Tag: realism

F. Scott Hess

 

F. Scott Hess, Unknown Title, Oil on Canvas, (Catch of the Day)

F. Scott Hess, “Light,” 2005, Oil on Canvas

Born in Baltimore, longtime Los Angeles artist F. Scott Hess attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, and Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, earning a BSA from the University of Wisconsin in 1977. In 1979, Hess moved to Vienna, Austria, where he studied for five years with the Austrian painter Rudolf Hausner, who has been credited as the first psychoanalytical painter. Through his artistic teaching experience in Vienna, Hess gained greater exposure to techniques of old master style painting, which profoundly influenced his work.

F. Scott Hess  has been described as a “New Old Master”. His narrative portraiture blends realistic scenes of everyday life with symbolic and allegorical events, humor, eroticism, and voyeurism. He begins with drawings and careful diagramming on his canvases before adding traditional oil paint or egg tempera. Hess’s works are defined by his strong brushwork, careful attention to the luminosity of flesh, and ability to capture ethereal light.

Source: generouslycrazytiger

Samuel C. Guy

Samuel C. Guy, “The Chess Players”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm

Samuel C Guy, who lives and works in Boston, explores topics that address the human condition such as masculinity, childhood, growth, and the existential. His work utilizes the figure as a means of discussing these themes. Through the manipulation of the subject, the surrounding references, and use of text and symbols he creates imagery that is at once enigmatic and contemplative.

Guy is also known for injecting satire and absurdity into his work, often making direct references to art history, both classic and modern. The resulting layers of meaning tap into and challenge the knowledge brought to the work by the viewer. Guy has moved towards a reduced palette, bringing an implied darkness, and cynicism to otherwise humorous or lighthearted paintings.

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Francois Xavier Fabre

Francois Xavier Fabre, “Academic Studies of the Male Torso”, 1787, Oil on Canvas

Born in Montpellier, French Neo-Classical painter Francois Xavier Fabre was a pupil of Jacques Louis David, and made his fame by winning in 1787 the Prix de Rome, a scholarship initially estabished by Louis XIV in 1663. Fabre left France during the Revolution and lived in Florence, Italy, becoming a member of the Florentine Academy where he taught. He gained popularity in Florence; the city’s artistocrats and tourists were drawn to his elegance, realism, and percisision of his paintings.

During his stay in Florence, Fabre met dramatist, Vittorio Alfieri, whose widow, Princess Loouise of Stolberg-Gerdern, he married. After Louise’s death in 1824, Fabre used the inherited fortune to found an art school in Montpellier. During his time in Italy, he built up a collection of 16th and 17th century Italian paintings and drawings, and paintings by his French contemporaries. On his own death, he bequeathed this extensive art collection to the town of Montpellier, forming the basis of the Musee Fabre.

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Iain Faulkner

Iain Faulkner, “Morning Coffee”, 2003, Oil on Canvas

Iain Faulkner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1973 where he was raised and educated. As a child Faulkner was encouraged and guided by his father, an electrical engineer, for whom drawing was both job and pastime. Faulkner went on to Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1996 with a BA (Honours) Degree in Fine Art. Faulkner is, however, largely self-taught and from the start of his professional career chose to follow the difficult and demanding path of figurative painting.

Source: allotherthingsintheworld

Calendar: September 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of September

The Garden Wall

September 12, 1898 marks the birthdate of the social realist artist Ben Shahn.

Ben Shahn began his path to becoming an artist when his family left Lithuania and moved to Brooklyn, New York. He was trained in his early years as a lithographer and graphic designer; his experience in these fields would be apparent in his future works, combining text with images. Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student in 1919, he left to pursue art at City College in 1921 and later at the National Academy of Design.

Ben Shahn’s twenty-three gouache paintings of the trials of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti communicated the political concerns of his time. Shahn followed the trial closely and believed, like many people worldwide, that the two men were not given a fair trial. Shahn participated in protests and made his gouache paintings in 1931 and 1932. Many were based on photographs appearing in the newspapers. “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” was exhibited in 1932 and received acclaim for both the public and the critics.

Ben Shahn’s work came to the attention of Diego Rivera. In May and June of 1933, Shahn served as an assistant to Rivera while Rivera executed his New York Rockefeller Center mural. During the Depression years, Shahn worked for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration, photographing the American south; his social documentary style emphasized the people’s living and working conditions. Shahn also painted many fresco murals for schools, post offices, and government buildings; the art he made affirmed his social justice ideals and the legacy of the Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Shahn mixed different genres of art; however, his body of work is distinctive for its lack of traditional portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. He used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he united through the consistency of using a strong line in his work. Shahn’s background in lithography contributed to his devotion to detail; his work is also noted for his use of unique symbolism, often compared to the imagery in Paul Klee’s drawings.

Ben Shahn’s social-realist vision informed his approach to art; his examination of the status quo inspired his creative process. Although Shahn often explored contested themes of modern urban life, organized labor, immigration and injustice, he did so while maintaining a compassionate tone. Shahn identified himself as a communicative artist, challenging the esoteric pretensions of art, which he believed disconnect the artists and their work from the public.

Beatrice Cuming

Beatrice Cuming, “Chubb”, 1941, Oil on Canvas, Lyman Allyn Art Museum

The early 20th century in the United States was a time of rapid expansion and industrialization fueled in part by waves of immigration. A decade of exuberance followed World War I before the stock market crash of 1929 initiated the Great Depression of the 1930s. Abstraction and European modernism filtered into American art, while a realistic, regional style simultaneously held sway, resulting in a mix of subjects and styles.

Many artists were drawn to the energy and bustle of the modern city, awash in crowds and transformed by industry, skyscrapers and the automobile. Beatrice Cuming’s painting, “Chubb”, shows a submarine being built in the Groton, Connecticut shipyard during World War II. Cuming’s canvas affirmed New London’s long connection to the sea and celebrated industry at a time when the nation was consumed with the war effort.

Harry Sternberg

Harry Sternberg, “The Atom”, 1949, Aquatint, 44 x 25 cm, Private Collection

Harry Sternberg, painter, lithographer and educator was born on July 19, 1904 in New York City. At the age of nine he began to take art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. From 1922 until 1926 he trained at the Arts Students League in New York. He rented his first studio in 1926 and began his career in etching, printmaking and painting.

During the depression Sternberg was a WPA artist, and his murals are in post offices in Chicago, Chester and Sellersville, Pennsylvania. From 1934 to 1968, he taught painting and graphics at the Art Students League in New York. He taught printmaking from 1942 to 1945 at the New School of Social Research. Sternberg was head of the Art Department in the Idylwild School of Music and Art at the University of Southern California from 1959 to 1969. He also wrote several books on graphics, including silk screening, etching and woodcutting.

Sternberg received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936 and his work was included in the first Whitney Museum Invitational Annual in 1937. During this period, Sternberg was friendly with Mexican artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, and David Siqueiros. Other artist- friends were Jacob Lawrence, Philip Evergood, and John Sennhauser, and the older artists, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley and Max Weber.

Note: A more extensive biography and additional artwork by Sternberg can be found in the January, 2022, archive of this site.

Calendar: June 24

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of June

Window Seat on Life

June 24, 1865 was the birthdate of the American Realism painter and teacher, Robert Henri.

In 1886 Robert Henri enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied under Thomas Anshutz and Thomas Hovenden. He traveled to Paris in 1888 to enroll at the Academie Julian, where he studied under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and embraced the Impressionist movement. At the end of 1891, he returned to Philadelphia to study and began teaching at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1892.

By 1895, Henri reconsidered his earlier love of Impressionism and urged his friends and proteges to create a new, more realistic art that spoke to the present time and experience. He believed artists should seek out fresh, less genteel subjects in the modern cities of America. The paintings produced by Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn and others became known as the Ashcan School of American Art. They spurned academic painting and Impressionism as the art of “surface” painting.

Art critic Robert Hughes, known for his television series on modern art, “The Shock of the New” and for his position as art critic with Time magazine, stated that “Henri wanted art to be akin to journalism. He wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter, as real a human product as sweat, carrying the un-suppressed smell of human life.”

In 1908, Henri was one of the organizers of a landmark show entitled “The Eight” at the Macbeth Galleries in New York. The exhibitors included, besides Henri, the artists John Sloan, Everett Shinn, George Luks and William J. Glackens, as well as three artists of a less-realistic style, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson and Arthur B. Davies. The goal of the exhibition was to celebrate America and American art, particularly those artist who depicted regional subjects such as cityscapes, urban dwellers, and the cinema and cabaret.

The exhibition was also intended as a protest against the exhibition policies and narrowness of taste of the National Academy of Design. Although it emphasized American art, “The Eight” became a vehicle for the dissemination of the new French modernist styles, due to Maurice Prendergast’s daring, vibrantly colored contributions to the show. The exhibition later traveled to several cities from Newark to Chicago, prompting further discussion in the press about the revolt against academic art and the new ideas about acceptable subject matter in painting.

In the spring of 1929, Henri was named as one of the top three living American artists by the Arts Council of New York. Henri died of cancer that summer at the age of sixty-four. He was eulogized by colleagues and former students and was honored with a memorial exhibition of seventy-eight paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fittingly, among Henri’s most enduring works are his portraits of his fellow painters, exhibiting the classic elements of his style: forceful brushwork, intense dark color effects, evocation of his and the sitter’s personality, and generosity of spirit.

John Tarahteeff

John Tarahteeff, “The Grand Canal”, Date Unknown, Acrylic on Canvas, Private Collection

An enigmatic figurative painter, Tarahteef combines Realism with a sort of contemporary Mannerism. His paintings of elongated, almost unnatural-looking characters can be humorous and unsettling, striking emotional chords in the viewer of amusement and sometimes disorientation. His acrylic paintings use tight composition, pale lighting, and plays of scale to hint to a deep and compelling narrative that remains slightly elusive.

Danny Galieote

Six Paintings by Danny Galieote

Galieote’s unique style takes cues from the drama and technical prowess of Italian Renaissance masters and the New-World optimism of American painters like Paul Cadmus, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood – wrapping it all up with a sinister twist of Rockwellesque humor. His work, though frequently featuring fashion and scenes from by-gone eras, does not concern itself with nostalgia; but rather with the pursuit of the universal, timeless theme of human nature. His paintings draw on elements all along this spectrum – suffusing them with an atmosphere at once dark and yet strangely sweet.

Steven Kenny

Steven Kenny, “The Wing”, 2005, Oil on Linen, Private Collection

Steven Kenny was born in Peekskill, New York in 1962. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1984. His final year of art school was spent studying independently in Rome. This direct exposure to European art (especially the Baroque works of the Italian, Dutch and Flemish schools) had a significant effect on his painting style.

From an early age the beauty and mystery of nature have deeply influenced his chosen subject matter: compositions that most often combine the human figure with elements from nature to comment on our interactions with the environment while symbolically alluding to the dynamics of human nature in general.

First settling in New York City, he gained notoriety as a freelance commercial illustrator. In 1997 Steven turned away from illustration in order to devote his full attention to fine art. Since that time he has lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and his home state of New York before settling in St Petersburg, Florida.

Fernando O’Connor

Fernando O’Connor, “Amarillo”, 2011, Oil and Charcoal on Canvas

Argentinean artist Fernando O’Connor started his career as a hyperrealist painter in the early 90’s as a result of his interest in the human figure. In time, that interest spread to other shapes and forms. Today, O’Connor’s work reflects the marriage of these two interests as it remains consistently evident in the unique composition of each paintings.

O’Connor continues to live and work in Buenos Aires.

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Joseph Sheppard

Joseph Sheppard, “Volleyball”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 152.4 x 175.3 cm, Private Collection

Joseph Sheppard is a Maryland artist who currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland and in Florence, Italy. He taught at the Maryland Instiute College of Art for 15 years. His favorite subject is the human figure which he paints in a realistic style. One of his favorite painters and greatest source of inspiration is the Baroque Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.

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