Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Knockout”, 1929, Oil on Canvas, 46 x 44 cm, Private Collection

Born in Lund, Sweden, in April of 1884, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, was an artist working in both oils and watercolors, and writer of poetry and short stories. He is regarded as a founding member of the Modernist art movement in Sweden.

For his early education, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson attended a Technical Company School; he later studied at Danish historical painter Kristian Zahrtmann’s School in Copenhagen. In 1907, he entered his work in an exhibition held at the Art Museum of the University of Lund. Adrian-Nilsson traveled to Berlin in 1913 where through author and critic Herwarth Walden’s gallery, Der Sturm, he came in contact with the contemporary art movements.

Both Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc were of huge importance when Adrian-Nilsson began developing his own style of expressive cubism, a semi-abstract style with deep, vibrant colors. Adrian-Nilsson became very influential in the radical art movement and was a member of the Halmstadgruppen, a group of avant-garde artists at Hamstad, Sweden, which continued unchanged until 1979. This group eventually included painter and sculptor Alexander Archipenko, painter and graphic artist Erik Olson, Sven Jonson, and Esaias Thorén. Initially cubists, the group was influenced later by Adrian-Nilsson’s surrealistic phase and his motifs of seamen.

Adrian-Nilsson was fascinated by modern technology and masculine strength, which was reflected in his images of sailors and sportsmen . Works of this nature include the 1914-15 “Katarinahissen I”, depicting two sailors amid a cubist blue-toned landscape, and “Sjömän i Gröna Lunds tivoli II”, a surrealistic work in blues and browns depicting sailors in Gröna Lund’s amusement park. Living a hidden life at a time that gay eroticism was both taboo and illegal in Sweden, Adrian-Nilsson expressed himself through these cubist and surreal images.

By 1919, Adrian-Nilsson’s art was developing into pure abstraction. He lived in Paris between the years 1920 and 1925, during which time he met Alexander Archipenko and Fernand Léger whose influence can be seen in Adrian-Nilsson’s renderings of mechanically-styled sportsmen, seamen and soldiers. In the later part of the 1920s, Adrian-Nilsson was working in his geometric abstract period. He developed his own personal style of surrealism during the 1930s and exhibited his work in multiple exhibitions, including the 1935 Kubisme-Surrealisme exhibition in Copenhagen.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson died in Stockholm on March 29, 1965 and is buried at the cemetery of Norra Kyrkogården in Lund.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson’s work is represented at the Nationalmuseum and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg’s Art Museum, the Malmö Art Museum, and the Museum of Culture in Lund where his work constitutes a permanent exhibition of modernistic art. Adrian-Nilsson’s writings are preserved at the University Library of Lund.

Insert Image: Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Katarinahissen I”, 1914-15, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 56 cm, Private Collection

Gerard Dillon

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Walker

Steve Walker, “Boardwalk Triad”, 1996, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 122 cm, Private Collection

Born in Ottawa in 1961, Canadian artist Steve Walker has been a recognizable part of gay culture for at least the past two decades. Steve Walker’s paintings canbe described as pensive, quiet, emotional, haunting, empathetic, knowing. The men who inhabit these paintings tell a story that is at once very personal, yet seemingly familiar to all gay men.

Entirely a self-taught artist, Walker relocated to Toronto at the age of nineteen initially to study theater. A tour through Europe where he was exposed to the artwork of the great Masters, particularly Caravaggio, led him to start a career as an artist. Walker eventually became established for his acrylic portraits done of young men, either solo or in pairs, going about their everyday lives.

Executed with a limited palette of muted tones, Steve Walker’s large-scaled paintings were exhibited at galleries in Toronto, New York, Philadelphia, Fort Lauderdale, Provincetown and Pasadena. His work was also used for the cover art of novels by Felice Picano, Gordon Anderson, Michael Thomas Ford, and others.

Walker himself saw his work as having a universal message. He once said, “As a homosexual, I have been moved, educated and inspired by works that deal with a heterosexual context. Why would I assume that a heterosexual would be incapable of appreciating work that speaks to common themes in life, as seen through my eyes as a gay man?”

Steve Walker’s passing was sudden and unexpected at his home in Costa Rica on January 4, 2012.. He died from a heart attack, but had no history of a heart condition. Walker once wrote: “I hope that in its silence, the body of my work has given a voice to my life, the lives of others, and in doing so, the dignity of all people.”

Notes: The Provincetown Artist Registry has an artist statement by Steve Walker on its online site: https://provincetownartistregistry.com/W/walker_steve.html

An extensive collection of Steve Walker’s artwork can be found on the official ‘Fans of Steve Walker Gay Art’ Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/groups/stevewalkerart/

For those interested, Gallery XO, located in Wilton Manors, Florida, has a large collection of reproduction prints of Steve Walker’s paintings, among other artists who create male figurative works. The Gallery XO website is located at: https://www.galleryxo.com

Bottom Insert Image: Steve Walker, “Jungle Boy”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection