Tag: paintings

Trevor Southey

The Art of Trevor Southey

Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Africa in 1940 to parents of colonialist Dutch descent, Trevor Jack Thomas Southey was a celebrated Mormon painter, print maker, sculptor and educator. His heritage can be traced to European colonists who settled in Cape Town, South Africa in the seventeenth-century. Southey’s work celebrated the human form and sought to transform humanity by challenging viewers to rediscover their inner soul.

Trevor Southey’s early interest in art developed during periods of rheumatic fever that often confined him to bed with only pencils, paper, and art books from the school library. His formal art education began with studies at the Brighton College of Art in Sussex, England. A year later, Southey studied at the Natel Technical College in Durban, South Africa where he met and was baptized by Mormon missionaries. In the early 1960s, he served as a Latter Day Saints missionary with the organization’s South Africa Aid program. 

Retaining his African and European origins, Southey emigrated to the United States in 1965 and studied at the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he earned both his Bachelor and Master Degrees. Southey taught art education at the university and became a founding member in 1966 of the highly significant Mormon Art and Belief Movement, an artist organization that was active until 1976. During his teaching career, Southey worked to establish a Mormon art form through his use of Latter Day Saint theology. 

Despite his homosexuality, Trevor Southey married psychotherapist Elaine Fish, the daughter of Jesse Fish and Lucile Cottam, in 1967 after a brief courtship of several months. In an attempt to conform to the teachings of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the couple settled down in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, built a homestead in Alpine  and raised four children. Southey along with artists Neil Hadlock, Dennis Smith and Gary Ernest Smith founded a small artist community in Alpine during the 1970s.

Southey resigned from Brigham Young University’s faculty in 1977 and began to pursue a personal artistic career. Coming to terms with his homosexuality, Southey divorced Elaine Fish in 1982 after fifteen years of marriage and found himself excommunicated on the outskirts of Mormon society. Thirty years later, Southey’s reputation as an artist prompted an invitation to once again join the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

As a figurative Realist, Trevor Southey used the depiction of the physical body to portray the soul, a method employed frequently by painters and sculptors of the Renaissance period. He expressed human spirituality through commonplace figures of an ethereal nature in scenes that combined realism and personally related allegories. Southey’s work, focused on the Rocky Mountain area, examined environmental issues that effected the land particularly those concerns that dealt with urban planning. In 1985, he relocated his Salt Lake City studio to San Francisco where Southey’s artwork achieved both critical and popular success. His four children from his annulled marriage later joined him in San Francisco. 

During the 1990s, Southey became an accomplished stained glass designer, sculptor and print maker. His many intaglio etchings exhibited the same elegance and delicate draftsmanship of his paintings. Southey’s “Full Bloom” intaglio series began as a pencil drawing of a woman he knew from church. In its final form, this successful series of etchings became a universal symbol of resurrection and the cycle of life. Fully established now as an artist of note, Southey received commissions for both paintings and sculptures throughout the United States and the United Kingdom . 

Trevor Southey did a series of illustrations for several books of poetry by writer, playwright and lecturer Carol Lynn Pearson. These include the 1976 “The Growing Season” and the 1987 “A Widening View”, both published by Bookcraft in Salt Lake City, as well as the 1967 “Beginnings” published by Trilogy Arts in Provo, Utah. Southey, along with Brigham Young University Professors Clyde W. Robinson and Donald R. Marshall, participated in a 1979 panel discussion with authors Diane Leigh and Brett Parkinson on the nature of art in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. This dialogue was later published in the Fall 1979 edition of “Century II”, the Brigham Young University journal for its College of Humanities.

In 2013, after a decade-long battle with prostate cancer and a recent diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, Southey returned to Salt Lake City, Utah to be cared for by friends and relatives. His four children also relocated to be by his side. Trevor Southey died, at the age of seventy-five after a year at the Salt Lake City hospice, on the twentieth of October in 2015. His funeral service was held at the Dumke Auditorium of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Southey’s work can be found in many private collections and both public and corporate institutions.

“ It made itself most known in my work. Even that work long preserved within the seeming sanctity of a subject like the traditional family would reflect that shunned part of my being. Works done innocently, once they were complete still held the whole truth within them. Perhaps no painting revealed that more clearly than Prodigal. Often while I refused to acknowledge this, others could read it quite clearly. Prodigal was conceived from Jesus’ parable of reconciliation and familial love. I feared the sensuality of this work, and indeed, it was gently declined by the clients. At its conception and execution, that sensuality was naive and even innocent, as was the deeper implications of content. Other works follow as a celebration of this new personal “home,’ this integration, the comfort of finally being one within oneself and one within a new society. Some of these images are almost embarrassingly overt, though that was by no means my intention.”

Trevor Southey, Gay, Excerpt from Warnock Fine Arts: Trevor Southey

Notes: Trevor Southey attracted controversy in 1981 with his “Flight Aspiration”, a painting of a flying nude man and woman that was part of a mural commissioned for the Salt Lake City International Airport. The mural was removed after protests by the American Family Association, a national anti-pornography group led locally by Romola Joy Beech, a well known Latter Day Saints conservative activist. After five years in storage at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, “Flight Aspiration” was placed into the museum’s permanent collection in 1986.

Duane Jennings, a long-time friend of Southey and author of the two-volume series “Stumbling Blocks and Stepping-Stones”, wrote a short article on the artist’s life for the online site “Affirmation: LBGTQ Mormons Families and Friends”: https://affirmation.org/trevor-southey-1940-2015/

The Affirmation site also has an article by Seba Martinez that discusses Southey’s personal experience in marriage, excommunication from the Church of the Latter Day Saints, and break-up of family bonds due to a loved one being homosexual: https://affirmation.org/pbs-documentary-mormons/

Selected for the LDS Film Festival, Nathan Florence’s 2022 film, “Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey”, is a narrative documentary on Southey’s life and work. This film contains film clips of Southey with his work. “Bright Spark” can be found in its entirety on the PBS/MPT site: https://www.pbs.org/video/bright-spark-the-reconciliation-of-trevor-southey-ld2x8l/

The Trevor Southey website is located at: http://www.trevorsouthey.com

The Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art site has a presentation of Trevor Southey’s large-scale painting series “Warriors” for viewing and purchase: http://www.trevorsouthey.com/warriors/index.html

Second Insert Image; Trevor Southey, “Yuri”, 2000, “Warrior” Series, Oil on Canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm, Dabakis-Justesen Fine Art

Third Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Transition”, 1980, Edition of 77, Etching, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Trevor Southey, “Russ”, 1990, Prismacolor Pencil Drawing on Silkscreen, 76.2 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

 

Illustrations for “Lord of the Flies”

Various Artists’ Illustrations for  “Lord of the Flies”

“Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out towards the open sea.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Six Paintings by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, of Coast Salish descent, graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in British Columbia. In combining his own experiences with a political perspective, he paints landscapes with vivid, acidic colours, merging Native iconography with a surrealist influence to address West Coast Native issues.

Yuxweluptun is Salish for “man of many masks,” a name given to the artist during his initiation into the Sxwaixwe Society at the age of fourteen. It is Cowishan Salish belief that the Sxwaixwe is a supernatural being who came down from the sky to live at the bottom of a lake. There is a dance associated with this creature in which the mask plays an important role. Yuxweluptun explains, “You carry the mask that belongs to your family and you identify with the animal on the mask.” (Robin Laurence, “Man of Masks,” Canadian Art, Spring 1995).

Yuxweluptun has chosen art as a way to voice his political concerns, exposing environmental destruction and the struggle of Native people. He believes that his artwork stimulates dialogue between Native and non-Native people.

Servando Cabrera Moreno

Paintings by Servando Cabrera Moreno

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

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

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

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

Jim Dine

Jim Dine, The “Pinocchio Paintings”

Forty years ago, Jim Dine acquired an effigy of Pinocchio that evoked in him some of the emotion he felt upon seeing the Walt Disney film as a child. The figure of the marionette that becomes a boy did not turn up in Dine’s own work until more than 30 years later, and in those paintings and drawings it was a stand-in for the artist himself, communicating some of Dine’s own youthful terror.

Pavel Tchelitchew

The Artwork of Pavel Tchelitchev

Born in October of 1898 in Dubrovka, a settlement of the Russian Empire, Pavel Tchelitchev was a surrealist painter and a costume and set designer. He was an exponent of the Neo-Romantic movement, a group which included French fashion designer and illustrator Christian Bérard and the Russian painters Eugène and Leonid Berman. This group, active in Paris during the 1920’s, drew their inspiration from Picasso’s ‘Blue’ and ‘Pink’ periods and the metaphysical paintings of de Chirico.

The only son of an aristocratic landowning family, Tchelitchev was educated by private tutors and expressed an early interest in art and ballet. After the 1917 revolution, his family was forced to flee Russia and settled in Ukraine. Tchelitchev studied at the Kiev Academy and at the studio of painter Aleksandra Ekster, one of the most experimental women of the avant-garde Art Deco movement. After graduation, he worked from 1920 to 1923 as a designer and builder of theater sets in both Odessa and Berlin. 

During the early 1920s, Pavel Tchelitchev, who was openly homosexual, met American pianist Allen Tanner in Berlin; the two men became lovers and moved together to Paris in 1923 to pursue the artistic careers. That year in Paris, Tchelitchev became acquainted with Gertrud Stein, who introduced him to the Sitwell sisters and the Gorer family, both wealthy families who supported the arts. He developed a long-standing close friendship with Edith Sitwell, which led to frequent correspondence between them and the painting of six portraits of Sitwell.

In Paris, Tchelitchev created multimedia painting, film and dance experiences that led to collaborative works with choreographer George Balanchine, later the founder of the New York City Ballet, and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the preeminent Ballets Russes. Tchelitchev’s first show in the United States was a group exhibition at New York’s newly opened Museum of Modern Art in which he showed his drawings. In 1934, he left his lover Allen Tanner and moved to New York City with his new partner, poet Charles Henri Ford, whom he had met in 1933 shortly after Ford’s arrival in Paris.

Pavel Tchelitchev continued to collaborate with choreographer Balanchine and was introduced to writer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein, who became Tchelitchev’s greatest patron. For seven years tarting in 1940, Tchelitchev produced illustrations for the literary and art magazine “View”, whose coverage of the avant-garde and surrealist art scene was published by Ford and gay poet and film critic Parker Tyler. 

Tchelitchev’s earliest paintings, abstract in style, were influenced by his study in Kiev with Ekster and by the Russian Constructivist and Italian Futurist movements. With his move to Paris in the 1920s, he became influenced by the assertive emotions contained within the brushstrokes of the French Neo-Romantic artists. Tchelitchev continued to experiment with new styles throughout his career and eventually incorporated elements of fantasy and surrealism with multiple perspectives into his body of work. 

Pavel Tchelitchev became a United States citizen in 1952 and moved to Italy with Charles Henri Ford in 1949. He died, with his partner by his side, in July of 1957 in Grottaferrata, Italy. His body is buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. 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. His correspondence, writings, photographs and printed material are housed in the Archives at Yale University. 

Note: For those interested in a more comprehensive study of Tchelitchew’s life and work, I recommend James Thrall Soby’s 1942 “Tchelitchew: Paintings, Drawings” published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This volume in its entirety can be found at: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3117_300061977.pdf

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Pavel Tchelitchew”, circa 1930s, Bromide Print, 22 x 18.7 cm, National Portrait Gallry, Washington DC

Second Insert Image: Pavel Tchelitchew, “Fallen Man”, Date Unknown, Gouache on Paper, 65 x 50 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Pavel Tchelitchew, “Study for Bathers”, 1938, Ink on Paper, 44.5 x 28 cm, Private Collection

Christopher Sousa

Oil Paintings by Christopher Sousa

Christopher Sousa was born in Fall River, MA and has lived and worked in Provincetown, MA since 2003. His portraits and figures explore themes of isolation, alienation, longing and desire. He counts Lucien Freud, Jenny Saville, Paul Cadmus and Euan Uglow among his influences. Sousa has studied with Larry Collins and Donald Beal.

Sousa is represented by AMP in Provincetown and the Woodman/Shimko Gallery in Palm Springs, CA. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, A Gallery, and Larry Collins Fine Art in Provincetown, MA, The Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, NY, The URI Feinstein Providence Campus Gallery in Providence, RI, and Reynolds Fine Art in New Haven, CT.

“My painting has always been about the face and/or figure, but most often depicting the male. My inspiration comes from people I see or meet, and a desire to investigate and document the complexities of their distinctiveness.

Recently I’ve become interested in exploring the male portrait beyond the conventional perceptions of masculinity. Eschewing elements of “manly” coarseness and clichéd machismo, I’m attempting instead to depict a softness and beauty traditionally associated with portraiture of the female.”

-Christopher Sousa

Richard Taddei

The Artwork of Richard Taddei

Born in New York City in 1946, Richard Taddei is an American painter known for his male figurative works which are abstracted and seen through opposing picture planes and geometrical spaces. Raised in New Hyde Park in Long Island, he attended the Art School of the University of Toledo, Ohio in 1964. Taddei transferred to New York’s Pratt Institute of Art in 1967 to study architecture and art; later in the year he traveled to Europe to explore its art museums. 

In 1968, Taddei began mentoring under the Kentucky-born artist Edward Melcarth, known for his Renaissance-influenced illustrations and paintings. Through Melcarth, he was introduced to the techniques employed in the art of Trompe l’Oeil and Venice’s seventeenth-century paintings. Taddei met photographer and designer John Loring in the same year; they would live together and form a design collaboration for creations at Tiffany & Company. 

After a move to a SoHo loft in the early half of the 1970s, Richard Taddei began several personal associations which influenced his work and life. In 1972, he traveled to Italy where he lived and worked alongside Edward Melcarth; later in the same year, Taddei met Peggy Guggenheim, the entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes who began collecting his work, and the nature-inspired oil painter David Hill. In 1975, Taddei lived in Paris for a year with David Hill and Canadian painter Joseph Plaskett, both of whom influenced his figurative work.

After a 1976 move to the TriBeCa area of New York City, Taddei had his first painting exhibitions with the art dealer Jualian Pretto and later presented work in a group show curated by Keith Haring in the East Village. In the 1980s, Taddei established a career in the decorative arts in which, among other works, he created designs for china, scarves, backdrops and table settings for Tiffany & Company. Taddei also created murals for events at New York City’s Tavern on the Green, the Metropolitan Museum’s Party of the Year, and the Annual Gala at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Richard Taddei’s paintings had appeared in many galleries, both in group and solo exhibitions. These include many group exhibitions in Provincetown, Massachusetts, including two solo exhibitions. Taddei’s work has also been shown in galleries in New York City, including the contemporary Hal Bromm Gallery. His most recent solo exhibition of new work was the January-February 2022 “Looking at Men” held at the Fine Art Gallery of the Wallkill River School located in New York’s Hudson Valley. 

Richard Taddei’s paintings have been championed by the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation and has been represented by the MDH Fine Arts Gallery. Images of Taddei’s work and contact information can be found at the artist’s site located at: https://www.richardtaddei.com 

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Taddei, “Italian Sailors”, 1986, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 111.8 cm, Private Collection

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.

Attila Richard Lukacs

Paintings by Attila Richard Lukacs

Canadian-born painter Attila Richard Lukacs’s large-scale paintings are steeped in art-historical references and homoeroticism. Evoking mythological rites of passage, with oddly shifting perspectives, Lukacs’s recent paintings find inspiration in Persian and Indian miniatures and the studied order of Renaissance composition..

Lukacs was part of a group of artists in the 1980s known as the Young Romantics. He became famous for his large-scale highly controversal canvases of skinheads and military cadets in the 1980s. His works make adept use of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro techniques and the flattened gold-leaf planes of the Symbolist painters. Over the years, his work has shifted between abstraction and figuration, sometimes integrating both.

Pippo Rizzo

Paintings by Pippo Rizzo

Born in Corleone, Sicily, in 1897, Pippo Rizzo was an artist whose style was strongly influenced by Cubism, the Bauhaus, Art Deco and other movements which marked the early decades of the twentieth century. His oil paintings, graphics and design work, involving fashion and furniture, combined such mainstream styles with Sicilian folk art to produce something truly unique, transcending the Socialist art that typified the Fascist era.

Rizzo was quite versatile in his use of media. He often ventured from the primitive to the stylised to the abstract. Compared to the art of many of his Italian contemporaries, Rizzo’s was rarely overtly political or politicised. In stark contrast to masters such as Picasso, Rizzo was not a philosophical revolutionary. His statements were altogether more universal.

With his wife, Maria, Rizzo founded a futurist art gallery in Palermo in 1925. His visionary side, though never as developed as that of a surrealist painter or science fiction illustrator, was remarkable for 1930s Italy. However, it did not challenge the aesthetic ideas of Fascism in the way that Vitaliano Brancati’s writings sometimes did.

As a young man, Pippo Rizzo studied in Rome and exhibited in Berlin and Buenos Aires. Over the years, he designed posters for the Venice carnivals. Rizzo taught art in Rome and, from 1936 to 1960, in Palermo. Rizzo then returned to Rome as dean of an art institute until retiring in 1962. He died in Palermo two years later.

Donald Pass

Etchings and Paintings by Donald Pass

Donald Pass was a British painter and visionary artist whose art has often been compared to that of William Blake by reviewers. He is known for work based on a vision he experienced, which has been interpreted as the Resurrection of the Dead. His work is found in museums and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Born in Congleton, Cheshire, Donald attended the King’s school in Macclesfield. He then enrolled at Burslem College of Art in 1947, from where he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art in London. When he was called up for national service, a medical examination found that Donald’s eyesight was poor. He instead began teaching art at Walsall Art College, moving to Drake Hall Prison in Stafford, where he managed to establish art on the curriculum, and later to Liverpool College of Art where John Lennon was one of his students.

Brian Biedul

Paintings by Brian Biedul

Brian Biedul was born in Colorado Springs in 1955. He soon thereafter moved to Europe with his family, where he spent the better part of his youth. While living in Paris he studied art under the instruction of Siegfried Hahn. Later, after returning to the United States and settling in Los Angeles, he received his BFA from Art Center College of Design.

Biedul is currently developing a series entitled “Spaces.” This series seeks to articulate what the artist calls “theoretical architecture.” It consists of three phases – Rectangles, Squares and Cubes. In the first two phases, Biedul uses the traditional medium of oil on canvas, conveying to the viewer the structure, dimension and tension of the theoetical 3-dimensional space. To assist in communicating these interconnected properties, Biedul uses a universally understood quantity – the human figure.

The third phase – Cubes – is to be a series of large-scale sculpted bronze cubes.  The Cubes will further the artist’s concept by similarly employing the human figure to depict space inside set perameters. Biedul hopes to begin the Cubes in early 2008.

Andrew Potter

Paintings by Andrew Potter

Andrew Potter is an artist who paints in a classical style. Following his initial training, he had worked for the Royal Academy of Arts in London for many years as a researcher. The knowledge he possesses informs many of his pictures and contributes to the classical form of his paintings.

He is an elected member of the United Society of Artists and his paintings are regularly exhibited in exhibitions at major London galleries. His paintings are characterised by solid composition, strong colours and a wide narrative content.

Andrew Potter moved in 2015 to Felanitx on the Balearic Island of Mallorca. In December of 2018, he opened The Andrew Potter Gallery, his own gallery and a studio space, in the town center of Felanitx.