Category: painting

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin, “Blue Roofs of Rouen”, Oil on Canvas, 1884, Oskar Reinhart Foundation, Switzerland

Paul Gauguin came to art late in life under the influence of the painters Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. Beginning his career as a stock broker, Gauguin developed a strong interest in art, and following the market crash of 1882, decided to dedicate his life to painting. A champion of the cloisonnist style, Gauguin’s strong, constructive brushstrokes embolden his colorful paintings.

After spending the early years of his career in Brittany and Arles with his contemporary, Vincent, van Gogh, Gauguin struck out into the world, travelling to Martinique, Panama, and Tahiti. Over the course of his two trips to Tahiti, he was inspired by what he called the “savage” surroundings, and pioneered the French Symbolist and Primativist movements.

His many allegorical paintings and portraits of women evoke the erotic, mysterious aura that Tahiti held for him. Gauguin’s synthesis of Western traditions and “exotic” subject matter paved the way for the Fauvists and Expressionists that followed in his wake.

Karel Appel

Karel Appel, “The Crying Crocodile Tries to Catch the Sun”, 1956, Oil on Canvas, Guggenheim Museum

Karel Appel was a member of the Cobra group, which emphasized material and its spontaneous application. Although the group was short-lived, its concerns have endured in his work. The single standing figures of humans or animals he developed during the 1950s are rendered in a deliberately awkward, naive way, with no attempt at modeling or perspectival illusionism. Thus, the crocodile in this painting is presented as a flat and immobile form, contoured with heavy black lines in the manner of a child’s drawing.

Appel’s paint handling activates a frenzy of rhythmic movement the 1956 “The Crying Crocodile Ties to Catch the Sun”, despite the static monumentality of the subject. Drips and smears are interspersed with veritable stalactites of brilliant, unmodulated color that buckle, ooze, slash, wither, and thread their way over the surface. The physicality of the impasto and its topographic variety allow it to reflect light and cast shadows dramatically, increasing the emotional intensity of violent color contrasts.

Jane Fisher

Jane Fisher, “Black Pajamas”, Oil on Canvas, 2013

Born in 1961, Jane Fisher received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University, where she won the Sara Sidwel Rogers Prize for her work at the Undergraduate Art League Exhibition in 1982. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. Fisher has shown her work at exhibitions since 1984 and has become well known in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

A figurative painter, Jane Fisher paints ordinary, identifiable people in familiar settings as individuals rather than as ideals. Her subject matter is diverse, ranging from divers in mid-air to models at an auto exhibition. Fisher’s work has been shown at the Charles Campbell Gallery and the George Krevsky Gallery, both in San Francisco, The Gescheidle Gallery in Chicago, and the LyonsWier Packer Gallery in New York. 

“The ideas for my paintings emerge as emotions. My task is to turn those emotions into images. I do this by playing on the viewer’s empathy, sympathy, curiosity and sense of humor. My paintings are figurative, presenting people in varying degrees of self-awareness. I am interested in how people behave alone as well as how they present themselves to others when they want to make a specific impression. These are the two main contexts I have used in exploring this; presenting people in moments of isolation, and presenting them in performance.” 

-— Jane Fisher

Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger, “Gelmeroda XIII”, Oil on Canvas, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States. 

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012. 

Feininger’s 1936 “Gelmeroda XIII” portrays one of his favorite subjects—the Gothic church of Gelmeroda, located near Weimar, Germany. In his many images of the fourteenth-century structure, Feininger explored the building as a physical connector between the past and the present. Here, he adopts the angled fragmentation of form and space found in Cubism and Italian Futurism to give a sense of spiritual energy and transcendence. In 1937, one year after this work was completed, Nazi officials included Feininger’s art in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, prompting him to return permanently to the United States.

Guillermo Lorca

Guillermo Lorca, Self Portrait

Guillermo Lorca was born in Santiago, Chile and began his artistic training at the age of 16, with Chilean painter Sergio Montero. In 2002 he participated in a group exhibition at the National Fine Arts Salon (Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes). After that show he started Arts studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, just to leave it very soon in pursue of his own personal training.

After college he studied for a while with Matías Movillo who taught him some important techniques – and from then on Lorca started to “simply observe a good painters like Velázquez”. Lorca is not hiding his fascination by classical painters such as Rembrandt and Diego Velazquez and that influence can be observed in his Baroque influenced work which is dealing with sensitive issues such as violence, sensuality, innocence and childhood.

After his first solo exhibition at Gallery Matthei, in 2007, Lorca had the opportunity to spend some time as an apprentice and assistant at the studio of the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum, near Oslo. Lorca was his first Latin American protégé.

Joseph Wright of Derby

Joseph Wright of Derby, “A Moonlight with a Lighthouse, Coast of Tuscany”, Oil on Canvas, Purchased in 1949 by the Tate Museum

When journeying to and from Rome, Wright had crossed much of mainland Italy but his acquaintance with districts beyond Rome would have been brief. Years later, this imagined scene gave Wright a context in which to compare the differing effects of natural and artifical light-sources that had so long fascinated him. Here, the luminosity of the moonlight in the night sky is contrasted with the hazy beam of the lighthouse and its reflection in the water. The looming dark mass of the cliff and portentous-looking rocks in the bottom left create a sense of melodrama.

Meghan Howland

Five Paintings by Meghan Howland

Meghan Howland, born in 1985 in Massachusetts lives and works as an artist in Portland, Maine. She graduated from New Hampshire Institute of Art with a BFA and is a Candidate for her Masters in Fine Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Her paintings takes the viewers into a seemingly dark fable world where she leaves them purposely to their own thoughts without telling an explicit story. Her work mostly shows people or objects she is constantly sourrounded by. The recurring bird image served her as a kind of a personal mascot in the beginning. In combination with the rather quiet portraits, the birds act more as a ‘perplexing embrace’ than an unsettling element of distraction.

Joel Rea

Joel Rea, “Forces”

Joel Rea was born in 1983 and graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2003. He has exhibited his work in Australia and the United States and has been acclaimed for his oil paintings in many prestigious art awards through out Australia. In 2013 he was selected for the Archibald Salon Des Refuses exhibition in Sydney, the Black Swan Award for Portraiture in Perth, the Fleurieu Landscape Prize in Adelaide and is the winner of the 2013 ANL Maritime Art Award in Melbourne.

Gerard Dillon

Gerard Dillon, “Mending Nets, Aran”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 84.3 x 92 cm, Private Collection

The Aran Islands, dramatically located off the west coast of Ireland, have long held a fascination for Irish artists and writers. At the turn of the 19th century, its preservation of the Irish language and its tightly-knit community”s traditional life intimately bound to the land and sea represented something wholly other, indeed sacred, from the modernity that was encroaching Ireland.

One of the definitive accounts of this existence was recorded by John Millington Synge, the playwright and writer who first visited the islands in 1898, in his 1907 book, “The Aran Islands”. illustrated by Jack Butler Yeats. Synge’s profound experiences of the island’s communities  informed his greatest and most famous writing, “The Playboy of the Western World”, a three-act play first performed at the Abby Theater in Dublin on the twenty=sixth of January in 1907.

By the time of Francis Gerard Dillon’s arrival forty years later in the 1940s, the nature and shape of these communities had been changing as the 20th centruy advanced; yet they still preserved a magic and mystery that entrhalled him. For Dillon, life in the West of Ireland represented a new freedom for him. It was an escape from the conflicts, both internal and external, that had dogged Dillon’s upbringing and adult life in Belfast and London. This release from past tensions fed directly into his painting.

Just as Synge evoked these communities with words, Dillon caught their spirit through paint. His naïve, child-like painting style imbued his work with an innocence, poetry and joy that is representative of both the Islanders way of life and Dillon’s response to them.  His paintings are rich visual stories which kept the rich story-telling tradition that was integral to the Aran Islands’ culture.

Franklin Carmichael

Franklin Carmichael, ‘Snow Clouds’, 1938, Oil on Canvas

Franklin Carmichael was a Canadian artist and the youngest original member of the Group of Seven. Carmichael arrived in Toronto at the age of twenty and entered the Ontario College of Art, where he studied with William Cruickshank and George Reid. In 1911, he began working as an apprentice at Grip Ltd for $2.50 a week. He then joined Tom Thomson and other painters who were training to become serious artists, joining them on weekend sketching trips.

He moved to Belgium in 1913 to study painting but due to the war soon returned to his native Ontario to rejoin the other artists. Carmichael was greatly influenced by Tom Thomson and shared space with him at the Studio Building in 1914. He was also on the fringe of the group because of his difference in age and was closely associated with the newer members of the Group of Seven.