Tag: drawing

The House of Hammer

The House of Hammer, Issue 10, “The Curse of the Werewolf” Pages 37-38

“The Curse of the Werewolf” is a 1961 British horror film based on the novel “The Werewolf of Paris” by Guy Endore. The film was made by the British company Hammer Film Productions and was shot at Bray Studios. The leading part of the werewolf was Oliver Reed’s first starring role in a film. The film was heavily censored in the United Kingdom on its initial release and was first shown on the BBC in a restored version thirty-two years later in 1993.

The film was adapted into a 15-page comic strip for the January 1978 issue of the magazine “The House of Hammer” (volume 1, # 10, published by General Book Distribution). It was drawn by John Bolton from a script by Stephen Moore. The cover of the issue featured a painting by Brian Lewis as Leon in human and werewolf forms.

Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew, “The Rose Necklace”, 1931, Oil on Board, Signed in Latin and Dated ’31 t.l.’, 29 x 21 Inches, Collection of Seymour Stein

Pavel Tchelitchew was a Russian-born artist known for his Surrealist portraits and anatomical studies. Often camouflaging human bodies and faces into geometric lines or landscape forms, the artist used both abstraction and symbolism to convey both the outer and inner appearance of an object.

Born on September 21, 1898 in Moscow, Russia, Tchelitchew and his family were forced to flee Russia during the 1917 Revolution. Tchelitchew went on to study under Alexandra Exter at the Kiev Academy. After graduating from school, the artist worked designing and constructing stage sets for theaters in Odessa and later Berlin. Moving to Paris in 1923, he fell into the intellectual circles of Gertrude Stein, leading him to incorporate Cubist and Surrealist elements into his work.

Tchelitchew went on to form a small group of artists known as the Néo Humanists, which included André Lanskoy, Christian Bérard, and Eugene Berman. By the 1930s, his work had begun employing multiple perspectives, a brighter color palette, and extremely foreshortened figures.

While still working on stage designs for ballets by Igor Stravinsky, he began to receive international recognition, and in 1942 one of his most celebrated works, “Hide and Seek”, was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tchelitchew died on July 31, 1957 in Grottaferrata, Italy. Today, Tchelitchew’s works can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The Rose Necklace” is a portrait of Charles Levinson, known as ‘Le Vincent’, who was ‘a handsome ex-soldier with a superb necklace of tattooed flowers’ (Tchelitchew). With his nonchalant beauty and easy physicality, Levinson inspired Tchelitchew to produce a full series of tattooed circus figures. This portrait provides an earthy, sexual counterpoint to Picasso’s 1904  “Garçon à la Pipe” which inspired Tchelitchew to paint portraits of his partner Charles Henri Ford and others surrounded by flowers; only here the garland of roses is transposed to the sitter’s chest. 

Vito Tomasello

Vito Tomasello, Untitled, 1940s, Pastel Drawing, 22 x 30 Incehs, Private Collection

A lifetime NYC resident and gay artist, Vito Tomasello is best known for his male nude drawings and paintings, as well as documenting the Ballet Trocadero dancers of the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s he was asssociated with the avantgarde in New York City. Works by his hand hang in the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York

Emien Etting

Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings by Emien Etting

Emlen Etting, born in Philadelphis in August of 1905, was a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and member of Philadelphia’s elite Main Line Society. He attended schools in Lausanne, Switzerland, and St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island. After graduating from Harvard in 1928, Eating  studied in Paris with the artist Andre Lhote who taught his students to reduce their subjects into lines and shapes. Emlen remained influenced by Lhote, his teacher and mentor, for the rest of his life.

Paris at that time was a student’s world. It was filled with myriad forms of art, philosophy, and all the passionate discussions that would accompany it. Etting frequented the most exclusive art shows and enjoyed the avant-garde films screened in Paris Studio 28. It was in this artistic crucible that Emlen Etting mingled with the most influential artists of the day

Emien Etting’s figurative paintings and drawings depict the loneliness of modernity and the extravagance of nature. He illustrated works by Paul Valéry and Franz Kafka, among others. Etting’s two films, the 1932 “Poem 8” and “Oramunde” filmed in 1933, are considered milestones of poetic filmmaking.

James Childs

James Childs, “The Bravo”, 1988, Black and White Chalk, 31 x24 Inches

The basis of James Childs’ art today is his study with Richard Lack and R.H.Ives Gammell, an education based in Boston Impressionism and the traditions of the Ecole des Beaux Arts transmitted through Gammell’s master, William McGregor Paxton. Childs amplified these studies by extensive copying of the Masters and comparative research in 19th. Century and Renaisance painting and drawing. The Greek aesthetic informs his personal ideal.

Childs has a B.F.A. from The Minneapolis College of Art and Design and spent a year at Atelier 63 in Haarlem, Holland, founded and taught by members of the expressionist group COBRA, Ger Lataster and Karl Apprl. Since moving to New York in 1987, Childs has mainly supported himself through society portraiture painted in a classical style. He has painted some of the most powerful men and most glamorous women of this era including Christopher Forbes, Carolyne Roehm, Blaine Trump, Elizabeth Ross Johnson, Ursula Corning, and Barbara and Donald Tober.

Robert Riggs

Robert Riggs, “The Pool”, 1933, Lithograph, Edition of 50, 37.3 x 49.6 cm, Private Collection

Printmaker and illustrator Robert Riggs was born in Decatur, Illinois and first studied art at Millikin University there, moving to New York and the Art Students League in 1915 when he received a scholarship underwriting two years of study. Riggs subsequently joined the advertising firm A. W. Ayer & Company of Philadelphia. While working there, Riggs also studied at the Académie Julian.

Returning to Philadelphia, in addition to his work at A. W. Ayer, Riggs also worked as a freelance magazine illustrator. He was strongly influenced by the work of George Bellows, producing a series of boxing prints in his own style, followed by a series of lithographs depicting circus-related subjects. In 1940, Riggs  produced four lithographs dealing with modern medical practice commissioned by publisher Smith, Kline, and French.

Of the eighty-four prints Riggs made over two decades, most were produced in the mid-1930s. Riggs gave up printmaking around 1950 but continued to produce advertising illustrations for major corporate clients. He was elected to associate membership in the National Academy of Design in 1939 and bercame a full member in 1946. Between 1961 and 1963, Riggs taught at the Philadelphia College of Art.

William Roberts

William Roberts:  Paintings and Drawing (Study for ‘The Return of Ulysses’)

Roberts was intrigued by Post-impressionism and Cubism, an interest fuelled by his friendships at the Slade, in particular with the audacious British painter David Bomberg, as well as by his travels in France and Italy after leaving the Slade in 1913.

Later in 1913 Roberts joined Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops for three mornings a week. The ten shillings earned for each workshop that Omega paid enabled Roberts to create challenging Cubist-style paintings such as “The Return of Ulysses” which was purchased by the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Nottingham, England.

Fred Hatt

Fred Hatt, Pastel Life Drawings

Born in 1958, Fred Hatt is an artist working in figurative drawing and painting, experimental video and photography, and performance. Holding a Bachelor of Fine Art in Film, he is a self-taught artist whose work includes great line drawings on charcoal paper done with oil pastels. Hatt’s work has been exhibited at the Leslie Lohman Gallery in New York City, the American Museum of Natural History, and the “Focus on the Figure” exhibition at the Edward Hopper House Art Center, among others.

“For me what is important is not conceptual or iconographic content, but process and practice. Drawing from life is the core practice for a multi-media career that crosses the boundaries between performance and visual arts, between traditional craft and contemporary technologies.Whether making a drawing, a video piece, a photograph or a performance, the focus is on the perception of energy and its expression through light and form.” -Fred Hatt

Images posted with thanks to the artist’s site: http://www.fredhatt.com

Egon Schiele

Works by Egon Schiele

Born on June 12 of 1890, Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter and a  protégé of Gustav Klimt. Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century, noted for the intensity and the raw sexuality of his work.He produced many self-portraits, of which many were naked self-portraits.  The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele’s paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism.

Maurice Heerdink

Paintings and Drawings by Maurice Heerdink

Born in 1955 in The Hague, Maurice Heerdink is a Dutch painter known mostly for his subtle painted photo-realistic male nude art. After graduating in 1981 from the Royal Art Academy in The Hague, The Netherlands, he traveled extensively through north and middle America. Heerdink illustrated books and magazines from 1989 to 2000, writing and publishing short stories of his own.

Heerdink developed a modern Caravaggio-style during the 1990s, emphasizing drama and lighting in his paintings. Focusing on mythology, he painted a series of figurative scenes, receiving a first prixe in 1999 at the “The Jesus Mystery” exhibition for his painting “The Return of the New Messiah”. A documentary of his life and art, “The Playful Eroticism of Maurice Heerdink” was shown on MVS Gay TV Amsterdam in 1998.

 

Richard McLean

Richard McLean, “Homoerotic Phones”, Date Unknown, Graphite on Paper

Richard McLean was an American painter and leading member of the Photorealist movement. Best known for his equestrian paintings, his intensely detailed and lifelike depictions of horses and their riders established him as a unique voice within the movement.

Born in 1934 in Hoquiam, Washington, McLean’s early artistic career was shaped by his study under painter and printmaker Richard Diebenkorn at the Bay Area California College of Arts and Crafts, where he received a BFA before going to on earn his MFA at Mills College in San Francisco. As one of the thirteen most prominent Photorealist painters during the 1960s and 70s alongside the likes of Chuck Close and Richard Estes, he is notable for his consistent use of Western subject matter in his works.

Before his death on January 3, 2014 in his hometown, McLean’s work was featured in many prominent international exhibitions, including the 1970 “Twenty-Two Realists” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the 1972 “Documenta” in Kassel, Germany.