standing sculptural works. He later, through a suggestion from artist Lanigan-Schmidt, began to incorporate his Catholic imagery into more functional pieces such as towel racks, calendars, desks, and folding screens.

The first work by Kellard to achieve national exposure was his “Shrine”, also known as “The Wagon Piece”, that he entered into the 1985 group exhibition “Precious: An American Cottage Industry of the Eighties” held at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. Constructed of latex paint on wood with added rope and hardware, the wheeled sculptural work is reminiscent of the mobile shrines of Catholic religious processions as well as the medieval mobile stages used for theatrical productions.

On the “dying” side of “Shrine” is an image of a crucified Christ flanked by large clown faces. The bottom panel contains three faces of women, including that of the Virgin Mary, who are all expressing grief. Written in the top panel is the quote taken from an eucharistic prayer “Dying You Destroyed Death”. The reverse, or “rising side”, of this work features a large face of Christ expressing sorrow. The bottom panel depicts an image of the Sacred Heart flanked by scenes of city and town dwellings. The top panel on this side contains the quote “Rising You Restored Life”.

Adrian Kellard’s work was first shown at Soho’s Schreiber/Cutler Gallery in 1986 as the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. For the following five years, his work was featured in annual solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions at the gallery. In 1987, Kellard was diagnosed with AIDS. Although the life-prolonging AZT medication was finally approved in 1989 to treat the virus, the drug still had debilitating side-effects and no long-term efficacy. Kellard made the decision not to take conventional medication and relied on alternative healing therapies to continue his active artistic life.

After his diagnosis, Kellard’s work became less overtly religious; a more compassionate tone, expressed through subdued colors, was evident. On the fourteenth of November in 1991, Adrian Lee Kellard died at the age of thirty-two from complications due to AIDS. His work continues to be exhibited in such venues as Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York.

Notes: The largest collection of Adrian Kellard’s work is housed in the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at the Saint Louis University in Missouri. Its articles on Adrian Kellard can be located at: https://mocra.wordpress.com/tag/adrian-kellard/

The Adrian Kellard Tribute Page, which is maintained by Kellard’s nephew Chris, contains a section in which Kellard’s friends reminisce about his latter days working at Kenn’s Broome Street in Manhattan. The Facebook page is located at: https://www.facebook.com/adriankellard/

Kellard’s early personal development of faith and compassion had a profound effect on his art and attitude towards others. An article written by Carl Siciliano, the founder and former executive director of the largest housing program for homeless LBGTQ youth, the Ali Forney Center, can be found at: https://outreach.faith/2023/10/how-saint-therese-of-lisieux-helped-my-gay-friend-as-he-was-dying-of-aids/

A 2023 dissertation for the State University of New York, Purchase by Leigh Ann Colby entitled “Faith and Function: The Art of Adrian Kellard” can be read at: https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/14012

Top Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Lee Kellard”, Date Unknown, Palladium Print

Second Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard at His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Bottom Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard in His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Ellsworth Kelly “Blue Orange”

Ellsworth Kelly, “Blue Orange”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Using elements of Color Field, hard-edge painting and Minimalism, Ellsworth Kelly created a distinctive personal style of graceful, simple forms skillfully executed with an unassuming technique. He began making abstract paintings in 1949. Three years later, Kelly discovered the late work of Claude Monet and began to paint more effortlessly using large formats and monochrome colors. By the end of the 1950s, his paintings had bridged the gap between reductive Minimalism and American Geometric Abstraction.

Kelly gifted his 1957 “Blue Orange” to painter Robert Indiana. The painting, a physical memory of the bond between two iconic American painters, is inscribed on the reverse with “EK 1957 FOR ROBERT AN ORANGE PEEL FROM PIER 7”. It was Kelly who introduced Indiana to the New York City’s famed Coenties Slip area, a section of Manhattan’s financial district that became the home of many ground-breaking American artists. Finding themselves neighbors, Kelly and Indiana forged a bond that eventually turned into a close and intimate friendship that sparked their creative energy and influenced their entire careers.

In the early 1960s, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana’s relationship eventually came to an end. The heartbreak Indiana felt ultimately led him to create his iconic LOVE imagery. Designed in 1965 for the Museum of Modern Art, Indiana’s tricolor arrangement for the “LOVE” Christmas card -red, blue and green- was seemingly influenced by Kelly’s most recognizable color palette. Although born from sadness and loss, Indiana’s four-letter word became the hope and optimism that would ultimately shape his career.

Kelly’s early development was influenced by the geometric and biomorphic works of Jean and Sophie Taeber-Arp as well as the work of Henri Mattisse whose paintings he saw while living in Paris between 1949 and 1952. Kelly’s main concerns, like those of Matisse, were based on the pursuit of pure form and color. He always looked to nature for his inspiration, either through photographs he had taken of his surroundings or the simple everyday experiences of his life.

The sweeping organic shape of Kelly’s “Blue Orange” is a study in nature that is both abstracted and two-dimensional. Emitting a warm orange glow, it is both minimal, yet powerful, and perfectly formed in its simplicity. Kelly used the simple organic form of an orange peel held against a clear blue sky to create an intimate exploration of pure color and form. Until his death, Robert Indiana kept this painting in his collection- a memory of a shared experience on southern Manhattan’s Pier 7 sixty years prior.

Robert Indian passed away in his home on the nineteenth of May in 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculptural retrospective at the Albright-Know Art Gallery. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Orange” was later put up for auction at Christie’s New York and sold in November of 2018 for USD 2, 772, 500.

Insert Image: Hans Namuth, “Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, 1958”, 1991, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Hans Namuth Estate

Robert Giard

The Portrait Photography of Robert Giard

Born at Hartford, Connecticut in July of 1939, Robert Giard was an American portrait, figurative and landscape photographer. He is best known for his black and white, unadorned portraits of American poets and authors, a two decade-long series that specifically focused on gay and lesbian writers.

Robert Giard received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University where he majored in English Literature. He earned his Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at Boston University. After graduating, Giard taught at the private New Lincoln School in Manhattan, New York. In 1972, he began, entirely self-taught, to photograph portraits of friends, nude figurative works, and the landscapes of the South Fork region of Staten Island. Giard’s early landscapes were mainly shot in late autumn to the beginning of spring when many of the homes were empty for the season. Included in these landscapes are photographs taken at The Creeks, artist Alfonso Ossario’s estate.

In 1974, Giard and his life partner, early childhood educator Jonathan Silin, settled in the popular resort hamlet of Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island, where they remained for nearly thirty years until Giard’s death. In 1985, Giard attended a performance at New York City’s The Public Theater of playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” which dealt with the AIDS crisis in the gay community. Sensing the enormity of the situation, he decided to use his photography to record the experiences, history and culture of the queer community. Combining his interests in literature and gay issues, Giard began documenting through portraits both the significant and new literary figures on the scene.

Robert Giard’s portraits included such notable figures as poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, poet and essayist Adrienne Cecile Rich, playwright Edward Albee III, poet and performance artist Assotto Saint, and novelist Michael Cunningham, a later literary Pulitzer Prize winner. A selection of the more than five hundred portraits Giard had amassed at the time were published in 1997 as an anthology entitled “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers” by MIT Press. This collection served as the companion volume to the New York Public Library’s 1998 exhibition of the same name.

In his later years, Giard began working on a portrait documentation of the three hundred twenty-one grant recipients of the Thanks Be To Grandmother Winifred Foundation, which supported until 2001 projects by women fifty-four years or older that benefitted other mature women. These grants supported research and artistic projects as well as those with social, economic or medical problems. Before his death, Giard had successfully photographed two hundred and forty-one of the women grantees. He traveled extensively across the country by train, bus or plane and kept a diary of his travels and his visits with the diverse group of women he met.

While traveling to a portrait session in Chicago, Robert Giard passed away on the sixteenth of July in 2002 at the age of sixty-two. His published version of “Particular Voices” won the 1997 Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Best Photography/Art Book. A recipient of many awards and grants, Giard had a long and distinguished solo and group exhibition career in the United States. His work is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Giard’s complete archive is housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in its American Collection.

The Robert Giard Foundation was formed in 2002 to preserve his photographic legacy, promote his work for educational purposes and encourage young photographers. The annual Robert Giard Fellowship is a ten-thousand dollar grant given to visual artists whose work addresses gender, sexuality and issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity.

In 2005, Crones’ Cradle Conserve Press published “The Grandmother Winifred Journals” 1996-2002” which contains all Giard’s images of the women grantees plus his diary entries that documented each session.

Notes: Although the Robert Giard Foundation site has not been updated since 2022, the Robert Giard Grant Cycle is still active. The pertinent addresses are: https://robertgiardfoundation.org and https://www.queer-art.org/giard-grant

The Lambda Literary Foundation has a biographical article on Robert Giard on the Gale Literature Resource Center site. It can be accessed through your library system’s card: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA92049131&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E9af9193c&aty=open-web-entry

Top Insert Image: Toba Tucker, “Robert Giard”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Second Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Portrait of the Photographer”, (Self-Portrait), 1982, Gelatin Silver Print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Estate of Robert Giard

Bottom Insert Photo: Robert Giard, “Newton McMahon”, 1981, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.6 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Bryan Rogers

The Paintings of Bryan Rogers

Born in 1977 in Connecticut, Bryan Rogers is an American painter who creates stylized, densely wooded landscapes with waterfalls in which oversized male figures are entwined with the natural elements. His contemporary Art Nouveau-styled paintings form complex tapestries of rhythmic patterns that project an atmosphere of Edenic tranquility.

Rogers sees queer identity as an intrinsic part of his work. The relationship of his paintings’ protagonists to both the organic and constructed spaces in which they are placed reflect the public and private spaces that people navigate during their daily life.

Bryan Rogers earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He continued his studies at New York City’s Pratt Institute where he earned his Master in Fine Arts. From 2013 to 2019, Rogers was co-director of Honey Ramka Gallery, a private UltraContemporary gallery that was based in Brooklyn, New York until its closure.

Rogers primarily works in acrylic paints on panel in his basement studio at his partner’s family home. His vividly colored images are created through thin, transparent washes applied by detail brushes. Interested in the patterns and symmetry of nature and architecture, Rogers places his protagonists, variations of his partner and brother, in lushly-patterned luminescent landscapes. The flowing organic nature of these highly detailed settings are reminiscent of works by Alphonse Mucha as well as the Art Nouveau-styled San Francisco music posters of the 1970s.

Bryan Rogers has exhibited his work throughout the United States and Europe. These include group exhibitions at New York City’s Spring/Break Art Show; The Hole, a contemporary gallery in New York City’s Tribeca district; and Art Athina, Greece’s contemporary art fair and one of the oldest such fairs in Europe. Rogers also participated in the 2022 “The Bathroom Show” as well as the 2021 and 2023 “Works on Paper” group exhibitions at New York City’s Monya Rowe Gallery.

Past exhibitions of Rogers’ work also include the 2021 “Woodland” at the Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles; “Intimacy” in 2022 at art curator Taymour Grahne’s London gallery; the 2022 “The Container Garden” at New York’s Sears-Peyton Gallery; “I Am American” in 2023 at the contemporary Kutlesa Gallery in Goldau, Switzerland; and the 2024 “Here and There” at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery in central London. In New York City, Rogers’ solo exhibitions also included the 2022 “Woodland”, the 2023 “Duality: The Real and the Perceived” and the 2024 “Wallflowers”, all held at the Monya Rowe Gallery in the East Chelsea district of Manhattan.

Inquiries about Bryan Rogers’ paintings and future exhibitions should be presented to his representative, Monya Rowe Gallery, 224 West 30th Street, #304, New York City.

http://monyarowegallery.com/index.php

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Bryan Rogers in Studio”, 2024, Color Print, Artnet News, January 2024

Second Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Here and There”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 122 x 91.4 cm, Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London

Third Insert Image: Bryan Rogers, “Entangled”, 2024, Acrylic on Panel, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York