Category: watercolors

Lionel Reiss

Lionel Reiss, “Going Home”, Watercolor, 1946

Lionel S. Reiss was a Polish-American Jewish painter born in Jaroslaw, Poland, and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he studied commercial art.  His family had moved to the United States in 1898 when he was four years old. As immigrants to the United States, Reiss’ parents joined the ranks of other Eastern European Jews who were fleeing their native countries at the start of the 20th century. Lionel Reiss’ family settled on New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood and Reiss himself spent the majority of his life in the city. Reiss worked as a commercial artist for newspapers, publishers, and a motion picture company. Eventually he became art director for Paramount Studios and is credited to be the creator of the Leo the Lion logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

Lionel S. Reiss’ 1946 watercolor, “Going Home (Near Bloomingdale’s and the 59th Street Elevated),” captures a crowd of mothers, shop girls, laborers, and businessmen ascending the packed staircase.

Servando Cabrera Moreno

Paintings by Servando Cabrera Moreno

Some 32 years after his death, artist Servando Cabrera Moreno, born in 1923, continues to stir up controversy. Provocative, transgressive, Cabrera Moreno dared to portray the nude male body in postures too daring for the Cuba of 1960-1980, where homosexuality was more than frowned upon. It’s no secret that their sexual orientation prompted the ostracism and exclusion of many Cuban artists, and Servando was no exception.

“In the late 1960s, as a step towards his erotic phase, which was the climax of his artistic development, Cabrera Moreno made works in which the representations were intended to parallel the plant and animal worlds. In the decade of the 1970s—which in his case lasted for more than 10 years, culminating in his death in 1981—Servando preferred to sensually represent the human body,” says Rosemary Rodríguez, curator of the exhibition Epifanía del cuerpo, entitled “Epiphany of the Body”, presented at the museum as part of the celebration of his 90th anniversary.

Gerardo Mosquera commented that Servando and Umberto Peña were the first, from the 1960s, to make homoerotic art in Cuba. They were the precursors of this trend, which spread at an international level beginning in the 1970s, starting in the U.S.

The erotic theme in Cuba was approached by various artists, including ones like Carlos Enríquez, who date from the first half of the last century. In the 1960s, along with Peña and Cabrera Moreno, artists like Manuel Mendive, Raul Martínez, and Osneldo García welcomed eroticism among their themes. But Umberto Peña and Servando are recognized for daring to approach homosexuality during those difficult years.

James Bertucci

Pencil Drawings and Watercolor Titled “Passage” by James Bertucci

James Bertucci is a national award winning artist who has an emphasis in representational painting and sculpture techniques. James’ artwork has recently been exhibited in galleries of New York, Laguna Beach, Washington D.C. and Chicago.

James interest in art began at age three. At age 6, he won a District Award as the outstanding student in all of Will, Kendall and Grundy counties of Illinois for his artwork. His piece entitiled the “Illinois State Cardinal” was published in the Illinois Reading Council Journal at age 7. James credits his high school teachers and mentor for 11 years, John Tylk for developing his skills. Bertucci studied under artist John Tylk at age 5, who taught him drawing and painting skillls along with introducing him to various techniques and approaches to art.

Antony Gormley

Watercolors and Sculptures by Antony Gormley

Gormley’s career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. Almost all his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal casts.

Gormley describes his work as “an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live.” Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or “the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside.” His work attempts to treat the body not as an object but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical – a trace of a real event of a real body in time.

The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormley’s Asian Field, an installation of 180,000 small clay figurines crafted by 350 Chinese villagers in five days from 100 tons of red clay. The appropriation of others’ works caused minor controversy and some of the figurines were stolen in protest. Also in 2006, the burning of Gormley’s 25-metre high The Waste Man formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus.

On 13 March 2011, Gormley was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for the set design for Babel (Words) at Sadler’s Wells in collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet. He was the recipient of the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and is the 2013 Praemium Imperiale laureate for sculpture. Gormley was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to the arts.

Rene Capone

Watercolors by Rene Capone

Born in September of 1978 in Niskayuna, a small town in the mid-eastern area of New York state, Rene Carol Capone is an American figurative painter.. He attended the Parsons School of Design in New York City on a merit scholarship in the fine arts. Upon graduation in 2000, Capone moved to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. 

Known for his depiction of the human figure in mysterious, erotic, or whimsical circumstances, Capone often uses themes from his favorite myths and literary tales in which to place his characters. He began his career as an artist creating dreamlike, sensual, often homoerotic images of young men on deep, personal quests for love, identity, and their place in the world.

After a four year hiatus from his fine art work in which he studied the topic of child abuse, Rene Capone self-published his first authored and illustrated graphic novel, “The Legend of Hedgehog Boy”. More than just a queer fairytale of a boy in search of his identity, the tale dealt with the issue of child abuse and its consequences, both psychological and physical. The story argued in favor of self-expression and the reconstruction of one’s life after a traumatic event.

In 2014, Capone published this illustrated novel entitled “A Boy Named”, the story of boy, now more comfortable in his skin, on a quest for identity in his world. The tale is told through eighty-five illustrations by Capone as well as a collection of portraits of him taken by various photographers.  Also in 2014, Capone did thirteen  illustrations for Dorian Carbone’s children’s book “A Turtle Who Likes to Eat Fish”. 

An overall retrospective of Rene Capone’s work from 1999 to 2011 was published under the title “Any Given Moment: The Artwork of René Capone”. His most recent publication is a hardcover art book of Capone’s work from 1997 to 2018, entitled “A Boy Named Patience”, which was published in 2021. The artwork features the words of poet Dave Russo alongside the paintings. Capone’s artwork has also been  published on book covers, including publications in France and Israel,  and will be used for a series of books entitled “The Goldberg Variations”, issued by arnolandpress.com.

He took a four-year absence from creating fine art to dig deep within his psyche and painful childhood to create a series of paintings that inspired his graphic novel The Legend of Hedgehog Boy. The novel struck a deep chord within many readers, and it transformed the artist as well.– The Advocate

Charles Demuth

Five Watercolors by Charles Demuth

Painter Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was one of the earliest American artists to expose his gay identity through forthright, positive depictions of homosexual desire. As a leader of the American Modernist movement, Demuth was best known as a pioneer of the precisionist style* and as a master watercolorist.

Raised in a well-off merchant family, Demuth had the financial freedom to pursue his artistic vision without regard for public opinion concerning aesthetics or sexuality. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he started painting when a childhood illness rendered him unable to walk. Charles studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where the realist tradition of former faculty member Thomas Eakins prevailed. Eakins was himself a painter of major works of homoerotic content.

In 1912, Charles began a relationship with Robert Locher, also from Lancaster, who was to become his life partner. After spending two years in Paris, the two men went to New York City, enjoying the bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich Village. They also embraced the summer artist colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Demuth associated with leftist writers and artists committed to sexual liberation.

Note: In regards to Charles Demuth’s “Turkish Bath with Self Portrait”, seen above, the watercolor sketch offers an illuminating depiction of the gay subculture in postwar New York. The setting is likely the Lafayette Baths, a Turkish bathhouse in the East Village. The artist, with dark hair and mustache, appears nude in the center of the frame. He talks with two other men: a blonde man swaddled in a towel, who faces away from the camera, and a fully undressed red-headed man who strikes a confident pose. Behind the trio, a man with indistinct features stands in a pool, water waist high, while a duo in the upper right corner of the canvas seem to be caught up in an intimate moment.

Demuth was likely open about his sexuality with his friends, and frankly depicted the evolving, underground gay scenes in New York and Paris. This image is striking in its open, candid depiction of desire and attraction between men. It was not intended for public exhibition during Demuth’s lifetime and historically it has great significance, visualizing the emergence of a sexual subculture organized along very different lines than male/female courtship. Since his death, Demuth’s watercolors of early-20th-century gay life have proven to be sources of inspiration and fellowship to later generations of American artists, including Andy Warhol, another Pennsylvania native.:

 

Richard Vyse

Richard Vyse: Watercolors and Ink Drawings on Paper

Internationally collected artist Richard Vyse has shown at galleries in Manhattan and Honolulu. He has studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and taught at Pratt n Brooklyn. Vyse’s art has been featured in many art and literary arts magazines. His artwork is in the collection of the Leslie+Lohman museum in Manhattan.

Andrew Wyeth

 

Andrew Wyeth, “Afternoon Flight”, 1976, Drybrush Watercolor, 58.1 x 72.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Andrew Newell Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Primarily a realist painter, Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and the people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford and his summer home in Midcoast Maine. Many of his works were done with the drybrush watercolor technique.

Andrew Wyeth is perhaps best known for his 1948 painting “Christina’s World”, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He  passed away on January 16, 2009 at the age of ninety-one.