Category: painting

Lyle Carbajal

Lyle Carbajal, “Oranges as Orange as Crayons”, Mixed Media on Wood

Lyle Carbajal uses his paintings to explore the unintentional. Through the use of color, bold line and image placement he hopes to capture the naiveté of daily life. Citing references to childhood imagery such as comics, monsters and machines, Carbajal juxtaposes the innocent associations of youth with the complicated path of maturation.

His focus on the face is evident in each painting, where visages are wild-eyed and gripped with anger, terror, confusion or pain.  The depictions of extreme emotive states in his paintings are as raw and innocent as those of a child.  Childhood memories and his Latin American background have helped Carbajal search for a primitive expression of the world.

Lyle Carbajal holds a degree in design yet is self-taught as a painter. His work has been exhibited in galleries around the world such as Museu de Estremoz in Portugal, the Caro D’Offay Gallery in Chicago, and Art Fair in Denmark.  His work can be found in many private and corporate collections.

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele, “Agony”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 70 x 80 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

At first strongly influenced by Klimt, whom he met in 1907, Schiele soon achieved an independent anticlassical style wherein his jagged lines arose more from psychological and spiritual feeling than from aesthetic considerations. He painted a number of outstanding portraits, such as that of his father-in-law, Johann Harms (1916; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), and a series of unflinching and disquieting self-portraits. Late works such as The Family (1918; Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna) reveal a newfound sense of security.

Ross Dickenson

Ross Dickenson, “Valley Farms”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

“Dickinson was a young artist employed by the Public Works of Art Project when he created this magical image of California’s farm country. Water, green grass and swelling earth conjure the promised land that John Steinbeck would describe in The Grapes of Wrath a few years later. But Dickinson introduced disquieting details, as if to suggest that danger exists even in paradise. The tiny fire in the field at lower right, probably set to burn dry brush, echoes a massive column of smoke across the hills in the distance. The hills themselves have the orange-red look of the rainless months, when California’s mountains become tinderboxes, and fires can sweep down into the valleys. Dickinson’s painting captures the fear underlying America’s hopes for better days during the Depression.”

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton, “Achelous and Hercules”, Detail, Egg Tempera and Oil on Canvas on Board, 1947

Achelous and Hercules is displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.  The painting was executed in egg tempera and oil on canvas, and affixed to a plywood panel measuring 62⅞ by 264⅛ inches.

The central figure is the muscular, shirtless “Hercules” grappling with the horns of the bull. A second man, also wearing bluejeans and no shirt, stands by the bull’s haunch and holds the end of a rope that swirls into another man’s hand in the foreground, where the work of woodchopping has been interrupted. The bull’s tail points into the surging, wavelike woods that rise out of the distance; a barn and silo emerge from the woods to the right. The undulating line of the rope and tail visually connect the woodlands and the timber produced from it.

Achelous and Hercules was painted for display at Harzfeld’s department store in Kansas City. The store specialized in ready to wear clothing for women, and Benton later acknowledged that it was strange to see his work “in an atmosphere of silk nighties, pink slips and perfume.” It was his first mural commission since his historical murals for the Missouri State Capital ten years before.

In light of controversies over that project, Benton sought reassurance that Harzfeld’s corporate president, Lester Siegel, would refrain from trying to exercise artistic control. Siegel in turn asked that Benton observe a certain degree of decorum. After the store closed in 1984, its parent company Allied Stores Corporation made a gift of it to the Smithsonian through the institution’s Collections Acquisition Program.

Joel Rea

Paintings by Joel Rea

Joel Rea was born in 1983 and graduated from the Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2003. He has exhibited his paintings through out Australia for the last 13 years featuring also in notable overseas exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia. Rea has been acclaimed for his oil paintings in many prestigious art awards held across Australia including most recently the Fleurieu Landscape Prize, The Mosman Art Award, The Sulman Prize and the 2016 Moran Prize for Portraiture.

Kelly Moore

Kelly Moore, “Dead Cowboy Retablo”

Kelly Moore is a self-taught artist who has no formal training or education in art. His original and expressionist work has been referred to as Outsider Art, Art Brut, Raw Art and Visionary Art. His intuitive style and technique reflects a raw, primitive quality that is frequently juxtaposed with a startling innocence. He is currently living and working in New Mexico.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst, “Naissance d’une Galaxie (Birth of a Galaxy)”, Oil on Canvas, 1969, Beyeler Foundation, Riehen, Switzerland

Closely associated with Surrealism and Dada, Max Ernst made paintings, sculptures, and prints depicting fantastic, nightmarish images that often made reference to anxieties originating in childhood. Ernst demonstrated a profound interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which is apparent in his exploration of Automatism and his invention of the Frottage technique.

The artist’s psychoanalytic leanings are evident in his iconic 1923 work “Pietà”, or “Revolution by Night”, in which Ernst substitutes the image of Mary cradling the body of Christ with a depiction of the artist himself held by his father. Much of the artist’s work defied societal norms, Christian morality, and the aesthetic standards of Western academic art.

Max Ernst painted “Birth of a Galaxy” in Paris during his second French period.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Athanor”” Oil on Canvas, 1991

Athanor is the painting executed in 1991 and exhibited in Berlin and Dresden. An evocative and controversial depiction of a Reichstag-like building as a brick oven makes Athanor – a monumental and a very important artwork that simultaneously presents a warning and a depiction of hope and potential to the German people. The title refers to the self-feeding furnace used by alchemists to keep the temperature during the process of turning lead into gold, and matter into spirit. This painting is a metaphor of the turbulent history of Germany, especially in regards to its art and culture. Created at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the painting evokes the memories of the destruction of Berlin in 1945, and the Reichstag fire in 1933.

Gerald Mast

Gerald mast, Clare Middle School Murals, 1938, Right Central Panel of Four, Clare, Michigan

Born in Topeka, Indiana, in 1908, Gerald Mast was a painter, graphic artist, designer and educator. He studied at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, and at Detroit’s School of Arts and Crafts, under modernist painter and educator John Carroll, who was associated with the Ash Can school artists. As an educator, Mast taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and was a Professor at the College of Architecture and Design of the University of Michigan at Grand Rapids from 1948 until his death in 1971. 

Gerald Mast was a member of the Works Progress Administration,   a New Deal federal agency which, from 1936 to 1943, carried out public works projects from building and road construction to public art projects. He produced murals for the Franklin Settlement in Detroit; the Bronkema Center in Grand Rapids; and the Harrick Public Library in Holland, Michigan. Executed in 1938 at the Detroit Institute of the Arts over a period of two years, his best known murals  are the four large panels installed in the now Middle School of Clare, Michigan. 

Mast’s four large, vertical panels, each twenty feet in height by eight feet in width, are installed on the north wall of Clare Middle School’s auditorium. The murals show agriculture, academics, the local trades, and the oil and gas industry, all of which were unique to the area when Mast arrived to complete his work; these mural received restoration in 2004. 

The two outer murals in the auditorium are dominated by a woman on the left panel and a man on the right panel. The nude woman,  holding a sheet in front of her, is standing before scenes of prosperous agriculture; the nude man, also holding a sheet, is seen standing before scenes of buildings and oil wells. The right central panel depicts scientists in front of classical thinkers. The left central panel depicts athletes, musicians, children, and nurses, with farmers and agricultural goods in the foreground. All of the subjects in the murals display unsmiling, grim determination.

Gerald Mast exhibited his work at the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1943 to 1963; the Great Lakes Exhibiton of 1938; the Rhode Island School of Design; Indianapolis’ Herron Art Institute from 1930 to 1964; and the National Ecclesiastical Exhibition in Birmingham, Michigan, among others. Executed under the WPA program, Gerald Mast’s 1938 ceramic sculpture, “Sea Nymph” is installed at the University of Michigan. 

Gerald Mast died on August 10, 1971 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Smithsonian Museum’s Archives of American Art contains his correspondence and writings, family photographs, several sketchbooks and loose sketches, exhibition catalogues, and writings, which include his manuscripts for “Egg Tempera” and “Philosophy of Art”. 

Insert Image: Gerald Mast, Untitled, 1964, Lithograph on Paper, Edition of 35, Private Collection

Benito Quinquela Martin

Benito Quinquela Martin, “Elevadores a Pleno Sol”, 1945, Oil on Canvas

Benito Quinquela Martín was an Argentine painter born in La Boca, Buenos Aires. Quinquela Martín is considered the port painter-par-excellence and one of the most popular Argentine painters. His paintings of port scenes show the activity, vigor and roughness of the daily life in the port of La Boca.

On the cover of Benito Quinquela Martin’s coffin was the following quote and a painting of the port of La Boca.

“Quien vivió rodeado de color no puede ser enterrado en una caja lisa”

(“He who lived surrounded by colour cannot be buried in a plain box.”)

Alex Colville

Alex Colville, “Horse and Train”, 1954, Casein Tempera on Hardboard, 41.2 x 54.2 cm, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada

Alex Colville is a Canadian painter from the province of New Brunswick. Colville was born in Toronto, As a child Colville used to construct model planes and trains. Colville grew up around horses because his father and grandfather owned them. Horse and Train would be personal to him because of his past experience with horses and technology. In 1938, Colville began attending Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick and received his bachelor for fine arts in 1942. Colville was involved in the Second World War; he became a war artist in the Canadian military.

Colville first sketched “Horse and Train” on a sheet of paper, on March 16, 1954. The original title of the painting was “A Dark Horse against an Armoured Train.” The setting of the picture “Horse and Train” is located at Aulac just outside of Sackville in the province of New Brunswick, where the elevated tracks crosses the Tantramar Marshes.

The “Horse and Train” was inspired by the poem, “Dedication to Mary Campbell,” published in 1949 by South African writer Roy Campbell. The poem includes the lines: “Against a regiment I oppose a brain, and a dark horse against an armoured train.”

Paul Signac

Paul Signac, “Blessing of the Tuna Fleet at Groix”, Oil on Canvas, 1923, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Neo- Impressionism flourished from 1886 to 1906. The term was coined by art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe the innovative work of the pioneers of this daring new vision.

Neo-Impressionism extended its reach beyond France to Belgium as well, where an avant-garde group known as Les Vingt (Les XX) embraced Seurat’s ideals following the 1887 exhibition in Brussels of his masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte”. Théo van Rysselberghe was also a member of this highly visible Belgian circle.  Even Henri Matisse briefly experimented with a Neo-Impressionist technique, prompted in part by the influence of Signac’s treatise “From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism” and by the invitation to paint with Signac at his Saint-Tropez residence.

Neo-Impressionists rejected the random spontaneity of Impressionism. They sought to impose order on the visual experience of nature by way of codified, scientific principles. An optical theory known as “mélange optique” was formulated to describe the idea that separate, often contrasting colors would combine in the eye of the viewer to achieve the desired chromatic effect.

The separation of color through individual strokes of pigment came to be known as “Divisionism” while the application of precise dots of paint came to be called “Pointillism.” According to Neo-Impressionist theory, the application of paint in this fashion set up vibrations of colored light that produced an optical purity not achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on canvas.