T M Davy

The Artwork of T M Davy

Born in New York, New York in 1980, T M Davy is a painter whose body work is characterized by realistic oil portraits. Davy studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 2001, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he currently teaches. In 2012 , he was an artist in residence at BOFFO in Fire Island, New York.

T M Davy’s work relies on scenes that are directly connected to his life and surroundings. Persistent themes in his work are the issues of intimacy, love, and friendship. Past subjects in his work have included candle-lit scenes of domestic life with family, his husband Liam, and his circle of friends. Davy has also painted a series of images centered on horses, inspired by the time he spent on a relative’s farm, and a series of images of candles lit in darkness.

The consistency of Davy’s technical execution and the sophistication of its realism are apparent in his oil on canvas work, whether in a small or a large-scale format. A connecting link in all of his paintings is his use of the chiaroscuro effect, a technique used also by painters Caravaggio and Anthony van Dyck, which emphasizes the interaction of light and shadow.He has also worked in the mediums of pastel and gouache, with which he produced several series of open air spontaneous drawings in a smaller scale format.

In his work produced on Fire Island, New York, Davy portrays many of his beachside figures entering or in the water, exemplifying the union of bodies with nature, a prominent theme of the artist. His portraits celebrate his inseparable communion with his husband, Liam Davy, as well as the intimacy and bond among close friends. His “Fire Island” series are a meditation on the power and freedom born from togetherness—between figure and landscape, mind and body, human and human.

Davy’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the “No Soul for Sale” exhibition at theTate Modern in London; the “B-Out” exhibition at the Andrew Edlin gallery in New York; the 2009 “Nudes” exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in São Paolo; and the 2019 “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany in 2018: the Exile gallery in Berlin, Germany, 2012; and gallery 11R in New York in 2014 and 2017.

“We exist in an age of complete transition. The time is now to communicate the beauty of queer love around the world. A paradigm shift in people’s conception of love is happening. If I can, I want to play a small part in that–in revealing how true and how eternal it is. Transcendence is a movement to the broadest spectrum. “ —T M Davy, 2019

Information of T M Davy’s work and exhibitions can be found at the artist’s site: http://www.tmdavy.com

Patrick Angus

The Artwork of Patrick Angus

Born in December of 1953 in North Hollywood, California, American painter Patrick Angus studied at the Santa Barbara Art Institute. Inspired by David Hockney’s book “72 Drawings”, he came to New York in 1980 to see the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Angus settled in the city and started illustrating the emerging modern gay culture with visual narratives and humor which had not been visible to the general population at that time.

Patrick Angus depicted not only the pleasant aspects of the scenes he witnessed; but he was also concerned with the unadorned sides of the persons and situations. The central theme that is expressed in many of Angus’s works is the longing for true, not only physical, intimacy. With his distinct observation skills, his compositions, and the use of light and expressive color, he depicted his observation of the scene, but also captured its atmosphere and the vulnerability of its individuals. The loneliness that Angus, as well as other gay men, often felt during this time and the attempts to offset it play an important role in Angus’ body of work.

Angus is known for his depiction of the gay New York scene in the 1980s, particularly its bar scenes, porn theaters, bathhouses, and strip shows. He is especially known for his large paintings of the Gaiety Theater, above the Howard Johnson’s restaurant at the corner of 46th Street and Broadway, with its nightlife of bold colors, flashing lights, and young male erotic dancers. Angus often created a dialogue in his work with references to known artists; such as Picasso and Manet,, by depicting them in his work, a practice common with the notions of post-modern art.

An example of this dialogue is Angus’s 1979 “Los Angeles Drawings”, which capture his experience discovering the city and its inhabitants at the beginning of his career as an openly gay artist. These drawings, which features portraits of men together in everyday life, are a direct conversation with fellow painter David Hockney, who remained a mentor, a collector of Angus’s work, as well as a friend until his death.

Patrick Angus died in 1992 at the age of 38 from the effects of AIDS, without receiving due recognition for his work during his lifetime. In recent years, however, his popularity increased with major retrospective exhibitions being held. An exhibition in early 2015 at Galerie Thomas Fuchs was followed by art fair presentations in Karlsruhe, Berlin, Miami, and other cities. A comprehensive monograph was produced in 2016 by art publisher Hatje Cantz with the participation of Galerie Thomas Fuchs.

This monograph was followed in 2017 by a major exhibition entitled “Patrick Angus” at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, on the occasion of which a publication was released by Distanz Verlag. In 2019 the Long Beach Museum of Art in California presented a retrospective of his work. The Leslie-Lohmann Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York later showed Angus’s work in the group exhibition “On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work”.

Patrick Angus is represented in the collections of the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Leslie-Lohmann Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and the Schwules Museum Berlin, and in many private collections.

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, A Shepherd with a Flute, 1525 to 1540, Oil on Canvas, 98 x 78 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum

Born in Brescia, Republic of Venice in 1480, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo was an Italian High Renaissance painter, noted for his coloring, chiaroscuro, and realism of his works. Little is known about his formative years; his first records attest to the fact that he was in the city of Parma in 1506, and a member of the Florentine painters’ guild in 1508.

During this period in Florence, Savoldo finished his 1510 “Elijah Fed by the Raven”, now residing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1515 he painted the “Portrait of a Clad Warrior”, which was wrongly identified previously with painter Gaston de Foix. Savoldo was interested, as was other contemporary northern Italian painters, in the traditions of the Flemish school; some of that influence can be seen in his “Temptation of Saint Anthony”, particularly in the depiction of the saint’s tempters. These Florentine works of Savoldo were appreciated by the commissioners from Venice, where Savoldo relocated sometime before 1520.

On June 15, 1524 Giovanni Savoldo signed a contract for an altarpiece for the church of San Domenico in Pesaro; this work now resides in Milan’s Brera Art Academy. The influence of the northern-Italian painter Giorgione’s use of color and mood can be felt in Savoldo’s poetic treatment of such works as his 1525 “Portrait of a Knight”. In 1527, Savoldo completed a “St. Hieronymus” for the residence of the Averoldi family in Brescia and, in the 1530s, a Nativity scene similar to Antonio de Corregio’s work of the same topic, which is now in the National Gallery in Washington DC.

In 1533 Savoldo painted his “Madonna with Four Saints” at the church of Santa Maria in Verona; and in 1537-1538 he executed the altarpiece for the main altar of Santa Croce, Brescia. He finished commissions for two Nativity paintings in 1540: one at the church of San Giobbe inVenice and one at the church of San Barnaba in Brescia. Showing influences by Titian and Lorenzo Lotto for clearly defined shapes in light, Savoldo’s 1540 “Magdalen” is a masterpiece of lighting effects, cloaked in an enigmatic white gown, almost completely veiled except for the face, with a sliver of red cloth sleeve emerging in a alluring fashion.

Savoldo’s use of deep, rich color gave his paintings dramatic tonal values. He defined his luminous, meticulously detailed figures by setting them against reflected or nocturnally lit scenes with unusual effects of light. Through the span of his career, Savoldo painted only forty paintings and had little influence on the course of Venetian painting. The exact date of is death is not known; in 1548 he was noted as still living but very old. Forgotten after his death, Savoldo’s reputation was revived with exhibitions of his work in the early twentieth century, and retrospectives held in 1990 in Brescia, Italy and Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Note: Giovanni Savoldo’s “A Shepherd with a Flute” is an example of the genre scenes that became popular in Venice in the early sixteenth century, when interest in pastoral poetry and drama also began to flourish. The figure of the shepherd is clearly delineated against his surroundings and appears almost luminous in the evening light through Savoldo’s use of deep, rich colors and expressive textures.

Image Insert: Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, “Magdalen”, 1540, Oil on Canvas, 89.1 x 82.4 cm, National Gallery of London

Alfred Schwarzschild

The Artwork of Alfred Schwarzschild

Alfred Schwarzschild was born in 1874, the second child of a wealthy Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. From 1890 to 1892, he studied under painter and draftsman Anton Burger in Kronberg and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. After leaving the Academy, Schwarzschild studied with painter and illustrator Wilhelm von Diez, an Academy Professor who had a major influence on his work. In 1903, Schwarzschild exhibited his work at the Paris Exhibition and received an Honorable Mention.

During World War I, Schwarzschild joined the Imperial German Flying Corps as an observer, where he shot aerial photographs of the terrain and drew sketches of the enemy positions. For his endeavors, he was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. In 1924, Schwarzschild married Theodora Luttner and later, with their three daughters, settled in the Isar River area of Munich, where he shared an artist studio with painter Albert Weisgerber, whose work formed the bridge between Impressionism and early Expressionism.

From 1901, Alfred Schwarzschild regularly entered work in the international art exhibition in the Royal Munich Glass Palace. In 1901 he was awarded a medal fo his figurative oil painting “Übermut (High Spirits)” at the Glaspalast, Munich.. Between 1905 and 1909, Schwarzschild was also regularly represented by his work in the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition. Painting in styles ranging fro Art Nouveau to New Objectivity, he became the great portrait painter of the Munich upper class.

Besides his portraiture work, Alfred Schwarzschild designed many souvenir postcards. He created a series of postcards with the image of a Munich child as a motif, a series on the topic of Oktoberfest, and a series on Munich’s famous Hofbräuhaus restaurant, founded in 1589 by the Duke of Bavaria. Schwarzschild often used his youngest daughter as the model for the postcards.

When Germany can under the rule of the National Socialist Party who placed restrictions upon the Jewish population, Schwarzschild found it extremely difficult, due to his Jewish origins, to sell his artwork. He fled to England in 1936, with the hope of earning a living; his family arrived in England in 1938, at which time the Nazi Party seized all his German assets. During the war years and despite war-time scarcities, Schwarzschild continued his artwork using whatever materials were available.

Known for his portraiture work, figurative paintings, and postcard images, Alfred Schwarzschild lived and worked in the United Kingdom until his death in London on August 19th of 1948. His artwork was deemed unworthy by the Nazi Party on the basis of it being sectarian; however, many of his works have survived and are in private collections and European museums.

Willem Arondeus

The Artwork of Willem Arondeus

Born in Amsterdam in 1895, Willem Arondeus was a Dutch illustrator, painter and author. At the age of thirteen, he attended the former Quellinus School, now the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he devoted himself to decorative painting. After a family dispute about his homosexuality, he left home at the age of seventeen and severed contact with his family. Contrary to the general custom of the time, Arondeus, even at a young age, openly talked about his homosexuality in his social circles.

After meeting artists in the neighboring villages of Laren and Blaricum, Arondeus decided to pursue a career as an artist. Traveling to Rotterdam, he studied painting at the city’s school for sculptors, the Quellinus School. He started his writing: work in 1920: and he received, in 1923, a commission for a large mural to be installed in the Rotterdam City Hall. Arondeus moved into the countryside of the central Netherlands to the city of Apeldoom where, in 1933, he met and settled with Jan Tijssen, a young gardener who would remain his partner for the next seven years.

Despite their financial struggles between the years 1923 and 1939, Willem Arondeus produced a significant amount of artwork in this period. He worked as an illustrator for the publications of Dutch poets J. H. Leopold, Pieter Cornelis Boutens and Martinus Nijhoff. He also received commissions for calendars and charity stamps, and painted landscapes in the areas of Amsterdam, Blaricum in northern Holland, and on the Isle of Urk. From 1930 to 1932, Arondeus made nine tapestries with ornaments around the arms of Noord-Holland towns for the County Seat.

Around 1935, Willem Arondeus ceased his visual arts work and devoted himself to his writing. He published two novels in 1938; “Het Uilenhuis (The Owls House)” and “In de Bloeiende Ramenas (In the Blossoming Winter Radish)”, both completed with his illustrations in the fin de siecle style. which embraced symbolism and the decadence movement. In 1939 Arondeus published “Matthĳs Maris: De Tragiek van den Droom (The Tragedy of the Dream)”, a biography of the Dutch mystical painter Matthijs Maris, which eased his financial situation.

In May of 1940, the German army invaded and occupied the Netherlands, and required all, above the age of fifteen, to carry identity cards with all personal information, including religion. By 1941, realizing the danger of his work against the German occupation, Arondeus sent Tijssen back to their home in Apeldoorn. Soon after the invasion, he joined the Raad van Verzet, Council of Resistance, and in the spring of 1942, started an underground periodical “Brandarisbrief (The Brandaris Letter)”, named after the oldest Dutch lighthouse. With other graphical artists like Frans Duwaer, Willem Sandberg and Gerrit van der Veen, Arondeus started to hide Jewish citizens and to falsify identity cards, which eventually totaled over eighty thousand.

Aware of the prevalence of false identity cards, the Nazi occupation began to compare the cards with the information found in the Municipal Archives. A plan to attack the Archives and destroy all the records was made by Willem Arondeus, Gerrit van der Veen and others. This attack took place on the evening of March 27 in 1943. A fire was set; with the collusion of the local fire brigade to forestall its extinguishing, thousands of cards were destroyed, which hindered the registration process.

Willem Arondeus was arrested on April 1st of 1943 and sentenced to death in June at a Nazi court held at Amsterdam’s Tropical Museum. He took full responsibility for the attack, with the hope others would be spared. Willem Arondeus, along with a group of twelve, was executed on July 1st of 1943 in the North Sea dunes of Overveen. In his last message before his execution, Arondeus, who had lived openly as a gay man before the war, asked his friend, Laura Carola Mazirel, the future jurist and human rights activist, to testify after the war that “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”

In 1984 the Dutch government posthumously awarded Resistance Memorial Cross to Willem Arondeus and the others. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, honored Arondeus in 1986 as a Righteous Among The Nations for destroying Municipal Records of Amsterdam, the result of which prevented the German occupiers from locating many of the Dutch-Jewish population. In 2001 twenty of Arondeus’s homo-erotic poems, written during his life in Urk and inspired by the work of gay Dutch poet Pieter Cornelis Boutens, were published as “Aloof Strophes (Aloof Stanzas)”.

Forrest Williams

Paintings by Forrest Williams

Born in North Carolina, Forrest Williams is an American figurative painter who lives and works in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. His extensive education began at Edinburgh University in Scotland where he graduated in 1985 with honors in English Literature and Art History. He next studied at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he earned his BA in English Literature. In 1989, Williams attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, earning Honors in Theater. He earned his Masters of Fine Art in Painting at the New York Academy of Art in 1994.

Most of Forrest William’s figurative paintings contain individual male figures, clothed or nude, in subjective spaces. Similar to the work of Hopper, there is a psychological undercurrent of loneliness and a lack of connection between the characters in the presented scenes. The paintings are staged sets, often with decorative elements, such as arrows, whose figures represent the iconic man caught between desire and doubt, and intimacy and uncertainty. .

Williams exhibited in group show a the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and later had his first solo show there, in which all his work sold. These shows were followed with other solo shows, including three at the Heather Marx Gallery in San Francisco between 2002 and 2007, a 2010 solo show entitled “Crossways” at the Marx & Savattero Gallery in San Francisco, and five solo shows at the AMP Gallery in Provincetown between 2014 and 2019.

“I remember reading that the young Balthus was deeply influenced by Derain’s remark, ‘The only purpose of painting today is the recovery of lost secrets.’ That observation was made almost a hundred years ago now, but it still resonates with me.” — Forrest Willams

The artist’s site can be found at : http://www.forrestwilliams.net

Lorenz Frølich

Paintings by Lorenz Frølich

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark in October of 1820, Lorenz Frølich was a painter, illustrator, etcher and graphic artist. He initially studied in Copenhagen under painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, now referred to as the Father of Danish painting, and in Dresden between 1843 to 1846 under fresco painter Eduard Julius Bendemann. Frølich later traveled to Paris and studied under historical painter Thomas Couture from 1852 to 1853.

During his academic period, Frølich was influenced, by the impressionist movement through his friends Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Alfred Stevens, and constantly exhibited his work at the salons. Through his friendship with painter Thorald Læssøe, Frølich met painter and graphic artist John Thomas Lundbye, an encounter which swiftly turned into a close relationship. Existing correspondence between the two men shows their friendship was both intellectual and romantic, and lasted until at least 1840.

Nordic sagas and the Danish landscape became the focus of both Frølich’s and Lundbye’s work as they traveled the country to depict the national flora, landscapes and local people. The two artists also did extensive illustrative work, specifically for children’s books. There are several personal works showing the strong bond and collaboration between the two artists during this period: a 1839 portrait of Frølich by Lundbye, now in the Hirschsprung Collection; Frølich’s 1939 “Portrait of the painter J. Th. Lyndbye”; caricatures made by Frølich in 1839 of Lyndbye as a dog; and Frølich’s drawing of the two artists painting outside in June 1839.

Lorenz Frølich produced original etchings for the 1853-55 “Illustreret Danmarkshistorie for Folket (Illustrated Danish History for the People)”; the 1844 “De Tvende Kirketaarne (The Second Church Tower)” by Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger; and the 1845 “Die Götter des Nordens (Gods of the North)”. Frølich’s illustrative work for author Hans Christian Andersen’s stories and the editions published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel in Paris, particularly Frølich’s realistic and candid depictions for the work “Mademoiselle Lili à Paris”, brought him recognition as a renowned illustrator.

Frølich was part of a circle of young Danish artists that, during the 1830s and 1840s, directed their attention towards the creation of a nationalistic form of Nordic art, with the aim of imitating nature in its purest form. He married Carolina Charlotta in de Betou in 1855 and was appointed a professor at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Art in 1877. For the celebration of Frølich’s eightieth birthday held in November of 1900, Danish composer and violinist Carl Nielsen wrote the “Kantate til Lorenz Frølich-Festen”. Lorenz Frølich died in 1908 in Hellerup, Denmark.

Insert Image: Lorenz Frølich, “Self Portrait”, 1860s, Oil on Canvas, 22 x 18 cm, Private Collection

Hans von Marées

Hans von Marées, “Dre Jünglinge unter Orangenbäumen (Three Young Men under Orange Trees”, 1873-1875, Mixed Media on Panel, 187.5 x 145 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany

Born in 1837 in Elberfeld, Prussia to a wealthy banking family, Hans Von Marées studied at the Berlin Academy from 1853 to 1855. During 1854, he also studied at the studio of painter and printmaker Carl Steffeck. Marées worked in Munich for eight years, where he became influenced by the historical school of painting. In 1864 literary historian and poet Count Adolf von Schack sent Steffeck and Marées to Italy for further studies by copying the old masters.

While living in Italy from 1864 to 1870, Marées became a friend of art theorist Konrad Fiedler, who later became his patron, and the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, who would design the architectural setting for Marées’s murals at the zoological museum. After his extended stay in Italy, Marées decided to settle in Italy permanently in 1873.

Residing in Naples in 1873, Hans Von Marées received his most important commission: the painting of the frescoes in the library of the newly built Stazione Zoologica, the zoological museum in Naples. Influenced by his exposure to Italian Renaissance art, his frescoes consisted of five scenes depicting figures in landscapes, intended to express the joys of sea and beach life.

After completing the frescoes, Von Marées moved to Florence, where he became acquainted with classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, two leading members of the idealistic art group known as the “German Romans”. Von Marées shared the aesthetic views of philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and German art theorist Adolph Konrad Fleder, which prompted him to embody the dream of the golden age of humanity in allegorical images, and to invest his works with expressive, creative elements

Von Marées initially specialized in portraiture but later turned to painting mythological subjects. He developed a complex and individualistic technique of overpainting tempera with layers of oil, creating a depth of color quite unlike the muted tones of his fellow artist Anselm Feuerbach.

During the 1880s, Marées painted four triptychs of importance: “The Judgement of Paris”, “The Hesperides”, “The Wooing”, and “Three Saints on Horseback”. The two triptych on mythological themes, “The Judgement of Paris” and “The Hesperides”, are marked by clearly arranged masses, rhythmical forms, and rather bright colors. Their two-dimensional and linear compositions anticipated the form of the art nouveau movement.

Hans Von Marées spent his last years of his life in Rome, supported by his patron, art theorist Konrad Fiedler. Although ambitious, he lacked self-confidence and, in the later part of his life, ceased to exhibit his work. Marées died in Rome at the age of 49 in June of 1887. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome in the Rione of Testaccio. A retrospective of his work was shown at the Munich Exhibition in 1891, where his paintings were highly acclaimed.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in London to parents who worked as nurses for the National Health Service after emigrating from Ghana. She briefly studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design before attending the Falmouth College of Arts, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 2000. Yiadom-Boakye completed her MA degree in Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003.

Yiadom-Boakye’s figurative oil paintings contain predominantly black fictional characters, existing in no specific place or time, who are presented without our concerns or anxieties but with contemplative expressions and relaxed gestures. This absence of a fixed narrative prompts the viewers to project their own meanings onto the scene. While the complex politics of painting black figures is an essential part of her work, Yiadom-Boakye’s main emphasis at the start is always the actual language of painting and how that relates to its subject matter.

Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are rooted in a traditional formal manner in regards to such considerations as line, color, and scale. However, Yiadom-Boakye’s choice of subjects and her handling of the paint medium is distinctly contemporary in style. The characteristic dark palette of her work, with its raw and muted colors, creates a feeling of stillness that contributes to the timeless nature of her subjects.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s work was recognized in 2010 by Nigerian curator and art critic Okwui Enwezor, who gave her an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. In the same year, she had her first solo show, entitled “Essays and Documents” at the Jack Shainman Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in New York City, which now represents her work.

In January of 2017, Yiadom-Boakye had a second solo show at the Shainman Gallery entitled “In Lieu of a Louder Love”. In the paintings of this show, her style shifted slightly and featured a new, warmer color scheme. The figures in her works included boldly colored clothing, and more detailed and vibrant backgrounds of yellow, orange and green.

Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings were included in the Ghanaian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her work is conserved in numerous institutional collections, including London’s Tate Collection, New York’s The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery Museum of Southern Australia in Adelaide, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, among others.

Note: The Tate Museum in London is holding a survey of Yiadom-Boakye’s work, from December 2nd of 2020 to May 9th of 2021, after which it will later travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain.

Salem Beiruti

Salem Beiruti, “Cernunnos”, 2020, Digiatal Art Print with Watercolor and Gold Gouache

Born in Lebanon, Salem Beiruti is a conceptual artist and illustrator residing in Madrid. Working after graduation as an art director in the fields of advertising, graphics, and fashion design, he has more than seventeen years of client and freelance work. Upon his move to Madrid, Beiruti became a full=time illustrator and artist.

Beiruti’s skillful digital illustrations are unique and inspired by such artists and photographers as Patrick Fillion, Paul Freeman, Issauro Cairo, and Francisco Prato. His project of mixed-media works “Morphosis” is a result of his personal journey as a man of an Arabic mid-eastern culture and its traditions to the man he is today. The art book was published in June of 2017 by German publisher Bruno Gmnuender.

Salem Beiruti’s “Cernunnos” is based on model Francesc Gascó.

For those interested in purchasing a print, Art of Salem is offering all prints at a 40% discount for Easter 2021. Please reference Ultrawolves when ordering. Thank you. https://www.instagram.com/artistsalem/

Edoardo Gelli

Edoardo Gelli, “Portrait of a Buttero”, Date Unknown, 44.6 x 32.4 cm, Private Collection

The painter and engraver Edoardo Gelli was born in Savone, Italy, in September of 1852, to parents of Lucca origin. He began his artistic studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where he attended the courses of sculptor Carlo Dal Poggetto. Gelli also followed for six months the lessons of painter and etcher Antonio Fontaneis held at the Academy of Lucca in 1868.

In the same year, Edoardo Gelli had his first exhibition at the Promotrice of Florence where he entered a landscape painting. He moved to Florence to complete his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, with painter Antonio Ciseri, known for his religious subjects. Although Gelli’s body of work is oriented to the re-enactment of seventeenth and eighteenth-century settings, he also produced many portraits and scenes of historical genre.

Edoardo Gelli established a career as a portraitist with many illustrious and famous figures in the upper bourgeoisie sitting for his works. In 1886, he received a royal commission to work for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial court, where he painted a portrait of Franz Joseph I, the Emperor of Austria. It was during his three years of service to the Emperor that Gelli painted the 1887 portrait of his former teacher, Carlo Dal Poggetto, which is currently preserved at the National Museum of Palazzo Mansi in the city center of Lucca.

Chiefly known for his genre and costume portraits, Gelli’s work may be compared with those of Italian genre painter Francesco Vinea and Tito Conti, the Florence-based painter of genre costume or historical subjects. A talented artist with a vibrant palette and fine brushwork, he received a series of awards and became an Honorary Academician of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

Gelli entered his “The Lost Chord” in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, informally known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, in Missouri, United States. He retired from public exhibitions in the 1910s, preferring to paint in private. Edoardo Gelli died in Florence in 1933. Several of his works can be seen at the Pinacoteca di Lucca, Italy.

Insert Image: Edoardo Gelli, “Young Odalisque Smoking Narghilè”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 158 x 117 cm, Private Collection

Note: A buttero is a herder from the Maremma, the coastal region of Tuscany, Italy, or the Pontine Marshes to the south, who tendered livestock, predominantly cattle, from the back of his working-breed horse. The attire of the butteri has its roots in the fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries, when many pastoral workers found better pay as mercenaries. Returning to an agricultural lifestyle, they brought with them items of military dress.

Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke, “T.E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, 1921-22, Oil on Canvas, 42.5 x 52.7 cm, Clouds Hill Dorset, National Trust

Born in York on June 12th of 1858 into a prominent Quaker family, Henry Scott Tuke was an English visual artist, both a painter and photographer. His father was Daniel Hack Tuke, a well-known medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, who campaigned for the humane treatment of the insane. In 1859 the Tuke family moved to Falmouth, where Daniel Tuke established a practice.

Encouraged to draw and paint from an early age, Henry Scott Tuke was enrolled in 1870 at Irwin Sharpe’s Quaker school in Weston-super-Mare, where he remained until the age of sixteen. In 1875, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art under etcher and painter Alphonse Legros and historical painter Sir Edward Poynter. Tuke won a scholarship which supported his training at the Slade and his 1880 studies in Italy. Between 1881 and 1883, he was in Paris where he met Realist movement painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was associated with the beginning of Naturalism. It was Bastien-Lepage who encouraged Tuke to paint en plein air, painting outdoors within the landscape.

While studying in France, Tuke decided to move to Newlyn Cornwall where many of his Parisian and Slade School friends, including painters Thomas Cooper Gotch and Albert Chevallier Tayler, had already formed the Newlyn School of painters. Attracted to the fishing village’s fantastic light, cheap living and the availability of inexpensive models, these artists were fascinated by the everyday life in the harbor and nearby villages and took this as the subject of many of their paintings.

After he exhibited his work at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Tuck received several important commissions. With his style of rough, visible brushstrokes, more impressionistic than those of the other painters, he distanced himself after a short time from the Newlyn School. During the 1880s, Tuke became friends with Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers including poet and cultural historian John Addington Symonds. In 1885, Tuke returned to Falmouth, a secluded part of Cornwall with a mild climate where many of his major works were produced.

In his time at Falmouth, Tuke focused on maritime scenes and portraits, earning most of his income from his work as a maritime painter. He used a converted old fishing boat as a studio and living quarters in the summer and, in winter, rented two rooms in a cottage situated between Pennance Point and Swanpool Beach. This cottage remained Tuke’s permanent base until his death. While living there, he produced his 1888-89 “All Hands to the Pumps”, showing sailors manning the pumps during a rough sea storm; “The Sailing Lesson” in 1892; and the 1914 ship portrait “Four Masted Barque”, commissioned by its owner.

Henry Scott Tuke became an established artist and was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1914. Sometime in 1923, he visited Jamaica and Central America. There he created from 1923 to 1924 several watercolor scenes, such as “Tobacco Cay, British Honduras”. However in penetrating the interior of Belize, Tuke became ill and was forced to return home, where he never fully recovered his health. After a long illness and suffering a heart attack in 1928, he died, a year later, in March of 1929. In his will Tuke left generous amounts of money to some of the men, who as boys, had been his models.

Moving between Cornish-based artist colonies and the London art scene, Tuke presented a stylistic fusion of progressive en plein air paintings executed with a vivid palette and loose impressionistic handling of lighting and brushwork. Although remembered today mainly for his oil paintings of young men, Tuke, in addition to his achievements as a figurative painter, produced as many portraits of ships as he did human figures. A prolific artist, he produced over thirteen-hundred known works during his career.

Note: Among Henry Scott Tuke’s friends and models was a high school cadet, T. E. Lawrence, who later became famous as the iconic Lawrence of Arabia. In the painting “T. E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, done at Newporth Beach, near Falmouth, Tuke painted the young Lawrence getting dressed after a swim. As Lawrence was in his thirties in the early 1920s, it is most likely that this scene was composed using an earlier sketch drawn by Tuke, possibly from 1905.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Henry Scott Tuke”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “Jamaica”, 1924, Oil on Panel, 39.5 x 32 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “The Green Waterways”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 112 cm, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, Lancashire, England

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “William Ayers Ingram and Henry Scott Tuke, Pennance Point”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Juliusz Martwy

Juliusz Martwy, “At Night”, 2008, Watercolor, Ink, Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 25 x 35 cm, Artist’s Private Collection

Born in Warsaw in 1977, Juliusz Lewandowski, known as Juliusz Martwy, is a self-taught Polish artist. He began his career with illustrations for an edition of French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse’s “The Songs of Maldoror”, written under his nom de plume Comte de Lautréamont, and illustrations for the literary works of Marquis de Sade, famous for his libertine sexuality. Martwy draws inspiration for his work from the figurative styles of expressionism, cubism, the New Objectivity, and Russian traditional painting.

An important part of Martwy’s collective works are the autobiographical threads, through which he presents the universal problems of human nature. He deals with social, political and moral issues in his paintings, both historical and contemporary, such as the past civil war in Spain, the French Revolution, and the current political situation in Poland.

Apart from multi-faceted genre scenes, Juliusz Martwy paints intimate figurative portraits within spaces that depict small narrative, often erotic, incidents. His palette varies from scenes executed in tones of exclusively one color to those with either contrasting or complimentary colors. The portrayed figures, who readily express their emotions to the viewers, are composed through the use of strong lines and blocks of color.

In 2011, Martwy had his initial exhibition of work at London’s Showcase Richmix Gallery in Bethnal Green. He entered his work at the 2011 Modern Fine Art International Artists Group Exhibition held at London’s Westbank Gallery. Martwy also showed in the 2011 Polish Erotic Art exhibition held at the Museum of Eroticism in Cracow, and later in 2014, as part of the Group Exhibition of EroArt at Warsaw’s Erotic Expo. In 2017, Martwy had a solo exhibition at the Talinn Portrait Gallery in Estonia. His work has been available through the Catharine Miller Gallery located in the Chelsea area of London.

More of Juliusz Martwy’s work and contact information may be found at the artist’s Behance site: https://www.behance.net/juliuszlewandowski

František Kupka

František Kupka, “The Yellow Scale”, 1907, Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

František Kupka was born in September of 1871 in Opočno, a small town in Bohemia, now a part of the Czech Republic. From 1889 to 1892, he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he painted historical and patriotic themes. Kupka later attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he concentrated on allegorical and symbolic subjects, influenced by the works of Symbolist painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. In 1904, Kupka exhibited his work at Vienna’s art association, the Kunstverein.

Kupka settled in Paris by the spring of 1894 and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under figurative and portrait painter Jean-Pierre Laurens. Inspired by the Neo-Impressionist and Fauvist paintings he saw in Paris exhibitions, Kupka began experimenting with different styles, all while supporting himself as an illustrator of books and posters. In 1906 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon d’Automne, Paris’s annual art exhibition on the Champs-Élysées.

František Kupka’s 1909 painting “Piano Keyboard/Lake” marked a break in his representational style. His work became increasingly abstract beginning in 1910-11, reflecting his theories of color, motion and the link between music and painting. In 1931, he was a founding member of Abstraction-Création, a group formed to counteract the influence of Andre Breton’s surrealist group.

Kupka had work shown in 1936 at the “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition at MOMA in New York City and, in the same year, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. He regularly exhibited in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, until his death. Having gained general recognition, he had several solo shows in New York and a 1946 retrospective of his work at the Galerie Mánes in Prague. František Kupka died in June of 1957 in Puteaux, France.

František Kupka was drawn to theosophy and Eastern philosophy. He saw deep links between music and visual art and believed fervently in the power of color. To that end, Kupka strove to dissociate color from its usual descriptive role, wanting to let it be expressive in itself, not just on the subject. In his first attempt at this theory, he painted his 1907 “The Yellow Scale”, and produced a very personal painting in a single scale of yellow colors. Although a self-portrait, the subject of the painting was actually the color yellow, contrasted with just a few strokes of green.

Top Insert Image: František Kupka, “Self Portrait”, 1905, Oil on Canvas

Bottom Insert Image: František Kupka, “Meditation”, 1903, Oil on Canvas

Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas, “Light Blue Nursery”, 1968, Acrylic on Canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was an expressionist abstract painter and art educator. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Washington, DC to escape the racism the family experienced in the South. Thomas attended Howard University, where she took classes taught by painter and educator Lois Mailou Jones and impressionist painter James V. Herring, who founded Howard University’s art department.

Alma Thomas graduated in 1924 as the university’s first Fine Art graduate. She acquired her Masters in Art Education from New York’s Columbia University and studied abroad in Europe with the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She was greatly influenced by the techniques of French Impressionism, through the still-lifes and landscapes of Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet.

Through her life, Thomas was involved with the history of black American intellectual life and participated in many organizations promoting such history and culture. Among these was the Little Paris Group, a literary circle of black public school teachers who met weekly in the 1940s. Alma Thomas also served as Vice President of the Barnett Aden Gallery, founded in 1947, as a black-owned non-profit art gallery. The gallery exhibited the work of all artists regardless of race; however, it was one of few places that showed black artists on equal footing with their white contemporaries.

After she retired, at the age of sixty-nine, from her career as an art teacher, Alma Thomas developed her own personal style. Inspired by the shifting light filtering between the leaves of trees in her garden, she began to paint her signature abstractions. Thomas was given her first solo show at the Dupont Theatre Art Gallery in 1960.

Although the work is abstract, the titles summon up specific moods and scenes, such as “Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses” in 1969, the 1973 “Snow Reflections on Pond”, and “Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music” painted in 1976. The colorful rectangular dabs of paint, often arranged in circles or rows, allow the under-colors to emerge through the open spaces.

Alma Thomas died at the age of 86 in 1978 in Washington, DC. During her life she was included in many group shows centered around black artists. It was not until after her death that her work began being included in shows which did not focus on the unifying themes of race or gender identity, but rather was allowed to exist simply as art. Her work can be seen at many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum.

Note: The insert image is Alma Thomas’s “Grassy Melodic Chat”, an acrylic on canvas painting done in 1976. It is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.