Tag: landscapes

John Minton

The Artwork of John Minton

Born in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire in December of 1917, Francis John Minton was an English illustrator, painter, stage designer and educator. He studied art at St. John’s Wood School of Art in northern London from 1935 to 1938.  Minton was introduced to the work of the French Neo-Romantic painters by his fellow student Michael Ayrton, who would become renowned for his writings and sculptural work. Between 1938 to 1939, he spent eight months studying art in France, often in the company of Ayrton, until the start of the second World War necessitated his return to England.

In 1941, John Minton joined the Pioneer Corps, a division of the British Army combatant corps used for light engineering tasks. He received a commission in a light infantry regiment in 1943, but was discharged in the same year on medical grounds. While in the army, Minton, collaborating with Michael Ayrton, designed sets and costumes for actor and theater director John Gielgud’s 1942 production of “Macbeth”. In the same year, they presented their paintings in a joint exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries. Minton’s intense, realistic work was expressed in dark color schemes and included a self-portrait and cityscapes of streets and bombed buildings.

During the war years, Minton met painters Adrian Ryan and Lucian Freud and developed a close friendship which soon became an intimate sexual relationship with both men that lasted until the late 1940s. After he had seen Freud’s portrait of Francis Bacon, Minton commissioned in 1952 his own portrait from Freud. Between 1943 and 1946, Minton taught illustration at London’s Camberwell College of Arts. He often attended late night sessions at The Colony Room Club, a private members’ drinking and social club known for its debauchery, and visited jazz clubs that dotted London’s Soho district. 

After he left Camberwell College, John Minton served as the head of the drawing and illustration department at the Central School of Art and Design from 1946 to 1948. During these years, he  continued his own work and shared a studio, first with painters and theater set designers Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, and later with painter Keith Vaughan, all of whom were artists of the Neo-Romantic circle in that immediate post-war period. 

Minton began a prolific period of work after 1945; besides entries in group exhibitions, he had seven solo shows at London’s prestigious Lefevre Gallery before 1956. Minton, in addition to creating his paintings and illustrative work, also became a tutor of painting in 1949 at the Royal College of Art, where he taught until the year before his death. By the mid-1950s with the arrival of the newly popular American Abstract Expressionism, Minton’s commitment to figural composition had begun to be seen as out-dated. 

John Minton returned to the world of the theater and accepted a commission to design stage sets for two productions by playwright Ronald Duncan for London’s Royal Court Theater, “Don Juan” and “The Death of Satan”. While working at the theater, he met Kevin Maybury, an Australian carpenter working in the scenery department. A relationship soon developed and, by the winter, Maybury had moved into Minton’s house in Chelsea. Maybury became the model for several drawings by Minton and also posed for a portrait in which he is shown seated in his workshop surrounded by the tools of his trade. 

Finding his work out of fashion and suffering from psychological problems, Minton began to self-medicate with alcohol. In April of 1956, he left the Royal College of Art on a one-year unpaid leave; his departure caused by a lack of confidence in his own ability as both teacher and painter, and by deep-seated doubts about the relevance of painting in the modern world. He started suffering from extreme mood swings and became more dependent on alcohol. John Minto was found dead on the 22nd of January in 1957. The coroner’s verdict was suicide. 

John Minton’s final work, an ambitious large-scale painting, was incomplete at the time of his death and depicted a gravely injured man surrounded by distraught onlookers.  On the day before Minton’s death, the painter Ruskin Spear had visited him at his studio and was told that Minton identified the dying figure with Hollywood actor James Dean, who had died two years previously in a car accident. The painting, known as the 1957 “The Death of James Dean”, is clearly unfinished; there were indications through friends that Minton never intended to finish it as he was worried about not being able to break out of his past style.

Minton’s range of work was wide and included designs for stamps, textiles and wallpapers; posters for the London Transport system and Ealing Studios, a television and film producer; large scale paintings for the Royal Academy and the Dome of Discovery exhibition space at the 1951 Festival of Britain; and numerous landscapes of the British countryside. However, he is best remembered for his illustrative work for books, both interior work and book jackets. Among these are poet Alan Ross’s travel book “Time Was Away-A Notebook in Corsica”, author Herbert Ernest Bates’s “The Country Heart”, and two ground-breaking cook books by food writer Elizabeth David.

Note: A history of the relationship between John Minton, Lucian Freud and Adrian Ryan, interspersed with images of their work, can be found at the online Museum Crush magazine located at: https://museumcrush.org/art-sex-and-death-the-unholy-trinity-of-freud-minton-and-ryan/

Top Insert Image: Rollie McKenna, “John Minton”, 1951, Bromide Print, 24.5 x 19.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Second Insert Image: John Minton, “John Minton”, circa 1953, Oil on Canvas, 35.6 x 25.4 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: John Minton, “The Life Model”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 63.5 x 76 cm, Private Collection 

Bottom Insert Image: John Deakin, “John Minton, Soho”, 1951, Gelatin Silver Print, Michael Hoppen Gallery

Marsden Hartley

Paintings by Marsden Hartley

Born in Lewiston, Maine on January 4th of 1877, Marsden Edmund Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, essayist and author.  The youngest of eight children, he remained, at the age of fourteen, with his father in Maine after the death of his mother, his siblings having moved to Ohio after the death. A year later in 1892, he joined his family in Cleveland, Ohio, where he began formal art training at Cleveland’s School of Art under a scholarship.

In 1898, Hartley relocated to New York City to study painting under Impressionist William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art; he also associated with member artists from  the National Academy of Design. Hartley became a close friend and admirer of allegorical and seascape painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, whom he often visited at his Greenwich Village studio. He also read the writings of Walt Whitman and the American  transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau.

Between 1900 and 1910, Marsden Hartley spent his summers in the city of Lewiston, located in southern Maine, and the region of western Maine near the village of Lovell. During these summers, he painted what are considered his first mature works, images of Kezar Lake located near the town of Lovell, and Maine’s hillsides and mountains. In 1909, Hartley exhibited these paintings at his first solo exhibition in art promoter Alfred Stieglitz’s internationally-known Gallery 291, located in Manhattan. Impressed by Hartley’s work, Stieglitz introduced him to the work of the European Modernist artists, such as Picasso, Kandinsky and Matisse.

Hartley traveled to Europe in April of 1912, the first of many visits, and in Paris became acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her circle of  writers and artists. He was encouraged by Stein, along with poet Hart Crane and novelist Sherwood Anderson, to write as well as paint. Disenchanted after living in Paris for a year, Hartley relocated to Berlin in April of 1913 where he became friends with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and continued his painting. Of his work done in Berlin, two of his still life paintings, inspired by the work of Cézanne, and six charcoal drawings were included in the historic 1913 Armory Show in New York.

Marsden Hartley’s work during this period in Berlin was a combination of German Expressionism and abstraction; his work was also inspired by the pageantry of the German military, though his view of the military changed with the outbreak of war in 1914. In Berlin, Hartley developed a close relationship with a lieutenant in the Prussian Armed Forces, Karl von Freyburg, who was a cousin of Hartley’s friend Arnold Ronnebeck. Infatuated with Freyburg, Hartley would use him as a recurring motif in his works. Although Freyburg survived the Battle of the Marne, for which he was awarded the Iron Cross, he died on October 7th in 1914, at the age of twenty-four, during the Battle of Arras. Hartley was devastated at the announcement of Freyburg’s death.

The works Hartley produced shortly after Freyburg’s death were variations on his post-war themes. However, along with the regimental plumes in his paintings, there were now numbers and letters which had deep significance to Hartley. They included the “K.v.F.” of Freyburg’s initials, coded references to the Iron Cross, Freyburg’s age and regiment numbers, and black and white checkered patterns which referenced Freyburg’s favorite game, chess. Two examples of these memorial pieces are “Portrait of a German Officer” and “Portrait No. 47”, both painted in Berlin and seen in the images above.

Marsden Hartley returned to the United States in early 1916. He traveled and painted from 1916 to 1921 in Provincetown, New York, New Mexico, and Bermuda. Although his works still contained some German iconography, he also painted other subjects, often with homoerotic undertones. After an auction of one hundred of his works at New York’s Anderson Gallery in 1921, Hartley returned to Europe and created still lifes and landscapes using the drawing medium of silverpoint. 

Throughout the 1930s, Hartley spent summers and autumns in New Hampshire painting scenes of its mountains. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent time painting in Mexico which was followed by a year in the Bavarian Alps. After a few months in Bermuda in 1935, Hartley traveled by ship to Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia, where he lived for two summers with the Mason family, who earned their living as fishermen. The deaths of the two Mason brothers, drowned in a hurricane, greatly affected Hartley and inspired a series of portrait paintings and seascapes. Hartley returned to Maine in 1937 where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in Ellsworth, Maine, at the age of sixty-six, on September 2nd of 1943.

Marsden Hartley was not overt about his homosexuality and often diverted attention to other aspects of his work. Most of his works, such as “Portrait of a German Officer”, a homage to Freyburg, and his 1916 “Handsome Drinks”, one of the first paintings Hartley did after his reluctant 1916 return to the United States, are coded in their reference to his sexuality. When he reached his sixties, he no longer felt unease and his works became more intimate, such as his two 1940 paintings “Flaming American (Swim Champ)” and the  “Madawaska-Acadian Light-Heavy”, seen in one of the above inserts. 

Top Inset Image: Marsden Hartley, “Green Landscape with Rocks, No. 2”, 1935-1936, Oil on Board, 33 x 45.4 cm, Brooklun Museum, New York

Second Insert Image: Richard Tweedy, “Marsden Hartley”, 1898, Oil on Canvas, 66 x 45.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: Marsden Hartley, “Abstraction”, 1912-1913, Oil on Canvas, 118 x 101 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Marsden Hartley, “Madawaska-Acadian Light-Heavy”, 1940, 101.6 x 76.2 cm, Chicago Art Institute

Luigi Lucioni

Paintings by Luigi Lucioni

Born in 1900 in Malnate, a small town near Milan, Italy, Luigi Lucioni was an accomplished etcher and artist who painted precisely described landscapes, still-lifes, and portraits over his sixty year career. Working with a strong feeling for his subjects and with great technical skill. Lucioni was a classical realist with a modern perspective, who drew inspiration from the Italian Renaissance artists, as well as the work of Paul Cezanne and landscape artist Claude Lorrain.

Lucioni’s body of work, both landscape and portraiture, was a result of close observation, meticulous delineation, and the careful positioning of compositional elements. He was paid close attention to the textures, patterns, colors, and the arrangement of shapes that would effect his compositions. 

In August of 1911, Luigi Lucioni came to the United States with his family, where they landed in New York Harbor with three hundred-fifty other third-class passengers. After being processed, the family initially moved into an apartment on Christopher Street in Manhattan before finally eventually settling, in 1929, at Union City, New Jersey. At age fifteen, Lucioni entered a competition for admission to Cooper Union, a private college with full scholarships to admitted students, and was accepted. 

In 1915, Lucioni began studying drawing and painting at the Cooper Union, where he received sound criticism from painting instructor and muralist William de Leftwich Dodge. Through Dodge’s influence, Lucioni developed a determination not to adapt to current trends in art but to pursue his own artistic vision. At age nineteen, he entered New York City’s National Academy of Design, where he studied etching under William Aueerbach-Levy. As a student, Lucioni met and was acquainted with many in the city’s circle of gay artists, including painter Jared French, photographer George Platt Lynes, writer Lincoln Kirstein, and artist Paul Cadmus, with whom he became romantically involved. 

In 1924, Lucioni was awarded a Tiffany Foundation Scholarship, which enabled him to spend part of every year for the next decade painting at Tiffany’s Oyster Bay, Long Island, estate. In 1925 he traveled to Italy for the first time since he had left the country as a boy. Lucioni’s encounter with Italy’s Renaissance art, which included the works of Botticelli, Raphael, and Piranesi, had a profound affect on his developing painting style. Upon his return to the United States from Italy, Luigi Lucioni lived and worked in a townhouse at 33 West 10th Street in New York City.

In 1928, Lucioni painted his “Portrait of Paul Cadmus” which memorialized the passion of both artists for the works of painter Piero della Francesca. Using a modern, close-up format, Lucioni modeled Cadmus against the geometric backdrop of a creased white cloth, capturing a piercing gaze that is at once mysterious and mesmerizing. In 1931, Lucioni  was commissioned to paint a Vermont landscape and, struck by the beauty of the mountains, eventually purchased a farmhouse in 1939 near Manchester, where he spent his  summers.

 In 1938, Lucioni met actress and singer Ethel Waters through a mutual friend, writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance. The result of this meeting was the 1939 “Portrait of Ethel Waters”, which last seen publicly in 1942 and presumed lost, is now in the collection of the Huntsville Museum of Art. In 1939, Lucioni also painted the “Portrait of Jared French” in which he used a  close-up format to capture the textures of French’s  hair and skin with fine details; Lucioni also highlighted French’s face by placing it against an off-white cloth background.

During the course of his successful career, Luigi Lucioni  exhibited in New York with the Ferargil Gallery, the Associated American Artists, and the Milch Gallery. In 1932, he became the youngest person to have a painting purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lucioni passed away on July 22nd of 1988 in New York City..

Lucioni’s work is in the collections of many leading American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Dallas Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Top Insert Image: Luigi Lucioni, “Rose Hobart”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 76.7 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Middle Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Luigi Lucioni”. 1930, Photographic Print, 13 x 18 cm, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Museum 

Bottom Insert Image: Luigi Lucioni, “Resting Athlete”, 1938, Oil on Canvas, 110.5 x 122 cm, Private Collection

Walter Stuempfig

Paintings by Walter Stuempfig

Walter Stuempfig was one of Philadelphia’s most highly regarded painters of the mid-twentieth century. He is known primarily for his landscapes of the Philadelphia area and the shores of New Jersey. Stuempfig’s work is often pervaded with a sense of poetic melancholy that has led to his frequent classification as a romantic realist.

Born in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in January of 1914, Walter Stuempfig’s initial education was at the Germantown Academy from which he graduated in 1930. He spent a year studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania before enrolling, in October of 1931, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Stuempfig studied under modernist illustrator and painter Henry McCarter, the impressionist landscape painter Daniel Garber and realist landscape painter Francis Speight. 

In 1934, Stuempfig won the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship for study abroad. He traveled frequently to Europe, and he was deeply influenced by the European masters, particularly Nicolas Poussin, Caravaggio, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. From his initial exhibition in 1932 until  1966, Stuempfig regularly exhibited in the annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy. He had his first successful exhibition, as an American realist painter, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1942 “Artists for Victory” show. 

Discovered by art gallery director R. Kirk Askew, Stuempfig had his first one man show in 1943 at the Durlacher Brothers Gallery in New York. His show was sold out on opening night, with both the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art adding his work to their collections. Stuempfig continued to be represented by the Durlacher Brothers Gallery through 1961. In 1947, the Corcoran Gallery purchased his painting “Two Houses” which had won second prize in the biennial competition that year for contemporary American paintings.

Walter Stuempfig had married his wife Lila Hill, a sculptor who also studied at  the Pennsylvania Academy, in 1935. Upon his wife’s death in 1946, he concentrated more intensely on his artwork. working from his studio in the Chestnut Hill area of northwest Philadelphia. Stuempfig  would spend his summers painting at New Jersey’s shore area and the Manayunk area of Philadelphia. In 1948, he became an instructor in drawing and composition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where he taught until his death, after a long illness, in November of 1970.  

As a painter, Walter Stuempfig worked independently, and remained outside the mainstream of the contemporary artistic movements. He was a prolific artist, producing over fifteen hundred works of figure compositions, landscapes and architectural subjects, portraits, and still lifes, all done in the style of romantic realism. Stuempfig had a subtle and polished painting technique; his figurative work had a great subjectivity, which was often infused with nostalgia and personal sentiment.

Walter Stuempfig’s paintings can be found in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Top Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Queen of the Seas Casino”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 48.1 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Sturgeon”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 35.6 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Jesse Hazel Arms

The Paintings of Jesse Arms

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 27, 1883, Jesse Hazel Arms was a painter, illustrator, printmaker, and muralist. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under Danish-American portraitist John Johanson and spent the summers studying with marine painter Charles Woodbury at his summer art colony school in Oguinquit, Maine. Following a short trip to Europe in 1909, Arms returned to her hometown of Chicago, where she worked as an artist and interior decorator.

Jesse Arms moved in 1911 to New York City where she became a student of painter and interior designer Albert Herter. She obtained employment with his company Herter Looms, a tapestry-textile design and manufacturing firm in New York City, where she specialized in tapestry cartoons until leaving the company in 1915. During her employment with Herter Looms, Arms assisted Albert Herter with his mural project for the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco and worked with Herter’s wife, still-life and portrait painter Adele Herter, as a private home decorator. 

Returning to her hometown of Chicago in 1915, Jesse Arms married Dutch-born painter and etcher Cornelius Botke. Together, they worked on murals in Chicago for the Kellogg Company and for the University of Chicago’s Noyes Hall, the social hub of the campus. In 1916, Jesse Arms gave birth to their only child, William. By 1917, after multiple exhibitions, she had gained recognition for her work and had won many awards both in Chicago and southern California. 

Following an initial visit in 1918 to California, Arms and her family relocated in 1919 to Carmel, California, where they became influential figures in the local art colony. The family eventually settled in 1927 on a ranch in Santa Paula, California, where Arms continued to paint and contributed to the managing of  the ranch. A prolific exhibitor of her work and member of both the California Art Club and the California Watercolor Society, Jesse Arms Botke died on October 2, 1971 in Santa Paula, California.

Jesse Arms was a prominent figure of the California School of Impressionism and became known for her exotic and richly decorated bird studies. Her highly detailed work depicted birds set in each species’ natural settings with an abundance of flora. Arms typically used oil paints, but also worked in watercolors and gouache; the backgrounds in her work were frequently embellished with gold and silver leaf. Arms also portrayed other subjects including genre and desert landscapes, and Native American figures.

Among the prizes award to Jesse Arms’s work are the 1918 Cahn Prize and the 1926 Shaffer Prize, both from the Art Institute of Chicago, and the 1938 Carpenter Prize from the Chicago Society for Sanity in Art. Her work can be seen in the collections of the San Diego Museum, Municipal Gallery of Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Maurice Grosser

Paintings by Maurice Grosser

Born on October 23, 1903 in Huntsville, Alabama, Maurice Grosser was an American writer, art critic, and painter. He attended Harvard University and graduated with a degree in Mathematics with honors in 1924. While at Harvard, Grosser received painting instruction from painter and professor Denman Ross, a trustee of Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. Grosser also studied both life drawing and painting at Boston’s Architectural School and South Boston’s Art School,

Awarded Harvard’s Sheldon Fellowship for a two year period, Grosser was able to study painting in both France and Italy. In 1925 in Paris, he met for the second time and began a relationship with American composer and critic Virgil Thomson, who became his life partner and frequent collaborator. After meeting Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1926, they returned to the United States and took up residence at New York’s Hotel Chelsea, where they presided over a salon which attracted leading figures in the arts, such as writer and poet Frank O’Hara, composer Leonard Bernstein, author Tennessee Williams, and avant-garde composer John Cage

Maurice Grosser first began his collaborative work with Virgil Thomson around 1928, when he assisted in the production of Thomson’s new opera “Four Saints in Three Acts”. The libretto for the opera was prepared by Gertrude Stein, the music was composed by Thomson, and the scenario was developed by Grosser. This opera was noted for its musical content, its form, and its portrayal of the European saints by a cast of black performers, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral director. 

Grosser next worked with Thomson on his provocative 1947 opera “The Mother of Us All”, based on the life of social reformer Susan B.  Anthony. The libretto for this opera was written by Gertrude Stein, who sent the finished work to Thomson in March of 1946, just a few months before her death in July. The two-act opera premiered in May of 1947 with soprano Dorothy Dow as Susan B. Anthony. The work was a 1956 Off-Broadway production, part of the Santa Fe Opera’s 1976 season, and staged at the New York City Opera in 2000 and the San Francisco Opera in 2003. 

A third collaboration between Maurice Grosser and Thomson was the 1985 “18 Portraits”. For many years, they had made portraits, some dating from the 1920s, of mutual friends in both music and paint forms. The portraits of each sitter were presented in eighteen separate bi-folios, with a single sheet insert consisting of two pages of music and an original lithograph of a  pencil and charcoal portrait.

A writer as well as a painter, Maurice Grosser lived among a circle of avant-garde authors, artists, and musicians. He spent long periods living and working abroad, first in Paris and later in Morocco, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Nigeria, Canada, and Brazil. As an artist, Grosser painted in a conservative realist style, in which he depicted structured landscapes in New England, and in the southern and western states. He was also a portraitist whose more famous subjects were  his companion, composer Virgil Thomson, Scottish operatic soprano Mary Garden, writer and playwright Jane Bowles, and British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead.

Between 1956 and 1967, Maurice Grosser served as art critic for “The Nation” magazine. As an author, he wrote four books on painting and art criticism, including “Painting in Public / Painting in Our Time” in 1948 and republished in 1964; “The Painter’s Eye” in 1951; the 1962 “Critic’s Eye”; and “Painter’s Progress” in 1971. Grosser’s memoir entitled “Visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas” was published posthumously in 2006 by New York Review Books. 

Maurice Grosser died on December 22, 1986, at the age of eighty-three. His ashes are interred at Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville, Alabama. Virgil Thomson died on September 30, 1989, in his suite at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan at age ninety-two. 

Note: Maurice and Virgil first met in 1920 while both were attending meetings of The Liberal Club at Harvard; but the intimate relationship between the two would not fully evolve until they met by chance in 1925 at the Parisian cafe “Deux Magots”.

Top Insert Image: Maurice Grosser, “Self Portrait”, 1925, Oil on Canvas, Location Unknown

Middle Insert Image: Maurice Grosser, “Self-Portrait”, 1985, Lithograph, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Maurice Grosser”, 1935, Silver Gelatin Print, Library of Congress

Naur Calvalcante

Photography by Naur Calvalcante

Naur Cavalcante is a designer and photographer, specializing in portraiture and commercial advertising, working in both Três Lagoas and São Paulo, Brazil. His work has been presented in the magazines: “Revista Planter”, “Revista Ella”, “Em Focco”, and the online magazines “Image Amplified” and “Morphosis”.

More information on the artist’s work can be located at: https://naurcavalcante.46graus.com

Andrea Pezzatti

Photography by Andrea Pezzatti

Andrea Pezzatti is a freelance photographer working in the fields of portraiture, commercial, and landscape photography. Based in both Montevideo and Paysandú, Uruguay, she has traveled worldwide, producing portfolios of her work in Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, and Sicily. Pezzetti is currently shooting her work with both the Canon Powershot GFX Mark iii and the Canon Eos 6D. 

More examples of Andrea Pezzatti’s work can be found at her 500px site located at: https://500px.com/p/andreapezzatti?view=photos

David Levine

David Levine: Coney Island Watercolors

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in December of 1926, David Levine was an American artist and illustrator. He studied painting at the Pratt Institute in New York and, later in 1946, attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, graduating with a degree in education. Levine also studied under painter and teacher Hans Hoffman, whose teaching had a significant influence on post-war American avant-garde artists, including Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers.

Along with doing illustrative work for publications, David Levine produced a body of paintings, many of which were destroyed in a later 1968 fire. Most of Levine’s paintings are watercolors, including portraits of ordinary citizens, seaside images of distinctive architecture, and scenes of vacationers enjoying the day at the beach. He often painted scenes of garment workers, remembering the workers in his father’s garment factory, and scenes of the bathers and amusement rides at Coney Island, a section of his Brooklyn hometown.

Together with portrait artist Aaron Shikler, David Levine founded a salon for artists interested in collective sketching and painting, the Painting Group, in 1958. In the early 1960s, he developed his skills as a political illustrator. He illustrated his first work for The New York Review of Books in 1963, subsequently drawing more than thirty-eight hundred caricatures of famous artists, writers and politicians for the Review’s publication. Levine produced other work of combined equal quantity for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy, among others.

David Levine was elected in 1967 into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1971. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, and several collections have been published, including Knoph’s 1978 “The Arts of David Levine” and the book “American Presidents”, published in 2008 by Knoph, which features his drawings of U.S. Presidents, covering a span of five decades.

In 2006, David Levine was diagnosed with macular degeneration, and with the gradual loss of his vision, produced no new work after April of 2007. A man who drew people of all political persuasions with the same acid treatment, David Levine died in December of 2009 of cancer at the age of eighty-three.

Jeffrey Smart

Paintings by Jeffrey Smart

Influenced by the Australian modernism of the 1940s, Jeffrey Smart dedicated himself to the representation of the modern city. He executed each painting with classical precision and included repetitious architectural motifs, referencing the Renaissance perspective. Smart painted stark portrayals of contemporary life, choosing as his subject matter the highways, trucks, factories, and even the vacant lots of everyday scenes.

Jeffrey Smart was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1921. He studied part-time in the late 1930s at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts under painter Marie Tuck and Rupert Bunny, a master of figure composition. Beginning in 1939, Smart also trained at the Adelaide Teachers College for two years. In this period, Smart visited the studio of Adelaide-based artist Doritt Black, who introduced him to the rules of dynamic symmetry, as seen in the work of the Old Masters and developed by avant-garde artists such as Braque, Cézanne, and Léger. 

The 1940s were a period of artistic growth and raise to fame for Smart, who started to exhibit in group shows alongside other emergent Australian artists, including Jaqueline Hick and Horace Trennery, and was given in his first solo show at Kosminsky Gallery in Melbourne in 1944. In 1945, Smart painted “The Waste Land I” and “The Wasteland II”. These desolate rural views, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name, point to the development of the artist’s distinctive hyper-clear and timeless version of landscape painting.

Between 1948 and 1950, Smart travelled to America and Europe, and then moved in Paris in 1949 to study at the Académie Montmartre under Fernand Léger. His several visits to European museum collections in this period will bring Smart to become particularly fascinated with the art of Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini, and especially Piero della Francesca, whose clarity of forms and rigorous use of perspective would greatly influence Smart’s works. In 1950, he lived on the island of Iachia in the bay of Naples, painting alongside contemporaries Donald Friend, Michael Shannon, and Jacqueline Hick. 

Upon his return to Australia in 1951, the artist settled in Sydney, where he will remain for the next twelve years. In the same year he won the Commonwealth Jubilee Prize for his 1951 painting “Wallalroo”, a scene from the daily life of that copper mining town. During his years in Sydney, Smart also worked as an art teacher and art critic at the Daily Telegraph while continuing to paint landscapes. Works from this period, such as the 1962 “Copper Park” and “The Cahill Expressway”, painted also in 1962, mark the beginning of Smart’s mature style, characterized by an increased hyper-clarity and meticulously crafted compositions.

The year 1963 was crucial in the artistic and personal life of Jeffrey Smart, who resumed his travels around Europe and permanently moved to Rome with Australian artist and partner Ian Bent. Thoughout the 1960s and 1970s, Smart’s artistic career gained momentum thanks to prominent solo shows and exhibitions in his homeland of Australia and around the world, including the 1967 solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London and the American touring group show “The Australian Painters 1964-1966”. 

In 1971, Smart purchase a farmhouse in the countryside of Arezzo, a  small town in Tuscany, where he would remain for the rest of his life. This move marked the start of the most prolific period in the his career. Starting from the 1970s, Smart dedicated himself to interpreting the landscape of modern Italy, mixing his own personal and imaginary relationship with the land with his precision details of climate, life, and landscape. While most of his work includes landscapes, in the 1980s and 1990s, Smart produced a small number of portraits and self-portraits, contrasting the accurate likeness with visionary urban settings. 

Jeffrey Smart’s last work entitled “Labyrinth” was completed in 2011, at which time he officially retired. The artist died in Arezzo in 2013 at the age of ninety-two. Even though he lived as an expatriate for most of his life, the majority of his works is now housed by Australian museums and galleries. 

“My only concern is putting the right shapes in the right colors in the right places. It is always the geometry” —Jeffrey Smart

Top Insert Image: Robert Walker, “Jeffrey Smart in Studio”, 1967, Print from Negative, 2.4 x 3.6 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Second Insert Image: Jeffrey Smart, “The Picnic”, 1980, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 106 x 70.7 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jeffrey Smart, “Labyrinth, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Bottom Insert Image: Jeffrey Smart, “The Surfers Bondi”, 1963, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Erin Hanson

Paintings by Erin Hanson

Beginning her study of oil painting as a child, Erin Hanson marked her appreciation for impressionism with her first viewing of Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises”. She began, at the age of twelve, her study of acrylic paint techniques  working at a mural studio. A high school scholarship enabled Hanson to study figure drawing at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. After graduating, she attended UC Berkeley where she obtained a degree in Bioengineering. 

Erin Hanson’s treks through the lands and national parks of Nevada, Utah and Colorado inspired many of her landscape paintings. Immersing herself in her artwork, she has painted consistently since her graduation from college. Hanson uses a minimalist technique of impasto painting, layering wet paint strokes upon previous wet strokes, with color palettes of four to five colors for control. Her work focuses primarily on landscapes shown with a boldness of light and color. Hanson currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Wu Lan-Chiann

Six Chinese Ink Paintings by Wu Lan-Chiann

Originally from Taiwan, Wu Lan-Chiann now lives and works in California. She specializes in Chinese ink painting, taking century old techniques and presenting her art by connecting the East with the West; old traditional painting in a contemporary format.

Wu Lan-Chiann received her BFA -with highest honors- from the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a MA from New York University’s Fine Art Department.

At the core of Wu Lan-Chiann’s paintings is a personal contemplation of universal values and themes that connect people across time and place. While Wu Lan-Chiann’s sources of inspiration are broad and diverse, she creates work that centers on the essence and meaning of life. In her most recent work, she explores the rhythm of nature as an allegory for the human cycle of life.

Wu Lan-Chiann has exhibited her art and lectured on the subject of Chinese ink painting in the Los Angeles area, San Francisco, and well as in New York, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and Japan. Wu Lan-Chiann’s work is collected on four continents.

Martin Zalba

Photography by Martin Zalba

Both a classical music composer and a renowned photographer, Spanish artist Martin Zalba Ibanez merges his experience in these mediums to create stunning photographs that depict breathtaking views and yet so much more. The influence of music drives his compositions, as he strives for harmony of colour, rhythm of perspective, melody of framing, orchestration of processing, and the counterpoints of shadow and light. His work shows us magical vistas, seeking continuously for the soul of light, the sound of shadows, the majesty of colours.