Category: painting

David Inshaw

Seven Landscapes  by David Inshaw

Born in Wednesfield, Straffordshire, England, David Inshaw is a British artist who sprang to public attention in 1973 when his painting The Badminton Game (bottom image) was exhibited at the ICA Summer Studio exhibition in London. The painting was subsequently acquired by the Tate Gallery and is one of several paintings from the 1970s that won him critical acclaim and a wide audience.

David Inshaw studied at Beckenham School of Art in 1959–63 and the Royal Academy Schools in 1963-66. A teaching post at the West of England College of Art, Bristol, in 1966–75 was followed by a two-year fellowship in Creative Art at Trinity College in Cambridge. Inshaw moved to Devizes, Wiltshire, in 1971 and formed the Broadheath Brotherhood with Graham and Ann Arnold in 1972. The three artists were joined by Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, and Graham and Annie Ovenden in 1975, when the group was renamed the Brotherhood of the Ruralists.

Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes, “Man on a Balcony”, Oil on Canvas, 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art

“Man on a Balcony” is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. The painting was exhibited in Paris at the  Salon d’Automne of 1912. This Cubist contribution to the salon created a controversy in the French Parliament about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such ‘barbaric art’.

Gleizes was a founder of Cubism, and demonstrated the principles of the movement in this monumental six foot tall painting with its projecting planes and fragmented lines. The large size of the painting reflects Gleizes’s ambition to show it in the large annual salon exhibitions in Paris, where he was able with others of his entourage to bring Cubism to wider audiences. The painting was completed around the same time as Albert Gleizes co-authored with Jean Metzinger a major treatise and manifesto on cubism entitled “Du Cubisme”.

“The plastic results are determined by the technique. As we can see straightaway, it is not a matter of describing, nor is it a matter of abstracting from, anything that is external to itself. There is a concrete act that has to be realised, a reality to be produced – of the same order as that which everyone is prepared to recognise in music, at the lowest level of the esemplastic scale, and in architecture, at the highest.”- Albert Gleizes, The Epic: From Immobile to mobile Form”, 1925

Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins, “John Biglin in a Single Scull”, 1873, Watercolor on Paper, Yale University Art Gallery

Thomas Eakins was in the vanguard of the army of Americans who invaded Paris during the latter part of the nineteenth century to complete their artistic education. After returning to his hometown of Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins never left the United States again. He believed that great artists relied not on their knowledge of other artists’ works but on personal experience.

For the rest of his career, Eakins remained committed to recording realistic scenes from contemporary American life. During the three years Eakins was abroad, competitive rowing on the Schuylkill River, which runs through Philadelphia, had become the city’s leading sport. In England, rowing had long been regarded as the exclusive activity of gentlemen, but in Philadelphia anyone could take part, since rowing clubs made the expensive equipment available to all. Eakins was an enthusiastic rower himself, but after his time in Paris he regarded the activity less as a form of recreation than a fertile source of subject matter that combined his dedication to modern life with his interest in anatomy.

 

Agostino Arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene, “Martyrium (San Sebastiano)”, 2011, Oil on Linen, 101.6 x 91.4 cm, Private Collection

Arrivabene’s masterful paintings have the ability to stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a “wunderkammern” or “a room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This points to the painter, Arrivabene, as an explorer  returning with  bizarre and extraordinary fragments or treasures  from  strange, new visionary worlds.

Peter de Francia

Paintings and Drawings by Peter de Francia

Peter Laurent de Francia was a French-born British artist, who served as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, from 1972 to 1986. He was the author of two books on Fernand Leger: Leger: The Great Parade (Painters on Painting) (1969) and Fernand Léger (1983).

Brought up “mostly by servants” in Paris, Peter de Francia was the only child of a wealthy corporate lawyer of Genoese descent and his English wife. He attended the Brussels Academy and, after four years in the army, the Slade.  However, his real education was in Italy, in the reawakening of neo-Realism and in the studio of the Communist artist Renato Guttuso, whose denunciatory drawings ‘Got Mit Uns’ were a lifelong influence. When de Francia arrived in England in 1940, he knew almost no one. He would remain for more than 60 years a Displaced Person, fundamentally opposed to all the British art establishment stood for.

Peter de Francia met both Beckmann and Grosz in New York in 1950. His identification with the late figure compositions of Léger was evident in his impassioned essay on The Great Parade, published in the RCA’s “Painters on Painting” series in 1969. Those three artists all pointed towards linearity; and it was in large-scale complex charcoal drawings, rather than paintings, that de Francia found his mature expression.

Forrest Williams

Forrest Williams, “Interval”, 2001, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Forrest Williams studied English and Art History at Edinburgh University, Scotland. He graduated from the New York Academy of Art, New York, with a MFA in Painting. Williams  currently works and lives in New York.

“My paintings are about men: about being a man as I see it and about relationships between men. They depict individual men, but they’re not portraits. The men inhabit a particular place, but it isn’t real. It’s an ambiguous, interior territory, where things are and are not what they seem.”

The paintings are staged scenarios, theatrical moments, and the men who inhabit them are the actors. The reality lies in the emotional core of this world — intensely felt but highly contained. My model Lorenzo called it “emotional purgatory.”

Although they’re a group of anonymous men, they’re at the same time self-portraits I suppose. Perhaps these are worlds of their own making — worlds with outsides and edges and unknown terrains beyond. This is the region where desire and doubt, longing and reticence, intimacy and uncertainty coexist. It speaks of absence as much as presence.” – Forrest Williams

Reblogged with many thanks to https://k250966.tumblr.com

Kenton Nelson

Kenton Nelson, “Looking”

Kenton Nelson was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA.  He attended Long Beach State University and Otis Parsons Art Institute, and for the last 35 years has had his art studio in Pasadena, CA.  He has been on the faculty of the Otis Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

Nelson traces his interest in painting back to his great uncle, Roberto Montenegro, renowned Mexican muralist and Modernist. The style of Nelson’s paintings have their origins in American Scene painting, Regionalism, and the work of the WPA artists of the 1930′s.

Nelson paints figures, landscape, and architecture bathed in light.  The objective in his paintings is to idealize the ordinary with the intention of engagement, using the iconic symbols and styles of his lifetime in a theatrical style to make leading suggestions.

John Jude Palencar

“Tree Goblin, John Jude Palencar, Watercolor and Gesso

After receiving a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, John Jude Palencar received further training at the Illustrators Workshop in Paris before embarking upon a highly successful career of painting book covers. He is noted for an intense, almost photographic realism with bold colours, though his figures are sometimes juxtaposed with more abstract backgrounds.

Primarily working in the fields of Fantasy and Horror, he has painted covers for some high-profile books, like Christopher Paolini’s popular “Eragon” novels and Jacqueline Carey’s “Kushiel” novels, yet he has painted science fiction covers as well; one standout example was his painting showing a tiny figure against pale ruins for a 1986 republication of David Brin’s 1985 “The Postman”, vaguely similar but vastly superior to Tom Hallman’s cover for the hardcover edition. He has also worked outside the genre for magazines like National Geographic, The Smithsonian, and Time magazine.

Stephen Cefalo

Stephen Cefalo: Paintings

Stephen Cefalo is an American artist in the traditions of Symbolism and the Baroque.  He was born in the hometown of Albrecht Durer (Nuremberg, Germany) on the birthday of three of his his heroes, Winslow Homer, Charles Le Brun, and Franz Von Stuck, and felt a calling from early childhood to become a painter.

Denis Sarazhin

Denis Sarazhin, “Teatime”, Oil on Canvas, Date Unknown

Denis Sarazhin was born in Nikopol, Ukraine in 1982 . He attended the Kharkov Art and Design Academy, graduating in 2008. He specialized in painting and was a pupil of Ganozkiy V. L., Chaus V. N., and Vintayev V. N.. Sarazhin was awarded with the 1st Degree Diploma Award for Excellence in Painting from the Ukrainian Art Academy. Since 2007 he has been a member of Kharkov’s section of the association of Ukraine’s Artists’ Alliance.