Mark Maggiori

Mark Maggiori, “What Lies Within Us”, 2021, Oil on Linen, 127 x 142.2 cm, Private Collection

Western Paintings by Mark Maggiori

Born in June of 1977 in Fontainebleau, a commune in the Paris metropolitan area, Mark Maggiori is a French-American painter, draftsman, graphic designer, musician and lead vocalist of the metal band Pleymo. He is known for his landscapes of the American Southwest and scenes featuring Native Americans and American cowboys.

At the age of fifteen, Maggiori traveled during a vacation with his family on a month-long road trip from New York to San Francisco. This long trip, with views of the country’s majestic national parks, made a lasting impression on him and evoked his fascination with Western art. Years later, Maggiori was formally trained in academic drawing at Paris’s Academie Julian, where other great western artists, such as Joseph Henry Sharp and Ernest L. Blumenschein, had trained before forming the Taos Society of Artists in 1915.

In 1997 after earning his degree, Mark Maggiori formed, along with musicians Benoít Julliard, Fred Ceraudo, and Mathias Borronquet, the successful nu metal band Pleymo. The band caught the attention of producer Stéphane Kraemer and released their first album entitled “Keçkispasse?” through the Wet Music label. The band led to opportunities in Europe and other artistic disciplines, such as photography and filmmaking, that increased Maggiori’s artistic creativity.

Maggiori met and married Los Angeles multi-media artist Petecia Le Fawnhawk, both of whom were drawn to the beauty of the American West. At the age of thirty-six, he made the commitment to concentrate on painting Western art. As a Frenchman, Maggiori had a profoundly unique vision of the American cowboy: however, in a span of a few years, he rose through the ranks to become one of the notable Western artists working today. Maggiori’s work combines the outdoor perspective with the colors and techniques he learned from his earlier photographic and film experiences. A prominent aspect of his Western scenes is the depiction of layered, textural clouds which highlight the figures in his landscapes.

Mark Maggiori has participated in many important solo and group shows. At the 2007 “Night of Artists” exhibition at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, he won the Sam Houston Award. To acquaint himself with the Western lifestyle, Maggiori began to spend time on ranches with cowboys and on horseback. Starting in 2017, he concentrated on painting outdoors, en plein air, in Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Maggiori’s work has been featured in various publications including Southwest Art, Forbes Magazine, Flaunt, Western Horseman, and others. His work has been exhibited at San Antonio’s Briscoe Western Art Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, and Los Angeles’s Maxwell Alexander Gallery.

Second Insert Image: Mark Maggiori, “Trail Blazing”, 2019, Oil on Linen, 61 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mark Maggiori, “Under the Pueblo Sun”, 2020, Oil on Linen, 81.3 x 86.4 cm, Private Collection

Radek Husak

The Artwork of Radek Husak

Born in Poland in 1984, Radek Husak ia a contemporary process-driven mixed-media artist whose works in the expanded field of print. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art and is currently based in London.

Through his research and experimentation, Husak developed a new approach to printmaking. He works with pigment transfers twinned with carbon-drawn elements that are either placed on paper or sandblasted aluminum panels. Blasting through the outer layer of aluminum reveals a reflective inner core upon which the pigment transfers are placed. These images are then embellished with paint, soft pastels, bodycolor, and carbon and color pencils.

Radek Husak’s work is inspired by art history, fashion, and queer theory. He combines the tradition of the nude with the large color-elements of 1950s and 1960s Pop Culture. Husak’s images, with their overlapping figurative forms, create in essence a static glitch. The edges of one body blurs and melts into the next, thereby creating sense of movement. The resulting movement effect of these bold, modern images bring to mind the early movement studies by French scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey, which he produced in the 1800s.

Husak creates works in the abstract form and constructs these images by taking elements of nature, such as skies, clouds and anatomical features, fragmenting and rearranging them to form flowing patterns. He also has produced figurative work in other mediums including ceramics and stained glass.

Radek Husak has shown his work in 2021 and 2011 at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London. The Grove Gallery and Quantus Gallery, both in London, are the venues for Husak’s first solo show, entitled “Duality” which is running from November 23 until December 22 in 2022.

Radek Husak’s work can be seen at his website located at: http://www.rhusak.co.uk His work can also be seen at Artsy located at: https://www.artsy.net/show/grove-gallery-duality?sort=partner_show_position

Bottom Insert Image: Radek Husak, “Saint Sebastian (SS5)”, 2022, Pigment Transfer, Bodycolor, Carbon and Color Pencils and Collage on Sandblasted Aluminum, Edition of 3, 84 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Naila Hazell

The Paintings of Naila Hazell

Born in 1981, Naila Hazell is a British contemporary artist who was raised in Baku, Azerbaijan. She studied fine arts under the renowned Soviet social-realist painter Boyukagha Mirzezade, a laureate of the State Prize of the Azerbaijan Republic. Hazell received her MFA at the Azerbaijani Fine Arts Academy. Although working mainly in oils, she is exploring other mediums for her conceptual art projects.

Hazell is mainly a figurative artist whose work in oils contain a diversity of deep colors and structures surrounding her figures. Her works explore the stillness found in those short precious moments that happen throughout one’s life, often ignored due to life’s rapid pace. Hazell’s themes contain many stories linked to ordinary life experiences; they also contain messages about the deeper realities of life and offer glimpses into individual identities.

Naila Hazell’s work has been included in many group exhibitions since her initial entry in a 2000 group exhibition in Baku. Her second group show was “White and Black” held in 2009 at the Azerbaijan National Museum in Baku. From 2010 to 2020, Hazell has had work in sixteen group shows in Azerbaijan and England. Among these were the 2011 “Novruz Celebration” held at Gibson Hall, Bishop Gate in London, the 2020 Mall Galleries Annual Exhibition for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the 2020 Mall Galleries Royal Society of British Artists 303rd Annual Exhibition in London.

In 2008, Hazrll had her first solo exhibition entitled “You Are Always With Me” at Baku’s Art Centre Gallery. Her second solo was the 2012 “Naila Hazell” exhibition held at the Axerbaijan Cultural Center in London. In 2020, Hazell exhibited her works at a solo exhibition in the Hogarth Health Club in Chiswick, London. Currently based in her West London studio, she was the recipient of the 2021 Royal Scottish Academy’s Lyon and Turnbull Award.

Naila Hazell’s work is currently being shown at an exhibition entitled “Face to Face” held at London’s Gillian Jason Gallery on Great Titchfield Street until the 17th of December. Hazell’s website can be found at: https://www.nailahazell.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Naila Hazell with Self Portrait”

Middle Insert Image: Naila Hazell, “Intersection with Shadows”, 2022, Oil on Linen

Bottom Insert Image: Naila Hazell, “Resting on Truth”, 2022, Oil on Linen

Dương Xuân Quyền

Paintings by Dương Xuân Quyền

Born in the Son Duong district of Vietnam in 1987, Dương Xuân Quyền is an artist and educator currently working at Tan Trao University in Tuyen Quang, Vietnam. He is a graduate of the Fine Arts Program at the Hanoi National University of Education.

Dương Xuân Quyền works in the Vietnamese tradition of carved-woodblock printing on black paper as a familiar way to express the contemporary issue of gay relationships to the public. Having produced the initial print work, Quyền then enriches the image with colors from acrylic or oil paints. His current work contains images of male couples as well as lush, tropical scenes of natural habitat.

From 2011 to 2015, Quyền regularly participated in the Northwest-Viet Bac Exhibition, one of the seven regional contemporary art exhibitions in the country. He also organized a 2015 group exhibition entitled “Sac Autumn” at Hanoi’s Exhibition Hall 16 in Ngo Quyen.

Dương Xuân Quyền had his first solo exhibition in 2017 entitled “Love People of the Same Sex”, a collection consisting of twenty-two paintings and embellished wood-carved etchings on paper. In his work, he used tropical foliage and water taro leaves as the background for his presentations of male couples in romantic poses.

In 2020, Quyền won the Third-Place Prize at the Northwestern Fine Arts Exhibition-Region III exhibition for his series “Delayed Appointment I,II,III”. In 2021, he again entered the same exhibition and won another Third-Place Prize, this time for his series “My Side Tells Stories About the Days Apart I, II, III”. Quyền’s second solo exhibition was held in Hanoi in 2022 and entitled “Vertical Flowers”. The show consisted of twenty-eight, large oil and acrylic paintings which depicted Duoc Mung leaves, a native plant well-known to the public.

Insert Image: Dương Xuân Quyền, “Awakening Lovers”, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 80 x 100 cm, Private Collection

Images of Dương Xuân Quyềns artwork can be found at his Instagram site located at: https://www.instagram.com/xuanquyenstudio/?hl=en

Carlos Cancio

Carlos Cancio, “Los Bañistas (The Bathers)”, 1989-1990, Acrylic on Paper Laid on Canvas, 230.9 x 175 cm, Private Collection

Carlos Cancio is a Cotemporary Puerto Rican artist; specialized in painting. After graduating from the University of Boston with a degree in fine arts, Cancio moved to Spain, where he set up his first studio. From 1991 to 2003, he lived in San Francisco, California; he currently lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Cancio has traveled extensively, including India where he became more familiar with that country’s art and culture.

Cancio began to show his work professionally in 1981, and has presented his work in several cities in the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. He has had solo shows at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 1987, the Museum of Art and History in San Juan in 1988, and the Museo de las Casas Reales Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic in 2004. Cancio has also taken part in group shows in the United States and Puerto Rico. His work is characterized by his poetic style, the use of figuration and its inclusion of pan-Caribbean motifs.

Image reblogged with many thanks to: https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Charles Dean Cornwell

The Artwork of Dean Cornwell

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in March of 1892, Charles Dean Cornwell was an illustrator and muralist who was a dominant presence in American illustration during the first half of the twentieth- century. He began his professional career at the age of eighteen as a cartoonist for the Louisville Herald. In 1911, Cornwell found employment with the art department of the Chicago Tribune and began studies at the Chicago Art Institute where he studied under educator and painter Harvey Dunn, a prominent student of illustrator Howard Pyle and a member of the Brandywine School collective.

In 1915, Dean Cornwell traveled to New Rochelle, New York, well known for its established art colony, and studied under Dunn at the Art Students League in New York City where he eventually developed his own light-imbued style. In 1918 in Chicago, Cornwell married artist Mildred Montrose Kirkham, who also studied at the Chicago Art Institute. They had two children; however, due to Cornwell’s constant extramarital affairs, they separated after a few years but never divorced.

Possessing a strong work ethic, Cornwell often worked seventeen hours a day and through the entire week. His illustrations appeared in nearly every major publication in the United States including Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping. In 1926, Cornwell signed a long-term contract with Cosmopolitan for an annual salary of one-hundred thousand dollars, equivalent to over a million dollars today.

Dean Cornwell illustrated the novels of authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Pearl S. Buck, W. Somerset Maugham, and short story writer Edna Ferber. He also illustrated posters to support the United States war efforts in three major conflicts, the Korean War effort and both the first and second World Wars. Through his career, Cornwell did advertising for hundreds of companies including General Motors, the Pennsylvania Railroad, Goodyear, and New York Life; he also illustrated ads for such products as Coca-Cola, Seagram’s Gin, and Palmolive Soap.

Deciding to dedicate the rest of his career to mural painting, Cornwell traveled to London in 1927, where he apprenticed to the painter Sir Frank William Brangwyn for a three-year study of mural painting. He assisted Brangwyn in a series of murals, including the British Empire Panels designed for the House of Lords. These panels, begun in 1925 and completed in 1932, were not hung in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords as intended. Considered too lively and colorful, the panels were housed in a specially built hall in Swansea.

The most renowned of Dean Cornwell’s murals is the Los Angeles Public Library’s twelve-panel “History of California” which encircles the Grand Rotunda. Painted on linen canvases and finished in 1933, the forty-foot tall panels took five years to complete. Cornwell, having used all the funding after two years, took on illustrative work to finance the project to its completion. His other murals include, among others, those for the General Motors exhibition at the 1939 World’s Fair, New York’s Hotel Warwick’s Raleigh Room, the Easter Airlines building (now 10 Rockefeller Plaza), Boston’s New England Telephone headquarters building, and the William Rappard Center in Geneva, Switzerland.

Cornwell lectured and taught at New York’s Art Students League. From 1922 to 1926, he served as the president of the Society of Illustrators and was elected into its Hall of Fame in 1959. Cornwall was elected in `923 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician and achieved full status in 1940. He served as President of the National Society of Mural Painters for four years beginning in 1953. Charles Dean Cornwell died at the age of sixty-eight in New York City on December 4th of 1960. A collection of his papers, correspondence, sketches, scrapbooks and photographs are housed in the Archives of American Art located in the Victor Building in Washington, DC.

Note: A very extensive article on Dean Cornwell, complete with family history, can be found at the PulpArtists website: https://www.pulpartists.com/Cornwell.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dean Cornwell in Studio”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Inset Image: Dean Cornwell, “Study of a Boy, for Water Mural”, 1927-33, Pastel and Charcoal Pencil on Paper, 58.4 x 38.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Dean Cornwell, Los Angeles Public Library”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Dean Cornwell, “Study of a Boy, for Water Mural”, 1927-33, Pastel and Charcoal Pencil on Paper, Dimensions and Location Unknown

Igor Sychev

The Paintings of Igor Sychev

Born in February of 1987 in the northern city of Nadym, Igor Sychev is a Russian artist known for his Magic-Realistic figurative paintings. At the age of five years having shown an inclination towards the arts, his parents enrolled him in the city’s art school where he studied until the age of sixteen. Sychev left Nadym upon graduation and relocated to Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, where he entered the Faculty of Industrial Design at the State Academy of Architecture, Design and Fine Arts.

After graduating from the Academy in 2010, Sychev moved to Moscow, which as Russia’s capital offered wider prospects for a career and self-expression. He soon obtained employment as an industrial designer and created designs for furniture and interior spaces. In 2011 while working in the design field , Sychev began a personal study of oil painting techniques. Over the next ten years, Igor Sychev gradually redirected his energies into pursuing a career as a painter.

In addition to the primary medium of oil paints, Igor Sychev also produces works in the mediums of watercolor, pencil, sepia and charcoal. His work is inspired by the works of the recognized Master artists , such as Michelangelo’s “David”, who viewed the nude male body as a source of beauty, Other influences on Sychev’s work include the paintings of Lucian Freud and Egon Schiele, the large-scale expressive paintings of Paolo Troilo, painter Gregory Little’s boldly colored figures in everyday scenes, and Portuguese painter Carlos Barahona Possollo’s male nude paintings.

As the present politics and attitudes in Russia are predominantly homophobic, Igor Sychev has not been able to exhibit in galleries or museums. He holds his private exhibitions in establishments offered by friends. Sychev’s work is held in many private collections throughout the world, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, and South Africa, among others.

Images of Igor Sychev’s paintings, watercolors and drawings, as well as contact information, can be found at the artist’s website located at: https://www.igorsychev.com

Bottom Insert Image: Igor Sychev, “Concrete Colours” Sketch, Date Unknnown, White/Black Pencil and Pen on Paper, Artist Collection (Available)

Gabrielle Garland

The Paintings of Gabrielle Garland

Born in New York City in 1968, Gabrielle Garland is an American painter whose work is centered on the elements of architecture, space, and design. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned her MFA from the University of Chicago. The daughter of artistic parents, Garland was influenced by her early participation in her mother’s profession of decorative painting. She currently resides in New York’s East Village and maintains a studio in Brooklyn.

For the last decade, Garland has been creating a series of images based on rural American architecture. These surreal portraits of houses and apartments, devoid of people, feature exterior views seen from the street and interior scenes arranged with personal domestic furnishings. Executed with a bold palette, the paintings show a fluid, elastic perspective, often containing oblique angles, which gives each home a unique personality. Lacking distinctive architectural features or indications of geographical locations, these anthropomorphic structures could stand anywhere.

Gabrielle Garland has exhibited her work in many group and solo exhibitions at both galleries and public spaces. These include multiple solo shows at the Hap Gallery in Portland, Oregon; the 2014 exhibition at Chicago’s Logan Center; the 2015 group show at MoMA’s Clemente Soto Vélex Cultural Center; multiple showings at Expo Chicago curated by Corbett vs Dempsey; the 2018 Campbell Project Space exhibition in Sydney, Australia; the 2017 Postcards from the Edge: Benefit for Visual Aids held in New York City; and “Chasing Phantoms”, a group show in 2022 at The Pit in Los Angeles, among others.

In addition to her paintings, Garland produced in 2014 the limited edition, black and white “Gabrielle Garland: Coloring Book”, created from a series of her drawings that became paintings of artists’ spaces.

Gabrielle Garland’s website, which contains images of both paintings and drawings, as well as upcoming exhibitions and contact information, can be found at: http://www.gabriellegarland.org

Top Insert Image: Gabrielle Garland, “Untitled 160”, 2020, Acrylic on Canvas over Panel, 55.9 x 68.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Gabrielle Garland, Untitled 63 (Green Coffee Table), Oil on Panel, 40.6 x 50.8 cm,

Orla Muff

Orla Muff, “Nana”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 45.1 x 55.3 cm, Private Collection

Born in April of 1903 in Copenhagen, Orla Andreas Heinrik Jacobsen was a Danish painter and illustrator. From 1917 to 1921, he received his formal art education at the Copenhagen Technical School under Carl Lund, the leading theatrical artist of the time. In 1917, he adopted a change in name to Orla Muff.

In 1918, Muff was awarded a distinguished seat at the Day’s Drawing Concourse, an event held by Children’s Aid, and had his first drawing printed on a postcard. In the same year he drew one hundred different illustrations depicting gnomes for a series of postcards, which was released in large editions several times. Muff’s illustrations for the early postcards were signed with an intertwined O and J standing for Orla Jacobsen. He continued to design postcards until the late 1960s; these later works were signed with Orla Muff.

After his studies with Carl Lund, Orla Muff began a period of travel through Europe where he studied in Sweden, Holland, France and Germany. He achieved acclaim early in his career as a designer of elaborate Art Deco styled sets for prominent European revues and theatrical productions. Included among these designs were sets for performances at Copenhagen’s Folk Theater, Austrian-born theatrical producer Max Reinhardt’s Theater in Berlin, and Norway’s Mayol Theater in Oslo.

In addition to his set designs, Muff began easel painting in the early 1930s; he created portraits, figurative works, and abstract paintings. His work is characterized by a refined sophistication and a predominantly light-toned color scale. Muff’s abstract compositions, executed in the styles of the Art Deco and Cubist movements, often contain mythologically inspired figures set in largely monochromatic backgrounds.

Painted in his early thirties, Orla Muff’s 1934 “Nana” is an Art Deco derived, Expressionist oil portrait of a young, high-spirited woman, shown smoking a cigarette and set against a mottled turquoise background. Muff’s use of strong lighting effects produced a dramatic and psychologically penetrating portrait of this young woman.

During the course of his career, Orla Muff exhibited successfully in many European exhibitions and was the recipient of juried awards and prizes. Among his notable works are “Leda and the Swan” exhibited in 1940; the 1940 oil on canvas “Tropical Jungle Women”; a 1947 series of wooden sculptural figures based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales; a 1957 series of illustrations from the Bible for use in films; and posters, costume designs, and theater decorations executed in 1921 and 1922 for performances of Anderson’s tales at the Mayol Theater in Oslo.

Orla Muff died in the city of Copenhagen in December of 1984. A small collection of personal correspondence from Orla Muff to Dr. Raymond Piper, as well as a photo of the artist and photos of Muff’s artwork, can be found in the Special Collections of the University of West Georgia.

Notes: An extensive collection of Orla Muff’s illustrated postcards can be found at the Danish Postcard Artists site located at: https://www.piaper.dk/postkortkunstnere/Postkortkunstnere/Orla_Muff/Orla_Muff.htm

A collection of fifty-five images of Orla Muff’s music sheet covers is located at the online Illustrated Sheet Music site: https://www.imagesmusicales.be/search/illustrator/Muff/11874/ShowImages/80/Submit/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Orla Muff”, Date Unknown, Collection of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen

Second Insert Image: Orla Muff, Music Sheet Cover for “Smaragden”, Composer Einar Cronhammer, 1923

Third Insert Image: Orla Muff, Music Sheet Cover for “Han är Söt och Rar”, Composer Harald Mortensen, 1925

Bottom Insert Image: Orla Muff, Music Sheet Cover for “Femina”, Composer Sven Rüno, 1923

Adrien Pelletier

Portraits by Adrien Pelletier

Born in Paris in 1981, Adrien Pelletier is a French painter whose work focuses on the art of portraiture. He earned his Bachelor of FineArts in Graphic Design at Paris’s Central Saint Martins in 2004 and his Master of Fine Arts at London’s Royal College of Arts in 2006. Pelletier also studied graphic design history and semiotics at Ecole Estienne in Paris. He has held the position of art director for many years at fashion magazines based in Paris and London.

For his Bachelor of Arts graphic design dissertation at Central Saint Martins in 2004, Adrien Pelletier produced “SWAG: The Talent of the Others”. The home-printed book was a collection of fictional interviews around the theme of borrowing from others. The research investigated various dialectic oppositions, such as original versus copy, authentic versuss fake, author versus artist, legal versus legitimate, authority versss integrity, and the concept of you versus me.

Executed in the mediums of acrylic or gouache, Pelletier’s works are intimate portraits of strangers, friends and lovers who are situated in outdoor or personal interior settings. These compositions, either innocent or sexual in nature, are painted using bold and complimentary colors in a straightforward, naive style. Pelletier uses personal photographs of people in his life as references for his work. His first exhibition in Paris was as part of Exposition Collective Libre N. 2 held at the 3537 Gallery in March of 2022.

At the invitation of Jean Pierre Blanc, the director of the arts center La Villa Noaillees, Pelletier began in 2017 an Art Residency on the Île du Levant off the coast of the French Riviera. While there, he painted a series of forty-five portraits of the residents of the island’s naturalist village, a society of independent individuals who shun cars and clothes.

In Pelletier’s Despina residency project, a more documentary approach was developed in which he often combined interviews with the portraiture. The project was to portray the cultural resistance to the political far-right movement and the possibilities of interactions among local communities. Portraits of activists, artists, intellectuals and people on the street were combined with dialogues on the environment, the rights of the individual, LBGTQ issues, and the protection of the indigenous Amazon communities.

Middle Insert Image: Adrien Pelletier, “Andreas à Athènes”, 2021, Paris, Gouache on Paper, 15 x 20 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Adrien Pelletier, “Mathias”, 2022, “To Paint is to Love Again” Series, Paris, Acrylic on Canvas, 75 x 50 cm

André Durand

Paintings by André Durand

Born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1947, André Durand is a Canadian photographer and painter of Irish ancestry who works within the European Hermetic tradition. At the age of seventeen, he left Canada with his wife Ludmilla to emigrate to Europe. Through its history, Hermeticism was closely associated with the idea of a primeval, divine wisdom that was revealed to ancient sages. Hermeticism remains influential within esoteric Christianity, particularly in the Christian mystical tradition of Maartinism. The anonymously written 1967 French tome “Meditations on the Tarot”, later edited and published by Robert Powell in 1980, summarizes the theory and practices of Christian Hermeticism.

Best known for his allegorical portraits of such figures as Princess Diane, Durand’s mythologically inspired paintings are the foundation of his work. These pieces display his deep understanding of the rituals and myths of both Christian and Classical traditions. Influenced by Michelangelo, Rubens and Titian, Durand tries to unite his religion with his art; however, he approaches the subject with the objective and philosophical criteria of a Neo-modernist.

In 1970 André Durand painted a series of images inspired by the dancers of the British Royal Ballet. His 1972 portrait of Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, whose work often bears heavily on the psychology of its characters, is housed in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Durand has also received international acclaim for his official portraits of Pope John Paul II and the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

In 2000, Durand became artist in residence at London’s Kingston Upon Thames University. A major exhibition in 2006, entitled “Durand Wholly Pictures” and which covered six years of work, was displayed in churches and cathedrals in the county of Sussex. These works depicted devotional Christian narratives set in traditional Sussex landscapes. In November of 2007, André Durand produced his oil on linen “Daniel in the Lions’ Den”; the sale of the painting and its limited edition prints benefited the Demelza Hospice Care for Children, a charity in Kent that provides support to life-limited children and their families.

After his return to Italy, André Durand visited the commune of Torre del Greco in Naples and the coastal town of Sperlonga, known for its sculptures and Roman sea grotto at the Villa of Tiberius. At the invitation of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Sperlonga, he opened a studio at the museum as artist in residence for two years. From 2010 to 2012, Durand began a series of round formal paintings on the subject of the Stations of the Resurrection, many of which contain the Grotto of Tiberius in the background.

Durand published several art photography volumes of his work in 2012. Most notable among them is the “Fotograf ando Statue per Anno”, an image collection of the statuary in Sperlonga’s National Archeological Museum. Containing text co-written by the museum’s director Marisa de’Spagnolls, this volume of sculptural work is the only comprehensive photographic archive of the museum’s collection.

André Durand’s work has been featured in many solo exhibitions in Italy and England. These include, among others, “Frammenti Classici” in 1995 at London’s Archeus Fine Art; the 2000 “Soggetti Italianizzati” at the Galleria Albemarle in London; and “Via Lucis e Lagrime di San Pietro” at Galleria Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Durand’s work is in many private collections and the permanent collections of the Scottish National Gallery and London’s National Portrait Gallery. He currently lives and works in Sperlonga, Italy.

Images of André Durand’s work, a manifesto on Neo-modernism, enquiries for commissions, and contact information can be found at the artist’s site: http://andredurandportraits.com

Second Insert Image: André Durand, “Saint Christopher Cynocephalus”, 2010, “Sacred” Series, Oil on Linen, 167.5 x 112 cm

Third Insert Image: André Durand, “Narcissus”, 2001, “Mythology” Series, Oil on Linen, 61 x 48 cm, Private Collection, Rome

Bottom Insert Image: André Durand, “Giordano Bruno Burning”, 2000, “Profane” Series, Oil on Linen, 203.2 x 167.6 cm

Burgess (Jess) Franklin Collins

The Artwork of Jess Collins

Born in Long Beach, California in August of 1923, Burgess (Jess) Franklin Collins was an American visual artist best known for his elaborate collages that addressed science, mysticism, sexuality, history and popular culture. In his early years, he read books which ranged from Proust to L. Frank Baum, listened to classical music, and constructed scrapbooks with a great aunt.

In 1942, Jess Collins entered the California Institute of Technology to study chemistry; however with the start of World War II, he was drafted in 1943 into the Army Corps of Engineers. Collins worked in a junior position at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the production of plutonium for atomic bombs until 1946. Upon his release from military service, he continued his education at California Institute and graduated with honors in the field of radiochemistry. Collins was given a position at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project located on the Columbia River in the state of Washington.

During his employment at the Hanford site, Jess Collins began adult education classes to study painting. Due to his growing concerns about the nature of his work in the atomic energy sector and the future of the industry, he left his position and decided to pursue a full-time career in the arts. Collins moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began to study art: first at the University of California at Berkeley and later at the California School of Fine Arts. Due to an estrangement with his family, Collins changed his name during this period of study to the singular Jess.

At the California School of Fine Arts, Jess studied with visual artist Elmer Bischoff, a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area; abstractionist painter Edward Corbett, known for his use of the color black in his work; painter Hassel Smith, whose work went through a succession of art forms from plein air to figurative expressionism; and Clyfford Still, whose work encompassed a wide range of materials. Jess quickly became a member of the 1950s San Francisco art scene and was actively engaged in exhibitions, poetry readings and other creative activities in the area.

In 1951, Jess met poet Robert Duncan, a member of the Black Mountain College and one of the most influential post-war American poets. They began a lifelong romantic relationship that evolved into a domestic household and an artistic collaboration that became central to the development of their art and poetry. This relationship lasted until Duncan’s death in 1968, thirty-seven years later. Along with abstract expressionist Harry Jacobus, Jess and Duncan opened the King Ubu Gallery in 1952, a venue which became an important exhibition space for alternative art in San Francisco.

Inspired by a gift from Duncan of “ Une Semaine de Bonté”, Max Ernst’s surrealist collage book, Jess began making collages, or Paste-Ups, in the early 1950s. These works, which combined text and image fragments from engravings, photographs, jigsaw pieces, and comic strips, became increasingly more complex over time. Eventually the Paste-Ups would contain thousands of distinct pieces. In 1959, Jess began a series of thirty-two works, entitled “Translation”. Each of the works were painted, enlarged reproductions of found images, such as children’s book illustrations and scientific drawings from old Scientific American periodicals, After being copied on new canvases, the paintings were combined with literary texts from such authors as William Blake, Gertrude Stein, and Plato.

The “Scavenger” series was based on painted or repainted canvases found in thrift shops. Thick layers of paint were applied covering parts of the former works while leaving other image areas exposed for viewing. Built in layers, the thick new paint reinterpreted the existing work with its added texture and images. The 1959 “Narkossos” began as a pencil drawing for a painting that was based on the myth of Narcissus. This initial drawing became a large scale mixed-media work of graphite rendering and paste-up fragments featuring references from literary and popular culture. This large-scale work with original artist’s frame is currently housed in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For the remainder of his life, Jess lived and worked in San Francisco except for a period of travel with Duncan in the mid-1950s to Europe and the Black Mountain College. The couple entertained their extensive but intimate circle of friends at their large Victorian home in the Mission District. The household was filled with artworks by Jess and their many friends, Duncan’s vast library, the couple’s recorded music collection, and many beautiful domestic objects salvaged by Jess from thrift shops. Jess had a major retrospective of his work in 1993-1994 which toured museums in San Francisco, Buffalo, and Washington, DC.

Jess died of natural causes at his San Francisco home on the second of January in 2004 at the age of eighty. His work appears in major museum collections around the country including: the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art and the Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco. His work is now represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City.

Note: The Jess Collins Trust established an archive for Jess’s papers and writings in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The Trust, which contains images of Jess’s work, exhibition and event information, and information on Robert Duncan’s work, can be found at: https://jesscollins.org

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jess, Berkeley, California”, 1956-57, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Helen Adam, “Jess Collins, Beach Near Pidgeon Point”, Date Unknown

Third Insert Image: Jess Collins, “Untitled (Car and Male Nude), Date Unknown, Collage, 30.5 x 20.3 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Jess Collins and Robert Duncan, Stinson Beach”, 1958-59

Niels Smits Van Burgst

Paintings by Niels Smits Van Burgst

Born in Maassluis, The Netherlands in 1970, Niels Smits Van Burgst is a figurative painter whose work reveals moments of his personal life experiences and those shared with close friends and acquaintances. He currently lives in Rotterdam where he works in a large studio near the Sparta Stadium.

Niels Smits Van Burgst attended the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hage where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1993 and his Masters Degree in 1994. He committed himself in 1994 to depicting the experience of life awareness in his paintings. Initially he concentrated on painting private and personal experiences; over time, he gradually extended his work to include friends and people casually met through the course of life.

The main emphasis of Van Burgst’s work is to show an identity, an understanding of what it means to be alive in Western society. His paintings, with their broad brushstrokes and cool palettes, provide the memories for their subjects’ life experiences. In many of Van Brugst’s works, he presents images of men existing in a civilized world where their excesses, such as lust, aggression and euphoria, are personally suppressed. In society, however, excesses are still experienced by individuals through sylized media channels such as television, the internet, and film.

Niels Smits Van Burgst’s paintings have been exhibited in New York, Berlin, Amterdam, Brussels, and many more cities across Europe. A retrospective of his work was held in 2013 at the Museum ‘de Buitenplaats in Eelde, Netherlands. Van Burgst won the Van Ommeren de Voogd Foundation Prize for Fine Art in 2007 and the Aku in 2011. His paintings are in collections both private and public.

Niels Smits Van Burgst is represented by “De Twee Pauwen Gallery in The Hage.

Complete collections of Niels Van Burgst’s work, including contact information, can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/nielsSvanB

http://www.svanb.nl

https://www.instagram.com/niels_smits_van_burgst/

Middle Insert Image: Niels Smits van Burgst, “De Schilderkunst (The Art of Painting)”, 2003, Oil on Wood, 30 x 22 cm

Jules-Élie Delaunay

Jules-Élie Delaunay, “Study for David Triumphant”, circa 1874, Black and White Chalk, Graphite on Tan Wove Paper, No Watermark, 37.8 x 25.6 cm, Martin du Louvre Gallery, Paris

Jules-Élie Delaunay, “David Triumphant”, circa 1874, Oil on Canvas, 147 x 114 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France

Born in 1828 in the city of Nantes, Jules-Élie Delaunay was a French painter of portraits and historical scenes. Educated at an elite local school, he received his initial art education from Joachim Sotta, a local artist. In 1846, Delaunay was introduced to French Neo-classical painter Hippolyte Flandrin, who had been the favorite student of painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Two years later, he enrolled in Flandrin’s workshop at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts. In addition to his studies with Flandrin, Delaunay also studied under French academic artist Louis Lamothe, principally a painter of portraits and historical scenes who had studied under both Ingress and Flandrin.

Jules-Élie Delaunay regularly entered into competitions for the Prix de Rome without success; his unsuccessful entry for the 1855 Prix de Rome was his historical painting “Caesar and His Fortune, which depicted Caesar attempting to cross the Straits of Brindisi in disguise as a slave. In 1856 Delaunay was awarded the prize jointly with painter Félix Auguste Clément. The next year, his painting “Christ on the Cross in the Midst of Holy Women” was purchased by the French State in 1857. This enabled him to move to the French Academy in Rome in January of 1857.

Living intermittently as a pensioner at the Villa Medici, Delaunay traveled to Sienna, Bologna, Venice, Verona, and Padua, before settling in Rome where he studied Raphael’s works at the Vatican. While in Rome, Delaunay met and befriended Edgar Degas, Léon Bonnat, and the prominent Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau. With only two years difference in age, Moreau and Delaunay shared a rapport and became close life-long friends. Delaunay returned to France at the beginning of 1861 and began to make studies for his painting “The Plague of Rome”.

In 1862, Jules-Élie Delaunay briefly visited London and, upon his return to Paris, began receiving commissions for decorative paintings. These included frescoes for the church of Saint Nicholas in Nantes, the three murals for the foyer of the Paris Opera House, murals for the Chapel of the Virgin at Paris’s Church of the Holy Trinity, and twelve paintings for the grand hall of the State Council at the Palais Royal.

In 1869, Delaunay finished his oil on wood painting “The Plague of Rome”. which was based on an episode in Italian chronicler Jacques de Voragine’s “The Golden Legend”, collected stories of the lives of medieval church saints. Depicting an angel in flight loosening a plague on Rome, the painting was exhibited at the Salon du Palais de l’Industrie in Paris. It was purchased by Napoleon III for public display and now resides in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Delaunay followed this canvas with two historical paintings: the 1870 “Death of Nessus” and the 1872 “Diana”, a full-length nude portrait of the goddess of the hunt.

Jules-Élie Delaunay’s 1874 “David Triumphant” tells the Old Testament story of David and Goliath and portrays the young hero David after he had slain the Philistine giant Goliath. David is shown holding his slingshot aloft and carrying the bloody sword used to behead his slain foe. This painting was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1874 and attracted considerable attention. Other notable works that followed were the 1876 “Ixion Plunged into Hades”, an 1882 portraiture of the Shakespearean heroine Ophelia, and two different works portraying the classical Greek poet Sappho, which was also a recurrent theme in his friend Moreau’s paintings.

In 1878, Delaunay was awarded a first-class medal at the Paris Exposition and became an officer of the Legion of Honor. He was made a member of the Institute in the following year. In 1889 Delaunay was awarded the Medal of Honor and became director of one of the three official workshops at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After winning the Grand Prize at the Paris Exposition Universelle, his health started to deteriorate. Delaunay died in September of 1891 in Paris and was buried at the Miséricorde Cemetery in Loire-Atlantique. As one of his closest friends, Gustavave Moreau was appointed the executor of his will. The Musée de Beaux-Arts in Nantes holds the largest collection of Jules-Élie Delaunay’s work

Top Insert Image: Jules-Elie Delaunay, “Self Portrait”, 1850, Etching Second State, Plate Size 11 x 8.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Middle Insert Image: Jules-Élie Delaunay, “In the Military Forge”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 114 x 146.8 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jules-Élie Delaunay, Study of a Horse and Rider”, 1869-79, Charcoal with Gouache on Tan China Paper, 210 x 153 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Ludvík Vacátko

The Paintings of Ludvík Vacátko

Born on the19th of August in 1873 in Simmering, a district of Vienna, Ludvík Vacátko was an Austrian-Hungarian painter, sculptor and professor of drawing who later relocated to the Czech Republic. As a painter, his work contained genre landscape scenes, figurative works and battle scenes. Horses, however, their anatomy and role in human life and history became the central theme of Vacátko’s life and work. Although the role of the horse began to slowly and inevitably disappear in people’s lives, Vacátko still rode a horse around the city.

After graduating from Prague’s military school, Ludvík Vacátko taught drawing classes to its cadets. He continued his art studies at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts and later at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts under Professor Nejedli. After fulfilling his military service, Vacátko devoted himself to his career as an artist and became an expert in the depiction of animal anatomy. His artistic influences came from the works of painters George Židlického and Franz Liebl.

In early 1898, Vacátko was asked by Czech painter Luděk Marold to collaborate on a gigantic panorama of the Battle of Lipany for an upcoming exhibition in Prague. Three other artists also worked on the battle scene: painter Karel Raška, landscape painter Václav Jansa, and colorist Theodor Hilšer. The panorama measured eleven meters high by ninety-five meters long.The stress of completing this huge work on schedule had a fatal effect on Marold’s already fragile health; he died shortly after it went on display in 1898.

At the turn of century, Ludvík Vacátko founded a private painting and drawing school in Prague, among his students was the painter Jindřich Prucha who studied under Vacátko in the years 1907 and 1908. Mobilized at the start of World War I, Prucha was later killed at the Galician front in September of 1914 at the age of twenty-seven.

In 1928, Vacátko published the book “Painting Animals”. He participated in the art competitions at the 1932 Summer Olympics which were held in Los Angeles, California. With the assistance of his friend Auguste Rodin, he became a member of Paris’s Union des Beauz Arts et Lettres. In 1943, Vacátko relocated to the city of Kunvald in the Czech Republic where he lived until his death on the 26th of November in 1956. His body is buried in the city of Pardubice.

Note: An extensive collection of Ludvík Vacátko’s paintings and sculptures can be found in Petr Kmošek Kona’s 2018 “V ZiVotě a Obrazech Malíře Ludvík Vacátko” which is located at: https://www.nzm.cz/file/b7f5584224aff8bf79b9a0b701cddfc6/15707/kone.pdf

Top Insert Photo: Photographer Unknown, “Ludvík Vacátko”, Ralph Schlüter Archives

Middle Insert Image: Ludvík Vacátko, “Tillage”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 56 x 79 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Ludvík Vacátko, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Oil on Cardboard, 64 x 50 cm, Private Collection