Category: painting

Nisachar

Nisachar, “Lord Agni”

Agni in Sanskrit means fire and is the name of the Vedic fire god. Agni is also one of the guardian deities of direction, who is typically found in the southeast corners of Hindu temples. In classical cosmology, Agni as fire has been one of the five inert impermanent constituents, Dhatus, along with space: Akasa, water: Ap, air: Vayu, and earth: Prithvi. The five combine to form the empirically perceived material existence or Prakriti.

In the Vedic literature, Agni is a major and oft invoked god along with Indra and Soma.  Agni is considered as the mouth of the gods and goddesses, and the medium that conveys offerings to them in a home or votive ritual.  He is conceptualized in ancient Hindu texts to exist at three levels, on earth as fire, in atmosphere as lightning, and in the sky as sun. This triple presence connects him as the messenger between gods and human beings in the Vedic thought.

Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, “The Warriors”, Oil on Canvas, 1913, Private Collection

Before Jasper Johns or Jackson Pollock, there was Marsden Hartley, America’s first great modern painter of the 20th century. He achieved this distinction in Paris and most of all in Berlin between early 1912 and late 1915. There he produced a stream of paintings that synthesized Cubism and other European modernisms, mixed in non-Western motifs and mysterious symbols and culminated in his lusty, elegiac German Officer paintings.

These canvases are memorials to Karl von Freyburg, the young German officer — possibly the great love of Hartley’s life — who was killed in the first weeks of World War I. Festooned with colorful patchworks of bright banners, checkerboards and bits of military regalia and insignia on black backgrounds, the paintings give Cubism a new legibility and emotionality, softening but also bulking up its fragile geometries into something more tactile and muscular.

A more complete biography of Marsden Hartley, along with other images of his work, can be found in the December 21, 2021 article of this site.

Hunt Slonem

Hunt Slonem, “Black Diamond”, Oil on Canvas, 2015, 56 x 88 Inches

Bringing a freewheeling sense of awe, wonder and detail to his wild array of paintings and sculptures and peaceful, mystical living and working spaces, NYC based artist and lifestyle trendsetter Hunt Slonem is considered one of the great colorists of his time.

As vibrant a dresser and decorator as he is a painter and sculptor, the Maine born creative force of nature is well known for his neo-expressionist works of butterflies, rabbits and tropical birds, the latter often inspired by the 30 to 100 exotic feathered friends he houses at any given time in an aviary in his 30,000 square foot Manhattan studio.

Slonem has had over 300 one-man shows in galleries and museums internationally. His work is also in the permanent collections of 250 museums including the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Moreau Foundation, and is part of private collections all over the world, including those of many celebrities.

Glenn Brady

Five Paintings by Glenn Brady

Born in 1966 in Brisbane, Australia, Glenn Brady grew up in a suburb of wooden houses,some on stilts to deal with the heat of the summer. By the age of sixteen, he had left both school and home. He started painting after a stay in a local phsychiatric hospital and has made painting his career. Brady has had thirteen solor shows in Brisbane and three solo shows in Melbourne. He won first prixe overall in the Gold Coast Show for his paintings at his first entry in a competition.

“I have never studied art and don’t really know much about it. .I just love to paint: and i paint what i see mainlym which to others mightn’t seem like much. But to me it’s all I’ve known……rows of houses and the very varied people who dwell in these suburbs, where each person’s home and life can be completely different to their neighbour who lives 15 feet away.”- Glenn Brady

Augustin Lesage

Augustin Lesage, “The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt”, Date Unknown

In 1911, when he was 35 years old, Augustin Lesage claimed he heard a voice speak to him from the darkness of the mine and tell him, “One day you will be a painter”. The only contact Lesage had had with the arts at that point in his life was a visit to the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille museum in Lille during his military service.

The voice experience prompted him to explore communication with what he believed was the spirit world, and within a year of his first experience, Lesage was hearing more voices, this time specifically giving him instructions. The voice told him what to paint, what art supplies to buy and where to find them. It was his belief that the voice speaking to him was the spirit of his little sister who had died at the age of three.

On purchasing his first canvas, Lesage mistakenly bought one ten times as large as he had intended. His spirit guides instructed him not to be daunted, but to begin painting. Large canvasses became his chosen format. He went on to develop a unique, highly symmetrical style, drafting detailed patterns and monolithic constructions reminiscent of Egyptian and Oriental architectural forms. He is considered an outsider artist of the Art Brut (”raw art”).

Terry Turrell

Terry Turrell, “When the Morning Comes”, 2009, Oil on Panel, 60.1 x 81.3 cm, Private Collection

Turrell was born in 1946 in rural Idaho, and traveled to San Francisco and then Seattle to find his niche in the art world, first whittling, then writing songs, and creating T-Shirts with unique designs. He put together quirky assemblages from a scrap yard of collected wood, tin and metal in his garage and backyard.

Much of his painting was done with his fingers, brushes, and tools from his tool box. His art was discovered in Seattle and he continues to produce improvisational artwork, which has acquired a loyal following. His works appear in prominent collections throughout the world.

Jacek Yerka

Jacek Yerka, “Eruption”, 1990, Acrylic on Canvas, 65 x 73 cm, Private Collection

Born in Poland in 1952, Jacek Yerka studied fine art and graphics prior to becoming a full-time artist in 1980. While at university, Yerka resisted the constant pressures of his instructors to adopt the less detailed, less realistic techniques that characterize so much of contemporary art. Instead, he stubbornly continued to work in the classic, meticulous Flemish style he still favors to this day.

His paintings are acrylic on canvas and carefully rendered, using images from his childhood, including his grandmother’s kitchen. He also includes odd beasts and whimsical landscapes. He comments, “For me, the 1950s were a kind of Golden Age … If I were, for instance, to paint a computer, it would definitely have a pre-war aesthetic to it.”

Imam Sucahyo

Imam Sucahyo,  “Nightmares”, Acrylic and Marker on Canvas, 2008, 50 x 78 Inches

Imam Sucahyo is a self-taught artist who was born in Tuban, a small city on the north east coast of East Java, Indonesia. His interest in art began after discovering a book in his school’s library about Affandi, Indonesia’s master painter known for his expressionist style.  After the deaths of his wife and mother, he moved to Surabaya, the capital city of East Java in 2014. There he met like-minded people and, through social media, Imam Sucahyo’s artwork attracted the followers of the Art Brut movement.

The intimacy of the subject in Imam Sucahyo’s “Nightmares” defies its own scale. Color, texture, and space merge to create a series of visual riddles. The feel of landscape, death and burial, a floating figure, red sky, horizontal figure at the top, and the encasement of the form in high contrast linear definition, all work together  in a feeling of earthy, somatic spirituality.

Color temperature evokes literal associations (earth, sky, blood) within an alternating visual tension and relief across the canvas in a lateral back and forth motion. The intuitive decisions about composition seem to be as much about discovery as invention…as if the image had always been there, just between consciousness and sleep.

Giovanni Colacicchi

Giovanni Colacicchi, “Fine d’ Estate”, (End of Summer), 1932, Oil on Canvas, Gallery of Modern Art, Florence, Italy

Born in 1900 at the ancient town of Anagni, Giovanni Colacicchi was an influential figurative painter of Italy’s Novecento artistic movement. Launched in 1923 at an exhibition in Milan, Novecento’s members rejected Europeanavant-garde art and wished to revive the tradition of large format history painting in the classical Italian manner. The group wished to create an art that was associated with the nationalistic rhetoric of Italy’s fascist regime. 

The son of Roberto Colacicchi and Pia Vannutelli, Colacicchi completed his classical studies in Rome. He arrived in Florence in 1916 and worked as an assistant at the Scolopi school. Colacicchi volunteered for military service after the defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto in 1917; however, hostilities had ceased before his military train reached the front lines in 1918. He enrolled in 1920 at the University of Florence’s Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. Colacicchi studied painting under Francesco Franchetti and would later write one of the few contemporary biographic works on Franchetti’s life. 

While at the University of Florence, Colacicchi frequented the Giubbe Rosse Cafe, an important meeting place for Florentine artists and intellectuals among whom were sculptor Giuseppe Graziosi and writers Alessandro Bonsanti, Alberto Carocci and Elio Vittorini. In 1922, he set up his first studio in the Borgo San Jacopo district of Florence. Colacicchi was a co-founder of the political and literary newspaper “La Rivista di Firenze” in 1924;  he contributed an article “Sulle Arti del Disegno (On the Art of Drawing)” and two poems for the paper. 

In September of 1924, Giovanni Colacicchi married Amalia Zanotti, a daughter of a noble family from Biella who introduced him to the landscapes of the Calabrian region. This marriage would later be annulled and he would marry painter Flavia Arlotta who would remain with him until his death. In October, Colacicchi exhibited his “Malinconia (Melancholy)” at the Palazzo della Esposizioni held at the Parterre di San Gallo; through this important work, he would be introduced to the Novecneto movement. In 1926, Colacicchi presented his work to positive reviews at the “Novecento Italiano” exhibition in Milan which also included works by Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, and Giorgio Morandi.

From 1928 to 1948, Colacicchi exhibited his work regularly at the Biennale of Venice and participated in all the other major exhibitions. In 1930, he had his first solo exhibition at the Saletta Fantini in Piazza Santa Trinita. After designing stage sets for the Scala in Milan in 1931, Colacicchi painted his 1932 “Fine d’Estate (End of Summer)”, later purchased in 1992 by Milan’s Gallery of Modern Art, and began his “Giacobbe e l’Angelo (Jacob and the Angel)”. After two more solo shows, he exhibited his “Jacob and the Angel” at the nineteenth Venice Biennial. In June of 1936, Colacicchi had a major exhibition of work, including paintings done during a year stay in South Africa, at the Galleria Fantechi.

In 1940, Colacicchi became a professor at Florence’s Accademia di Bella Arti, a position he would hold until 1970. Evacuated with his family to the Florence subdivision of Vallombrosa in 1943, Colacicchi and his family were guests of art historian Bernard Berenson at the Casa al Dono. While residing there, he posed his model Guido Fabiani tied to a tree and painted his 1943 “San Sebastian”. During these war years, Colacicchi and his family took into their home both Allied soldiers who escaped from German prison camps and Jewish families in danger of being caught.

After the liberation of Florence in August of 1944, Colacicchi became the Rector of the Accademia de Bell Arts and was called to join the Urban Commission for the Reconstruction of Florence to oversee historic conservation of both its urban landscape and monuments. Besides his portraits, landscapes, and monumental figure studies, he created numerous decorations for public buildings in Italy. On the twenty-second of January in 1947, Colacicchi exhibited his work in a group show entitled “Nuevo Umanesimo (New Humanism)” that cited its opposition  to the new wave of abstraction and supported objectivity in  the subject’s representation, both pictorial and sculptural. He continued to exhibit in solo and group exhibitions through the rest of his years primarily in Italy but also in Germany, Sweden, and Spain. 

In 1991, a retrospective entitled “Giovanni Colacicchi” was published by Idea Books in Milan. On the twenty-seventh of December in 1992, Giovanni Colacicchi, still at work on his paintings, died in his family’s home in Florence’s Via dell’Osservatorio. The private archive of Giovanni Colacicchi and his second wife Flavia Arlotta, deposited by their children Piero and Francesco in 2011, is preserved at the Archivio Contemporaneo “Alessandro Bonsanti” of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence.  

Notes:  The official Giovanni Colacicchi website, which contains a year by year biography and multiple galleries of his work, is located at: http://www.giovannicolacicchi.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Giovanni Colacicchi”, circa 1920s, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Giovanni Colacicchi, “Landscape, 1941, Oil on Canvas, 60.5 x 76 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image:Giovanni Colacicchi, “La Via Lattea con Spirale (The Milky Way with Spiral)”, 1980, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Giovanni Colacicchi and Flavia Arlotta”, circa 1935-40, Vintage Print

 

Simon Hantai

Simon Hantai, “Bird”, 1950, Mixed Media on Paper, 119 x 13 cm, Private Collection

Simon Hantaï was a highly regarded, famously reclusive French painter whose work explored ideas of absence and silence — and who took those ideas so seriously that he disappeared completely from view for 15 very productive years.

Born in Hungary, Mr. Hantaï was a major figure in European art from the 1950s onward. He was known in particular for abstract, often huge canvases that crackled with bold, saturated color punctuated by unfilled areas of pure white. Their singular appearance resulted from a method of folding and tying the canvas before applying paint, a process known as pliage, which Mr. Hantaï developed in the early 1960s.

He was also known for the long, self-imposed retreat from the public arena in the 1980s and ’90s. In 1999, the magazine Art in America described this absence as stemming from “a streak of ethical obstinacy virtually unparalleled in contemporary art.” In a 1998 interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Mr. Hantaï explained the reason for his long isolation:

“I felt that the art world was going wrong,” Mr. Hantaï said. “I was starting to receive commissions. I was being asked to paint the ceiling of the Paris Opera House. Society seemed to be preparing to paint my work for me. I could have obeyed; many, perhaps most, painters do. The prospect did not coincide with my desire.”

Bob Hoke

Paintings by Bob Hoke

Bob Hoke’s‘ paintings on board are immediate, bizarre and rich in colour, lively portraits that live in the Outsider art world, a place outside the cultural mainstream, that are compelled to exist because the maker has to make, scratch, mark, bring colour to live without regard to art history and the gallery system.

He lives and sleeps art, along with his partner Therese Marie Nolan, in an old brick church on the banks of the Mississippi river. For decades he has been scrounging for found materials in skips to paint his vivid pictures – that are both chaotic and full of humour – that draw from a hard life of making, moving, trying to make paintings that exorcise his feelings and experiences. He now sells his works online directly to a global audience.

“I’m a bohemian dumpster divin outsider artist/painter. Aint got a lot of formal training. Been painting on and off most of my life. For the last 10 years I have been displaying my paintings on ebay. I paint approximately 30 to 40 paintings a month. Nothing the same but a common thread of chaos and humor. I live in an old church in downtown historic Hannibal, Missouri along the vast Mississippi river. I sleep and eat downstairs and paint upstairs.”- Bob Hoke