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"PAINTING PRECISE LOCATIONS IS IRRELEVANT; SIMPLY KEEP THE CHARACTER"

June 25, 2013, 7:46 pm
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Joseph Zbukvic
From artnatureoflife.blogspot.com


Getting ready to paint

Where the grey matter kicks in

Paintings awaiting the return of the master

Pastel and the easel

Braced for a painting
All images from jzbukvic.com


Joseph Zbukvic was born in 1952 in Yugoslavia. In 1967 he enrolled into the University Ivo Leber to study languages and literature combining the performing and visual arts to pursue a teaching career. However this was interrupted in 1970 when, due to political unrest, he decided to emigrate to Australia. During this period Joseph was given the opportunity to return to art. He continued his formal education at Deakin University, Melbourne, graduating in 1974, gaining a Diploma of Art, majoring in Industrial Design.
In 1978 he took up painting full time, quickly establishing himself as one of the leading artists in the country, specialising in watercolour.
He lectures at the Charles Sturt University, Mitchell School of Arts, Melbourne University and the University of Western Australia. He has held over 40 solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, London and Texas. He is a member of the Victorian Watercolor Society and a long-standing member of the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society.
In 1998 he was nominated and accepted into the esteemed membership of the Australian Watercolor Institute and has won over 200 major art awards over his professional career. Joseph has travelled widely and is much sought after as a teacher, taking art courses all over Europe and the USA. His work is represented in many public and private collections all over the world.
(From The Tryon Gallery at tryon.co.uk)


Coffee Time

Delivery Time
All images from tryon.co.uk


Dordongne, France

Venice Fish Market

The Last Run
All images from internationalmastersoff


The Boulevard, Cologna
From melbournefineart.com.au


"Painting precise locations is irrelevant; simply keep the character."
Joseph Zbukvic is a leading master of watercolor medium of his time. His impressive achievements and enormous success is due to his ability to transform any subject into visual poetic language. Covering an infinite variety of subjects, his sensitive, lyrical and atmospheric paintings have captured people and galleries from all around the world.
Due to his exceptional drawing skills and extraordinary abilities in art, he is proficient in any medium. However, it is his passion for watercolors that has led him to become a unique master of that medium. Although greatly admired for his soft moody impressions of rural life, Joseph also produces strong urban scenes and powerful equestrian images. He has always had a deep connection and affection for the laborer and the common man and it is these works that are also his finest paintings ever produced in watercolor.
He has continued to explore new subjects and fresh ways to express his vision by frequent overseas travel. He has reached a new level of technical ability, maturity and strength as he enters the fourth decade of his career.
(From twentymelbournepainterssociety.com.au)

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CHILDE HASSAM

June 26, 2013, 8:41 pm
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Grand prix day Sun

Spanish Steps

Cityscape
All images from wikipaintings.org


Hassam (pronounced HASS'm;) (known to all as Childe, pronounced like child) was born in his family home in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1859. His father Frederick was a moderately successful businessman with a large collection of art and antiques. He descended from a long line of New Englanders, while his mother, Rosa, was a native of Maine. Hassam demonstrated an interest in art early. He had his first lessons in drawing and watercolor while attending The Mather School, but his parents took little notice of his nascent talent.
As a child Hassam excelled at boxing and swimming at Dorchester High School. A disastrous fire in November 1872 wiped out much of Boston's commercial district, including his father's business. Hassam left high school after two years despite his uncle's offer to pay for a Harvard education. Hassam preferred to help support his family by working. His father arranged a job for him in the accounting department of publisher Little, Brown & Company. During that time, he studied the art of wood engraving and found employment with George Johnson, a wood engraver. He quickly proved an adept draftsman (listed as a "draughtsman" in the Boston directory) and he produced designs for commercial engravings such as letterheads and newspapers. Around 1879, Hassam began creating his earliest oil paintings, but his preferred medium was watercolor, mostly outdoor studies.
(en.wikipedia.org)


L'Exposition universelle de Chicago
Columbian Exposition, Chicago
From nl.wikipedia.org


Champs Elysées, Paris, 1889
From commons.wikimedia.org


Snowstorm, Madison Square Garden, 1890
From msa.maryland.gov


By 1883, Hassam was exhibiting publicly and had his first solo exhibition, of watercolors, at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston. The following year, his friend Celia Thaxter convinced him to drop his first name and thereafter he was known simply as "Childe Hassam". He also began to add a crescent symbol in front of his signature, the meaning of which remains unknown.
Having had relatively little formal art training, Hassam was advised by his friend (and fellow Boston Art Club member) Edmund H. Garrett to take a two-month "study trip" with him to Europe during the summer of 1883. Hassam and Garrett traveled throughout the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain, studying the Old Masters together and creating watercolors of the European countryside. Hassam was particularly impressed with the watercolors of J. M. W. Turner. Sixty-seven of the watercolors Hassam did on this trip formed the basis of his second exhibition in 1884. During this period, Hassam taught at the Cowles Art School. He also joined the "Paint and Clay Club", expanding his contacts in the art community, which included prominent critics and "the readiest and smartest of our younger generation of artists, illustrators, sculptors, and decorators—the nearest thing to Bohemia that Boston can boast."
Friends found him to be energetic, robust, outgoing, and unassuming, capable of self-mockery and considerate acts, but he could be argumentative and wickedly witty against the art community who opposed him. Hassam was particularly influenced by the circle of William Morris Hunt, who like the great French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, emphasized the Barbizon tradition of working directly from nature. He absorbed their credo that "atmosphere and light are the great things to work for in landscape painting."


A Back Road
From pih.wikipedia.org


In 1885, a noted critic, in part responding to Hassam’s early oil painting A Back Road (1884), stated that "the Boston taste for landscape painting, founded on this sound French school, is the one vital, positive, productive, and distinctive tendency among our artists today...the truth is poetry enough for these radicals of the new school. It is a healthy, manly muscular kind of art."
(en.wikipedia.org)


In the Park, Paris
From b-womeninamericanhistory19.blogspot.com


Early Evening, After Snowfall
From terminartors.com


Late in 1886 Hassam and his wife, Kathleen Maud, departed for France and spent the next three years abroad. They settled in Paris, and Hassam began lessons in drawing at the Académie Julian with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. His work of these years reflects his growing awareness of the French Impressionists; he consistently used broken brushstrokes, and his palette rapidly became brighter. Hassam preferred to consider himself a painter of ‘light and air’ in a general sense rather than be labeled an Impressionist.
In 1889 Hassam settled in New York. He continued to depict urban scenes just as he had in Boston, a genre with which he became so closely identified. In the summer seasons he traveled to artistic resorts throughout New England. Around 1884 he visited Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the Maine–New Hampshire coast, and he returned there repeatedly during the early 1890s to produce some of his finest and most sophisticated Impressionist watercolors and oils. By 1892 Hassam was exhibiting regularly at the annual exhibitions of most of the major art institutions on the East Coast, including the Boston Art Club, American Water Color Society, National Academy of Design, New York Water Color Club, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Art Club. In 1898 he helped to organize the first exhibition, in New York, of the Ten American painters.
Between 1900 and 1910 Hassam continued to live and work in New York, during the warmer months visiting the artistic colonies at Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut; his brand of Impressionism influenced not only students and amateur artists who gathered there, but also fellow American Impressionists such as Julian Alden Weir and Willard Leroy Metcalf.
(oxfordartonline.com)

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DANIEL GARBER

July 2, 2013, 12:09 am
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Quarry at Byram, about 1917
From research.craigmacdonald.com


El viejo molino (1921)
From floresypalabras.blogspot.com


Corn
From underthegables.blogspot.com


In the second decade of the twentieth century, artist Daniel Garber (1880-1958) emerged as one of leaders of the New Hope School, also known as the Pennsylvania School of Landscape Painters. This handful of artists was tied together more by the location of their studios -- in Bucks County, Pennsylvania -- than by any one painting style. Garber, and the school as a whole, were heralded as the landscape painters of their generation, receiving critical recognition across the United States where they exhibited their works in the first quarter of the twentieth century; artist and critic Guy Pene du Bois observing in 1915 that their art was "our first truly national expression."
The group's art was largely ignored for most of the mid to late twentieth century since it did not seem to fit perceptions of American modernism and its roots. Over the past quarter of a century, however, regional studies of American art have steadily included discussions of the New Hope school and other art centers.
Garber immediately after high school left his home state to attend the Art Academy of Cincinnati where he studied from 1897 to 1899 with two artists trained in the Munich school of late nineteenth-century realism. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he trained from 1900-1905, Garber's primary mentor was Thomas Anshutz (1851-1912). Anshutz continued the traditions of American realist Thomas Eakins (1844-1816) and is sometimes best remembered as the teacher of many of the artists of the Ashcan School of urban realism.
Anshutz encouraged his students, including Garber, to seek their own artistic direction. After painting in a similar manner to his teacher, utilizing a dark brown palette and more conventional composition devices, Garber went his own way; unlike his New York contemporaries of the Ashcan School, however, he went on to explore realism in the country, depicting the rural landscape. This freedom encouraged by Anshutz also allowed Garber to develop a decorative formal style greatly unlike that of his teacher.
(antiquesandfineart.com)
He is best known today for his large impressionist scenes of the New Hope area, in which he often depicted the Delaware River. He also painted figurative interior works and excelled at etching. In addition to his painting career, Garber taught art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for over forty years.
Garber was born on April 11, 1880 in North Manchester, Indiana. He studied art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1899-1905. During this time Garber met and married his wife, Mary Franklin, who was also an art student. In the tradition of many American artists, Garber and his wife traveled to Europe to complete his art education. Returning to America in 1907, on the advice of artist William Langson Lathrop he settled at Cuttalossa just downriver from Lumberville, Pennsylvania, six miles up the Delaware River from New Hope.
Like most impressionist painters, Garber painted landscapes en plein air, directly from nature. He exhibited his works nationwide and earned numerous awards, including a Gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915) in San Francisco, California. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1913. Garber died on July 5, 1958, after falling from a ladder at his studio. Today, Garber's paintings are considered by collectors and art historians to be among the finest works produced from the New Hope art colony. His paintings are owned by major museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
(From tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com)
Along with painter Edward Redfield, Garber became a stylistic leader of the group now referred to as the Pennsylvania Impressionists. However, while his Bucks County compatriots were known for swift en plein air painting, Garber was much more methodical, repeatedly returning to the same scenes both outdoors and within his studio. As he stated, "People talk about impulse, about impressions, but that isn't personal with me It is the study of a subject that appeals to me rather than any quick notebook impression of it."
During the first two decades of the 20th century, Garber became noted for a series of paintings of local quarries that transformed landscapes disfigured by industry into serene and glowing scenes. He also painted dreamlike spring landscapes depicting blossoming trees in dazzling tonalities, as well as a number of quiet domestic figure paintings of family members. By 1920, heavier stitchlike textures and large two-dimensional patterns began to emerge in Garber's landscapes, and in 1928, artist and critic Henry C. Pitz proclaimed that Garber's work represented "American landscape at its best."
(Michener Art Museum in Resource Library at tfaoi.com)


Springtime, 1954
From crashinglybeautiful.tumblr


Spring Valley Inn
From woodmerecollection.org


Fields in Jersey

Romantic Realist

Our Country Neighbors , 1937
All images from liveinternet.ru


He painted in a straightforward, luminous manner, depicting the great quarries across the river in Byram, New Jersey, as well as in a more decorative, high-key mode, rendering foliage and branch patterns. This painting includes an element of fantasy that had begun to characterize much of the late Impressionist work in America. During the period 1908 and 1924, Garber included skillfully painted figures in most of his paintings, unlike many of his contemporaries. To a smaller extent Garber was a portraitist, but his landscapes of the woods and quarries of Bucks County, Pennsylvania gained him his greatest notoriety.
His talents as a teacher were also evident, and he became the outstanding teacher among the group living at New Hope. He was a member of the faculty at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1904, and then began in 1909 began a career of teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts that lasted forty-one years. Not far from the Delaware River in Lumberville, Bucks County, Garber settled on a tranquil farm in 1907, and that provided him the inspiration for many of his works. Retiring in 1950, Garber was one of the Academy's most admired and respected teachers.
(gratzgallery.com)



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"PAINTINGS SHOULD BE WINDOWS TO THE IMAGINATION"

July 2, 2013, 7:25 pm
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The Flyer
From tutwilerfineart.com


Homeward Bound
From transpressnz.blogspot.com


Rockport Reflections
From air-sana.it


Mountain Pass Southern Pacific Railroad
From tutwilerfineart.com


David Tutwiler holds the honor of having his paintings hang in some of America's most prestigious collections, both public and private. Including collections of the Pepsi Cola Co., the National Railway Historical Society, and the Sloan Collection of Valparaiso University.
He began painting at the young age of fourteen, with a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago. He went on to study and graduate from the American Academy of Art with an Associates Degree in Fine Art.
David has participated in many National Exhibitions such as the Mystic Seaport International, the Oil Painters of America, and the Great American Artists exhibitions, Cincinnati, Ohio. In addition to being one of America's foremost painters of Steam Era Railroad subjects, his portfolio also includes significant works depicting traditional American landscapes and coastal subjects of the sea coasts and the Great Lakes. David maintains a studio on the southern shores of Lake Michigan and a summer gallery in Rockport Mass. with his wife Line, also an accomplished professional artist, and the mother of their six children.
(thecollectionshop.com)


Bambi's Winter Wonderland
From world-wide-art.com


Inspired to find history alive and woven into the romance of life, David has spent over 30 years painting from the gifts that surround him in his faith, family, friends and diversity of life. In addition to being one of America’s foremost painters of steam era railroading, David has painted significant pieces depicting traditional American landscapes and sailing vessels. He has won numerous awards including the Marguerite Pearson Gold Medal and the National Park Academy Bronze Medal.
(rockportartassn.org)
David lives just about three miles beyond the South Shore headquarters, right along Route 12. He and his wife Line were most gracious. They live within listening distance of the South Shore line and close to the Dunes area. They split their time between Indiana and Rockport, Massachusetts. David and Line had a very cozy studio, separate from the house. It was filled with David's artwork, and of course, railroad memorabilia. The wood stove made things quite comfortable, and it must be very pleasant place to be on a cold, wintry day. David is originally from Chicago, and received much of his initial training through The American Academy of Fine Art. He even met his wife there! He has always been interested in trains. When he graduated, he saw so many of his classmates go into other jobs, just to pay the rent. He decided that he would try being a painter one day at a time. One day turned into months, and the months turned into years, and here he is, as he said, "Still painting for a living".
(zoominfo.com)


Out of the Mist
From visitshoremagazine.com


"Out of the Mist", Tutwiler’s Indiana Salon Show winning painting, was inspired by a trip he took to Chama, New Mexico. The piece depicts a stop on the last active segment of the Rio Grande Railroad, which stretches from Chama to Colorado.
"That particular painting was one that I felt would be nice (to submit),” Tutwiler said. “The subject matter ties into the old railroad history of Indiana. The old Wabash and the railroad lines through Indiana go back along ways. There’s a lot of history there and part of the links that crisscrosses America.”
“(The Indiana Salon Show is) a great show to participate in,” he added. “It’s well orchestrated and they do a great job of putting it together.”
(visitshoremagazine.com)
Over the course of his three–decades plus as a painter, Beverly Shores’ artist David Tutwiler has been on the right track when it comes to his art and the railroad strata.
“The train theme was one of the first things I ever sketched and drew, going back to third and fourth grade, and one of my first accomplishments was a painting that won me a scholarship into the School of the Art Institute, and that was of the train subject,” he said. “And each of the major achievements along the way seems to be train related somehow.”
Tutwiler, who is the Best of Show recipient at the Hoosier Salon at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis, was reared in West Suburban Hinsdale, Ill. Along with trains and railroads, Tutwiler cited the Indiana Dunes and lakeshore as early influences on his art.
Along with his studies at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, he honed his craft at the American Academy of Art, where he met his wife, Line. For 31 years now, the Tutwilers have divided their time between Beverly Shores and Massachusetts, where they own and operate a namesake art studio.
While fortunate to be able to make a living for himself and his family as an artist, he cites advice he received decades ago from acclaimed American painter Richard Schmid as the guideline for aspiring artists today.
“(Schmid) said ‘You need to concentrate on painting and developing your painting and not worry about the money.’ When I started out, I took that to heart. I wasn’t trying to aim to make big money. I was aiming to make paintings that were of what experiences I’ve had and places I’ve traveled.
“Paintings should be windows to the imagination.”
(visitshoremagazine.com)


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"SCAR ART" PAINTINGS

July 3, 2013, 11:42 pm
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Zang Hongnian besides “before the long march”
Everlasting Red Flag
From siva.edu.cn


Before the long march
Everlasting Red Flag
From ALLDAY.RU


Peasant from Yuxian
From fletchergallery.com


Halloween Parade Triptych

Return of Zhang Qian
Images from theacademyoffineart.com


HongNian Zhang is a Chinese-born American painter, who works in the Western academic tradition. Works by this gifted artist have been exhibited and acquired by museums, galleries, corporations and private collectors across the globe.
Growing up in China, Mr. Zhang became accomplished in art at a young age. He was one of the top students at the highly selective and prestigious Central Art Academy’s Affiliated High School in Beijing. The instruction there was rigorous, paving the road for his future success. Unfortunately, the Cultural Revolution broke out and temporarily forestalled his art career. In 1970, Zhang and his classmates were sent to a forced labor camp in the remote countryside. He labored there for 4 years and creating art was prohibited.
(tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com)


We Were Young Then
From china1980s.org


In 1974, Hongnian returned to Beijing and soon became a rising star. As the youngest artist ever to be appointed to the Beijing Art Academy, he created large-scale oil paintings that caught the public’s attention and heart. His innovative oils helped develop “Scar Art”, an important artistic movement in China that examined the painful memories of the Cultural Revolution. Two of his “Scar Art” paintings, No! And We Were Young Then, were acquired by China’s National Art Museum for their permanent collection. In 1979 he was elected to the All China Artists Association. He was the youngest artist at that time to have achieved the honor. In 1984, his painting, Preparing for winter, one of the first oil paintings depicting Tibetan life, won the Bronze Medal. It was also acquired by the National Art Museum for their permanent collection. At the same time, Hongnian was accepted to the extremely selective Central Art Academy’s Master Degree program.
(tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com)


Silk Road
From liveinternet.ru


Grief
From cuadernoderetazos.files.wordpress.com


In 1985, Zhang came to the United State to continue his study in art. He became involved with New York’s Grand Central Gallery and was one of the artists in the gallery’s successful 1986 show, “Realism from China.” It was the first show to introduce Chinese oil painting to the Western world. Art News and CBS were among the media groups that acknowledged the show with reports and interviews.
After moving to Woodstock, New York in 1991, Zhang continued to work in the realism tradition, yet expanding his subjects from Tibetan to a wide range that include Chinese and American historical paintings, and contemporary American subjects. He has taught in various art schools, including the New York Academy and the Woodstock School of Art. His works have appeared in numerous publications, including National Geographic Magazine in October 2001, July 2003, February 2004 and July 2005. Four of his Chinese historical paintings were acquired by National Geographic Society and included in their collection. Zhang and his wife, Lois Woolley, co-wrote The Yin Yang of Painting, which presents his unique artistic approach and style for oil painting.
(fletchergallery.com)

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SIDEWALKS AND AVENUES

July 12, 2013, 9:05 pm
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La Place Saint-Michel
Source allartpainting.com
From commons.wikimedia.org


Eugène Galien-Laloue (1854–1941) was a French artist of French-Italian parents and was born in Paris on December 11, 1854. He was a populariser of street scenes, usually painted in autumn or winter. His paintings of the early 1900s accurately represent the era in which he lived: a happy, bustling Paris, la Belle Époque, with horse-drawn carriages, trolley cars and its first omnibuses. Galien-Laloue's works are valued not only for their contribution to 20th century art, but for the actual history, which they document. His work can be seen at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Louvier; Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Rochelle; Mulhouse, France.
(en.wikipedia.org).


Petit palais

Place de Chatalet

Le Grand Boulevard
Images from callaghan-finepaintings


Some artists or writers are content to have a pseudonym so as to disguise their work. Eugène Galien Laloue was particularly adept at establishing several identities, since over the course of his career he worked under three pseudonyms: J. Lievin – after a soldier he met during the Franco-Prussian war, E. Galiany – an Italianized version of his own names, and L. Dupuy – after Dupuy Léon who lived in his same area. While these are three confirmed names that he used, there is the possibility that he used other names as well. Even his name “Galien” is questionable, since on occasion he spelled it with one “l” and on his birth certificate it is spelled “Gallien”. Why the artist went to such great lengths to perplex audiences and historians is the question that remains to be answered. From the beginning of his career and perhaps spurred by his travels along the railway lines, Galien Laloue became interested in showing the natural environment. While not uncommon, it was perhaps an interesting theme for an artist who did not necessarily seek to connect with nature and while painting en plein-air, he “hated to walk in any mud and even a blade of grass bothered him.”
(Noë Willer, Eugène Galien-Laloue: 1854-1941, New York: Alexander Kahan, 1999, pg. 16)
He had a reclusive personality, which also may explain the reasons behind his numerous pseudonyms. He preferred the solitariness of his studio and thus did not paint his works entirely on-site. Unlike many other artists as well, he did not like to travel and many of his views of other cities or countries were inspired by postcards and photographs, an increasing tendency with many artists as photography became a more established method of use. Noë Willer further elaborates upon the unique personality of this artist: He was not eccentric but always conservative, practically a royalist. He was obsessed with his painting. In his private life he found simplicity alluring: he married three sisters, one after the other (beginning with the youngest and ending with the oldest). They had all lived next door to him. He lived a monastic life. All worldly pursuits, games, alcohol, the pleasure of the flesh were not for him. Riding his bicycle to places in Paris to paint was his only physical exercise.
(rehsgalleries.com)


Porte St. Martin
From rehsgalleries.com


Le Grand Boulevard 2
From one1more2time3.files.wordpress.com


A typical Galien-Laloue painting depicts sidewalks and avenues crowded with people or tourists mingling before the capital's monuments. He also painted the landscapes of Normandy and Seine-et-Marne, as well as military scenes he was commissioned to produce in 1914. The Republic of France selected Galien-Laloue to work as a 'war artist,' both during the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, chiefly in watercolor. "He was originally trained as an architect, but did not enjoy the promotional aspects of the profession. Under the tutelage of Charles Laloue, he quickly gained fame as an artist, specializing in watercolor and gouache."
(allpaintings.org)


The Quays Gouache on paper
From macconnal-mason.com


Village, an Autumn Evening
Oil on canvas Images from the-athenaeum.org


La Bourse Paris
From allpaintings.org


"Galien-Laloue mastered the depiction of the Belle Epoque Paris street scene, much in the vein of Jean Beraud (1849-1936) or James Jacques Tissot (1836-1902). He portrayed Paris at its best: irresistible shops, boulevards and "quartiers". With delicate line and dramatic lighting, Galien-Laloue documented the daily bustle of one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Paris." "Galien Laloue continued to paint until 1940, when he broke the arm with which he held his brush...He had become very popular with both French and especially American artists and continued to paint the same scenes of Paris throughout his career. He died in his daughter’s house in Chérence, where they had taken refuge at the beginning of the Second World War, on April 18th, 1941."
(allpaintings.org)

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ARTHUR STREETON

July 14, 2013, 8:56 pm
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Sunlight Sweet Coogee
From commons.wikimedia.org


Manlybeach
From afterlabs.com


Sirius Cove
From commons.wikimedia.org


'Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide'
Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales
From commons.wikimedia.org


Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton (1867-1943)  was born on 8 April 1867 at Duneed, Victoria, fourth of five children of Charles Henry Streeton, schoolteacher, and his wife Mary, née Johnson, whom Charles had met on his voyage from England in 1854 and married in 1857 on his appointment to Queenscliff. The family moved to Melbourne in 1874 when Charles joined the administrative staff of the Education Department. They settled at Richmond and Arthur attended the Punt Road State School until 1880 when he became a junior clerk in the office of Rolfe & Co., importers, of Bourke Street.
As a child Arthur liked to draw and sketch in water-colour. He enrolled in night classes at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design in 1882-87 and in 1886 his skill at sketching led to his being apprenticed as a lithographer to Charles Troedel & Co., of Collins Street. Streeton's first independently published black-and-white work, 'His First Snake', appeared in the Australasian Sketcher of 24 January 1889. He had no formal instruction in painting; his earliest extant oils date from 1884 and at this stage he was largely self-taught; he used such manuals as William Morris Hunt's Talks About Art (1877) which urged the emulation of plein air French painters Jean Millet and Camille Corot.
Inspired by his reading, Streeton wrote to the compiler of Hunt's book for photographs of Corot's work. In the summer of 1886 Streeton met Tom Roberts at Mentone. Seeing his work 'full of light and air', Roberts asked him to join a painting group which included Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams. In their company Streeton continued to work on the problems of light and heat and space and distance which had already absorbed him. With the sale of 'Settler's Camp' and 'Pastoral', both exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society in 1888, he was able to paint full time: for the next two years he worked at Box Hill and Heidelberg with his artist friends who now included Charles Conder, and also in the city where he did portraits and studies of the Yarra River and its bridges. A camp established at an old house at Eaglemont, overlooking the Yarra valley near Heidelberg, became the focus of their artistic fellowship. Streeton and Conder supplemented their income by giving painting lessons to young women; at weekends artists and students visited to paint and picnic beneath the pines.
(Ann E. Galbally at adb.anu.edu.au)


Troops marching in the centre of Boulogne, 1918
From m.artgallery.nsw.gov.au


Mount St Quentin, 1918
Current Loc Melbourne Museum
From commons.wikimedia.org


Arthur Streeton was appointed an official war artist by the Commonwealth Government of Australia in May 1918. He arrived in France shortly after his appointment and was sent to a training school at Boulogne where he was taught how to use a gas mask. Streeton was employed to produce at least 25 drawings and watercolours, and one large painting of a battle scene or other Australian Imperial Force involvement. In just over six months he was prolific, producing numerous drawings and watercolour studies on site, and completed works in his studio in London.
Troops marching in the centre of Boulogne, 1918, depicts troops marching in the centre of Boulogne. Although many of Streeton’s war paintings concentrated on the landscape, this picture represents the machinery of war, both human and mechanical.
(m.artgallery.nsw.gov.au)


Tea in the Garden, Grange Road 1930
From menziesartbrands.com


After the war, Streeton resumed painting in the Grampians and Dandenong Ranges. Streeton built a house on five acres (20,000 m²) at Olinda in the Dandenongs where he continued to paint. He won the Wynne Prize in 1928 with Afternoon Light, Goulburn Valley. He was an art critic for The Argus from 1929 to 1935 and in 1937 was knighted for services to the arts. He married Esther Leonora Clench, a Canadian violinist, in 1908. Streeton died in September 1943. He is buried at Fern Tree Gully cemetery. Streeton Primary School in the Melbourne suburb of Yallambie is named after Streeton.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)



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MEAD SCHAEFFER

July 16, 2013, 9:47 pm
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Captain Blood
From bpib.com


Mead Blackbuck
From getlostblog.wordpress.com


Captain Pinken
From pinterest.com


The Count of Monte Cristo
From getlostblog.files.wordpress.com


Mead Schaeffer was born in 1898 in Freedom Plains, New York. He's of the same generation as Saul Tepper, Boris Artzybasheff, Rico Tomaso, Haddon Sundblom, Donald Teague, Floyd Davis, Edwin Georgi and Norman Rockwell - a generation that was to explode into the pages of the nation's illustrated magazines in the 1930's through the 1950's. Schaeffer attended the Pratt Institute in New York City and after his graduation in 1920 he took further studies with Harvey Dunn and Dean Cornwell. He very quickly got work in the waning issues of the smaller, traditional magazines.
(By Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. - JVJ PUBLISHING at bpib.com)

The followings are images from Moby Dick by Herman Melville,
Published by Dodd, Mead & Co ~ 1923:


Moby Dick

Ahab

I will soon be out

Townho story
All images from thegoldenagesite.blogspot.com


1922 was the same year he began doing book illustrations. Just as Scribner's had their classics with mostly Wyeth illustrations, Dodd-Mead began a similar series with Schaeffer doing the majority of the titles. Quite an honor for a 24-year-old. His earliest books were Herman Melville titles: Moby Dick (1922), Typee (1923) and Omoo (1924). He also did a pair of Rand McNally titles in their adventure/classic series in 1924: Adventures of Remi and King Arthur and His Knights. These early efforts represent the first of three very distinct stylistic approaches of his career.
(By Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. - JVJ PUBLISHING at bpib.com)


Ladies Home Journal 1931
From navarrobadia.blogspot.com


The followings are images from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas,
Published by Dodd, Mead & Co ~ 1929:


Frontis

Drew his Rapier

Threw the Dice

Received Instructions

Felton bowed his head
All images from null-entropy.com


Paratrooper Periscope

Tank Patrol
Images from surfsedge.com


In 1930, Schaeffer turned his attention from fictional characters to real people depicted in real settings. During the 1930s and 1940s he received commissions from magazines including Good Housekeeping , McCall's, the Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, Country Gentleman, and Cosmopolitan. He produced 46 covers for the weekly Saturday Evening Post. His work as a war correspondent for the Post during World War II resulted in a well-known series of covers illustrating American military personnel. He lived for a time in New Rochelle, New York, but for most of his career lived in Arlington, Vermont, where his studio was in a barn. Norman Rockwell was a good friend, and Schaeffer and his family often posed as models for Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post illustrations and paintings.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)


Forbidden Lover
The Ladies Home Journal July 1932
From getlostblog.files.wordpress.com


Schaeffer abandoned the romantic adventure milieu in favor of more realistic subject matter. According to a quote in Susan E. Meyer's 1981 book, Norman Rockwell's People, "I suddenly realized I was sick of it all - sick of painting dudes and dandies. I longed to do honest work, based on real places, real people and real things." Which sounds all well and good, but he had always gone to great lengths to put realism into his paintings, often traveling to exotic locales so as to get the images right for a book or story. All of the people, places and things he'd been painting were very "real." Maybe it was Rockwell that influenced him, but World War II may have changed his perspective, also.
(By Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. - JVJ PUBLISHING at bpib.com)


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JAMES GUTHRIE

July 17, 2013, 9:01 pm
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To Pastures New 1882-83
Fromdeflam’s photostream at flickr.com


Hard At It 1883

In the Orchard 1885-86
Images from 19thcenturybritpaint.blogspot.com


Pastoral
From bbc.co.uk


Sir James Guthrie (1859-1930) was one of the Glasgow Boys, a group of late-19th century Scottish painters influenced by French realist Jules Bastien-Lepage. Like some other artists of middle-class origin in those days, his family sent him to university with the idea that he would practice law.
And like the others he abandoned that line of education to take up art, though his art training came largely by self-education. Regardless of how he mastered his skills, Guthrie became one of the most prominent Scottish artists of his time. By 1902 he was president of the Royal Scottish Academy and in 1903 was knighted. (artcontrarian.blogspot.com)


A Hind's Daughter

Schoolmates

Boy With a Straw

Gypsy Fires are Burning for Daylight's Past and Gone

Poppleton, The Artist at Work

Field Work in the Lothians
Images from the-athenaeum.org


Unlike many of his contemporaries he did not study in Paris, being mostly self-taught, although he was mentored for a short time by James Drummond in Glasgow and then John Pettie in London.
He lived most of his life in the Scottish Borders, most notably in Cockburnspath, Berwickshire, where he painted some of his most important works, including A Hind Daughter (1883), and Schoolmates. He was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1888, and a full member in 1892. In 1902 he succeeded Sir George Reid as RSA president in 1902.
(intofineart.com)


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CORNELIS VREEDENBURGH

July 21, 2013, 10:41 pm
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Familie Vreedenburgh met Cornelis
From gallery.dorant.net


Farm next to canal

Ships On A Puddle

Of Woerdense Verlaat
Images from wikipaintings.org


View on the Amstel Sun
From graphic.ir


Cornelis Vreedenburgh was born in Woerden on August 25th, 1880 and was a loyal follower of The Hague School Impressionism all his life. His characteristic style of short, often colourful strokes and highlights, has a luminous feel to it that is totally his own. His father, who painted himself and had a large painting company, gave him his first drawing lessons when he was very young. He went on to study with the famous artists Willem Tholen and Paul Arntzenius. Vreedenburgh had a fondness for water landscapes and together with his former tutor and friend Tholen, he often travelled outdoors near waterways and rivers to paint.
(lesliesmith.nl)


Fair In Laren
From wikipaintings.org


A sunny view of a farm in a polder
From nevsepic.com.ua


After his marriage to the painter M. Schotel they spent some time together in the village of Saint Tropez in the south of France. Back in Holland they settled in the small town of Hattem for a time but eventually moved to the “Gooi” and the town of Laren later on. Vreedenburgh returned to Amsterdam, the city that captivated him, on a regular basis to paint the canals and “grachtenpanden”. During a study trip to Palestine and a commissioned trip to the “Holy Land” of Israël, Vreedenburgh produced many sketches and studies in watercolour and oil paint.
(lesliesmith.nl)


Cows in the Meadow

With The Koepelkerk Beyond
Images from wikipaintings.org


In 1937 Queen Wilhelmina bought two of his paintings, “Cows in the Meadow” and “The Prins Hendrikkade in Amsterdam”. The latter was stolen in the Second World War by the German forces and has never been found. Vreedenburgh was a member of the artist society “Pulchri Studio” in The Hague, “Lucas” in Laren and “Arti et Amicitae” in Amsterdam. He won numerous medals for his work during his lifetime, including a silver medal in San Francisco, the Willink van Collen Prize through Art et Amicitiae and a bronze medal in Arnhem. Vreedenburgh died in Laren on June 27th, 1946.
(lesliesmith.nl)



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FRANK WILLIAM BRANGWYN

July 23, 2013, 2:33 am
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Frank Brangwyn
From brangwyn.net


Charity
From artclon.com


Sir Frank William Brangwyn RA RWS RBA (12 May 1867 – 11 June 1956) was an Anglo-Welsh artist, painter, water colourist, virtuoso engraver and illustrator, and progressive designer. He received some artistic training, probably from his father, and later from Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and in the workshops of William Morris, but he was largely an autodidact without a formal artistic education. At the age of seventeen, one of his paintings was accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he was strengthened in his conviction to become an artist.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
After his family moved to England in 1875 Brangwyn entered the South Kensington Art Schools and from 1882 to 1884 worked for William Morris. Brangwyn's plein-air work in Cornwall from 1884 to 1888 resulted in a series of oils, exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists, London, in which the subdued tones indicate the influences of Whistler and the Newlyn school.
(tate.org.uk)


Funeral at Sea
From bbc.co.uk


Initially he painted traditional subjects about the sea and life on the seas. His canvas, Funeral At Sea (1890) won a medal of the 3rd class at the 1891 Paris Salon. The limited palette in this painting is typical of his Newlyn period (although he was not officially a Newlyn artist). By the late 19th century Orientalism had become a favoured theme for many painters. Soon Brangwyn was attracted by the light and the bright colours of these southern countries. He travelled to Istanbul and the Black Sea, working as a deck hand for his passage. He made many paintings and drawings, particularly of Spain, Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey. This lightened his palette, a change that initially did not find critical favor. He continued his travels to different parts of Africa, including South Africa.
(tate.org.uk)


The Swans

The Lower Reaches of the Thames

Fruits and Flagon
All Images from bbc.co.uk


The earthquake of 1910 in Messina, Sicily, inspired a notable series of watercolours, while in etching, which he had begun in 1904, he evolved a monumental style using strong chiaroscuro. Industry, shipping and contemporary London and Venice were favourite theme, lithographs, war posters, and pageant, scenery and architectural designs. From 1924 Brangwyn was occupied with what he regarded as the culmination of his life's work, for panels for the Royal Gallery in the House of Lords. These were rejected by the Lords as being too flamboyant. On completion in 1933 they were purchased for the Guildhall, Swansea: they are still in situ. After his murals of 1930–34 for the Rockefeller Center, New York, he devoted himself to religious art. Brangwyn paid little regard to contemporary developments in art and in his later years lived virtually as a recluse at Ditchling, where he had settled in 1918.
(tate.org.uk)


‘Making Sailors: Youthful Ambition’
From tate.org.uk


Brangwyn was an artistic jack-of-all-trades. As well as paintings and drawings, he produced designs for stained glass, furniture, ceramics, table glassware, buildings and interiors, was a lithographer and woodcutter and was an illustrator of books. In 1952 Clifford Musgrave estimated that Brangwyn had produced over 12,000 works. He collaborated with Japanese Urushibara Mokuchu on a series of woodblock prints. Brangwyn's mural commissions would cover over 22,000 sq ft (2,000 m2) of canvas, he painted over 1,000 oils, over 660 mixed media works (watercolours, gouache), over 500 etchings, about 400 wood engravings and woodcuts, 280 lithographs, 40 architectural and interior designs, 230 designs for furniture, and 20 stained glass panels and windows.
Towards the end of his life, Brangwyn donated many of his own and other artworks to museums and galleries in Britain and Europe. In 1944, he recovered and secured designs by Frederic Shields for the Chapel of the Ascension built by Herbert Horne, which was destroyed in 1940 during the London Blitz. In 1950, one of his last works provided illustrations for the book Sixty Years of Yachts by Herbert Julyan, a good friend.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)


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FRANK E. SCHOONOVER

July 23, 2013, 6:35 pm
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Frank E. Schoonover
From oakknollbooks.files.wordpress.com


The Brandywine School was a style of illustration — as well as an artists colony in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, near Brandywine Creek — both founded by artist Howard Pyle (1853–1911) at the end of the 19th century. The works produced there were widely published in adventure novels, magazines and romances in the early 20th Century. Pyle was mentor to such successful artists as N. C. Wyeth, Frank E. Schoonover, Stanley M. Arthurs, W.J. Aylward, Thornton Oakley, Violet Oakley, Clifford Ashley, Anna Whelan Betts, Ethel Franklin Betts and Harvey Dunn.
(chetvergvecher.livejournal.com)






Golden Age Comic Book Stories
All images from chetvergvecher.livejournal


From childhood, Frank Schoonover was drawn to the outdoors and opportunities to explore the wonder of nature. As he put it, “I don’t know what I was looking for but I loved the water and the streams.” It’s no wonder then, that as his passion for both the outdoors and art grew, he began creating pen and ink drawings of streams, bridges, buildings, and barns. It wasn’t long before he realized that illustration was his true passion. This excerpt from Frank E. Schoonover Catalogue Raisonné by John Schoonover, Louise Schoonover Smith, and LeeAnn Dean describes Schoonover’s first experiences studying art under the famous Howard Pyle.
In early September, 1896, an advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer forever changed his course. Listed in the newspaper was the fall offering of classes at Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia. He scoured the ad and “…it said that anyone with a desire for illustration could have the instruction in that kind of art under the tutelage of Howard Pyle, that if the work in hand would pass the judgment of Howard Pyle. Well that was it.”
(An Excerpt from Frank E. Schoonover Catalogue Raisonné at oakknollbooks.wordpress.com)


Schoonover (far left) with Drexel students

Pyle with favorites Stanley Arthurs (left) and Schoonover
Images from oakknollbooks.files.wordpress.com


He confronted his parents. “I really think that I’m not really material or fitted to be a Presbyterian minister. I think I’d like to go down and study with Mr. Pyle and be an illustrator. They didn’t seem to object very much to it.” With the goal of eventually studying under Pyle, a hopeful Schoonover submitted drawings for admission to Drexel to Clifford P. Grayson, director of the School of Drawing, Painting, and Modeling in the Department of Fine and Applied Art. He was accepted into that four-year program at a time when Philadelphia provided a compelling environment for artists, educators, and those interested in the arts. Significant among those in Philadelphia at the time was William Merritt Chase, who started teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1896. William Glackens had returned to the city, Cecelia Beaux critiqued Academy portrait classes, and Thomas Anshutz taught its antique classes. Sculptor Charles Grafly instructed at Drexel and the Academy, and Howard Pyle was a luminary at Drexel. “The training provided in these surroundings was grounded in sound academic curricula with an evolving specialization in illustration.” Concurrently, the swift development of photoengraving throughout the country during the nineteenth century’s last quarter favorably advanced American illustration as an art form.
(An Excerpt from Frank E. Schoonover Catalogue Raisonné at oakknollbooks.wordpress.com)


BLACKBEARD BUCCANEER cover Illustration
From pinterest.com


Schoonover went on to win one of the ten prestigious scholarships to the Chadds Ford Summer classes in 1898 and 1899 where Pyle tutored the most advanced students. Under Pyle's encouragement he was soon illustrating books, many of the themes heavily influenced by his love of the outdoors. When Pyle left Drexel to build his own school, Schoonover went with him.
In 1903, Schoonover spent four months exploring the Hudson Bay and James Bay areas of Quebec and Ontario on foot and by dogsled. This experience turned out to be the inspiration for some of his best work throughout his career, including a series of illustrated stories for Scribner's Magazine in 1905.
From then on he never missed an opportunity to travel from the studio in his quest to absorb atmosphere and local colour: Virginia, Colorado, Montana, Louisiana, Jamaica, etc. Also in 1905 he had his first fiction published and became a member of the Society of Illustrators.
In 1906, he left Pyle's school to open his own studio in Wilmington, Delaware at 1305 Franklin Street and later at 1616 Rodney Street, which was to become home base for the rest of his life. He married Martha Culbertson of Philadelphia in 1911. From 1903 to 1913 he did illustrations for all the major magazines of the day (Harpers, Ladies' Home Journal, Scribner's, Century, McClures), and soon became recognized as one of the country's premier illustrators.
He continued his association with Pyle until the master's death in 1911 - together they worked on the Hudson County Courthouse Murals. Besides doing magazine illustration, Schoonover wrote articles and stories and illustrated more than two hundred classics and children's books. Throughout his career he illustrated the works of many famous authors: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, Rex Beach, Zane Grey, Robert W. Chambers, Gilbert Parker, Henry Van Dyke, Clarence Mulford, etc.
(ERB C.H.A.S.E.R. ENCYCLOPEDIA at erbzine.com)


Locksley Shoots before Prince John
From libraryarchives.standrews-de.org


The above painting was given by donors Frank E. Schoonover and J. Thompson Brown on January 15, 1936. It was created as an illustration for the book "Ivanhoe" published in 1929. A series of Frank Schoonover's Ivanhoe paintings was loaned to the School on May 25, 1931, and then presented to the Episcopal Church School Foundation to be shown at the School as a gift from the donors. (libraryarchives.standrews-de.org)
Frank Schoonover illustrated more than 150 classic books and hundreds of the great illustrated magazines of the day. More than five million readers every month saw his illustrations of the fiction of Jack London and Zane Grey. And he was the first to visualize the legendary western character Hopalong Cassidy. Dramatic reenactments shot in wilderness regions of Wyoming, the Canadian North and the Delaware River in eastern Pennsylvania are underscored with the music of Aaron Copeland Appalachian Spring to entertainingly recreate the subjects Frank Schoonover loved first - horses and dogsleds, buckskins and snowshoes, holsters and knives, prairie grass and ice.
Frank Schoonover’s creative vision transcended the pop culture mandates he and contemporaries such as Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth obliged. Schoonover’s moody monochromatic sketches of boys toiling in coal mines and girls laboring in textile mills are visionary social commentary that reinforces how art can be a catalyst of social change. Frank Schoonover’s rapture with life itself inspired his passion for authenticity, which envisioned both America’s wistful recollection of itself, and our relentless aspiration of a more perfect union.
(shop.wvia.org)
Schoonover's subject matter included cowboys, Indians, and Canadian trappers. His forms were simple and well defined and his moods powerful. Later in his career, his style became less rigid and more impressionistic. He was also an accomplished watercolorist and muralist and an avid photographer. He used photographs as references for his illustrations to remind himself of the mood and character of the models. Besides doing magazine illustration, Schoonover wrote articles and stories and illustrated more than two hundred classics and children's books. He and Gayle Hoskins organized the Wilmington Sketch Club in 1925, and in 1931 lectured at the School of Illustration for the John Herron Art Institute of Indianapolis. In 1942 he began his own school in Wilmington, where he taught art classes until 1968, when he was ninety-one years of age. After a series of paralyzing strokes, which ended his artistic career in 1968, Schoonover died at the age of ninety-five in 1972.
(schoonoverstudios.com)


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THE 'TARTAR PAINTER'

August 5, 2013, 11:27 pm
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Self-portrait
From francisvallejoinspiration.blogspot.com


NIKOLAI FECHIN
Portrait Painter Brian Neher
From brianneher.com


Elfilosofo-litografia
From francisvallejoinspiration.blogspot.com


Nicolai Fechin was born in 1881 in the city of Kazan, Russia, the son of Ivan Alexandrovitch Fechin, an accomplished icon maker, woodcarver, and gilder. At the age of thirteen Fechin was ready to begin his life's work, attending the Kazan School of Art (1895-1901) and then the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, where he was taught by the great Russian master, Ilya Repin. His work appeared in America for the first time at the 1910 International Exhibit of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.
In both western Europe and America, Fechin was greeted with instant acclaim. Among such distinguished contemporaries as Claude Monet, Pisarro, Gaston Latouche, Sisley and John Sargent, he won his first prizes and medals. He was called a "Moujik in art", the "Tartar painter."
(fechin.com)


Laughing Man with Mustache
From flickriver.com


Manicure Lady
From onokart.wordpress.com


Girl holding peaches
From fechin.com


Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya, 1914
Source artsait.ru/art/f/feshin/art1.php
State Art Museum of Tatarstan, Kazan
From Wikimedia Commons


He was already well known in the States from canvases at American and European exhibitions, as well as sales. His patron Stimmel and John Burnham, the notable architect and a major collector of his work, helped Fechin and his family leave Russia. He soon was commissioned for new portraits and started teaching at the New York Academy of Art. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design, where in 1924 he won the first prize; in 1926 he won a medal at the 1926 International Exposition in Philadelphia. He became well-known for his powerful portraits, which observers said seemed to radiate from the eyes of the subject. Some of his more renowned subjects are Nikolai Lenin, Karl Marx, Frieda Lawrence and Lillian Gish.
(en.wikipedia.org)


Portrait of a Young Woman

Portrait of my father
Frye Art Museum
Images frommedia.oregonlive.com


Hardships following the Bolshevik Revolution eventually led Fechin to take his wife Alexandra and daughter Eya to the United States in 1923. The family first settled in New York but not for long.
Since a child, he had loved the somber forests and peoples near the Tartar border in his homeland. He found their equal in the high pine forests of the Colorado Plateau, the old adobe villages, and the Pueblo, Apache and Navajo tribes of the American Southwest. In 1926 he moved his family to Taos, where a small community of artists also made their home.
(fechin.com)
The Fechins purchased a two-story adobe house, and spent several years enlarging and modifying it according to designs by Fechin. Changes included adding and enlarging windows, enlarging the porch and making the rooms more open. He also carved doors according to Russian style, created triptych windows, and carved furniture for use in the house, which reflects a combination of modernist, Russian and Native American sensibility.
(en.wikipedia.org)
Fechin seems to have had little in common with the other artists in Taos and almost never socialized with them, though he and John Young-Hunter, who maintained a studio in Taos, remained good friends. Training as well as temperament tended to separate Fechin from his peers. He found it difficult to express himself in English and in particular to talk about art; he believed that what he had to say was nonverbal and best described in his pictures. When he took time off from work, more often than not it was to try his luck at fishing. At such times he preferred solitude to the company of others. Fechin's sojourn in Taos came to an end in 1933 when Alexandra filed for divorce.
(taosartmuseum.org)


Eya in Peasant Blouse, 1933
From artcontrarian.blogspot.com


Fechin stopped working on the house when he and his wife Alexandra divorced in 1933. She lived at the house until her death in 1983. Fechin returned to New York with their daughter Eya for the winter, and she lived mostly with him until her own marriage. After New York, he traveled to Southern California, Mexico, Japan, and the Pacific Islands of Java and Bali. Soon he bought a spacious house in Hollywood, but in 1948 sold it and moved into a studio in Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica. There he taught small groups of students, painted, and happily entertained guests.
In 1955 he died in Santa Monica and was buried there. In 1976 his daughter Eya took his remains back to Russia for reinterment in Kazan. The Russian artist Sergei Bongart bought the Rustic Canyon studio where Fechin had lived and painted there until his own death later in 1955. Some of Fechin's paintings and portraits, along with his work table and easel, are on display at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The rest of his works are displayed in different countries, with the largest collection at the Fechin Center in Kazan, Russia. In 1975 the artist/author Mary Balcomb wrote the definitive book, 'Nicolai Fechin'.
(en.wikipedia.org)


Portrait N.M.Sapozhnikovoy
Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan
From books0977.tumblr.com


“Fechin was known as the living old master ... an artist's artist. Others called him the Michaelangelo of our time.His talents in so many diverse disciplines was unique indeed --- a master of painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, woodcarving and ceramics.What his eyes saw and his hands touched, became a creative experience. His talents in so many diverse disciplines were unique indeed - a master of painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, woodcarving & ceramics. Nicolai Fechin died in 1955, but his sensitive and dramatic portraits in charcoal and oils are a legacy which stirs the emotions and inspires visions. The insight and warmth he transfered from life to canvas are in this classic volume originally published in 1975, now in its third printing by Fechin Art Reproductions.”
(Written by Mary N. Balcomb, with a forward by Fechin's daughter Eya Fechin, this 167 page volume covers Fechin's life from Russia in 1881 to America in 1955)
Toward the end of his life, Nicolai Fechin was persuaded by his biggest collector and good friend, John Burnham, to have a simultaneous retrospective at the art museums in San Diego and La Jolla. The events were huge successes and a chance for Nicolai Fechin to see paintings he had not seen for many years.

Nicolai Nicolai Fechin Painting Exhibitions & Awards:
1908 First Prize, Imperial Academy of Fine Art, Petrograd
1909 Gold Medal, International Glass Palace, Munich
1924 Proctor Prize, National Academy of Design, New York, New York
1927 Stendahl Gallery, Los Angeles, California
1930 California State Fair, Sacramento, California
1935 First Prize, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
1936 Medal of Honor, Foundation of Western Artists
1939 Golden Gate International Exposition
1939 Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, California
1930s-1940s Stendahl Gallery, Los Angeles, California
1968 Maxwell Gallery, San Francisco, California (nicolaifechinpaintingexpert.com)


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HARBOR SCENES

August 13, 2013, 9:14 pm
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Rafting up  
Images from mcdougallfinearts.com


Rockport Harbor
From clarkegalleries.com


Known for his bold Impressionist harbor scenes, Harry Aiken Vincent was a prominent member of the Rockport Art Colony in the beginning of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago, Vincent moved to Rockport, Massachusetts in 1918, devoting himself to studying the ocean around Cape Ann. He became the first President of the Rockport Art Association in 1921 and served as a charter member of the North Shore Art Association. His vivid marine paintings won several prizes from the Salmagundi Club and the New York Watercolor Club and were featured in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Today, Vincent’s work is in such prominent collections as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Butler Institute of American Art.
(questroyalfineart.com)


Old Quarry, Rockport Fall Colors Near Venice
From the-athenaeum.org


The more one reads about the life of artists, with a bit of historical perspective, the more one notices that pure talent and quality of output frequently does not correlate with the quantity of biographical material and critical writing that exists on that artist. Clearly, there is a realization that the personality of the artist himself is a factor, in addition to the quality of his or her work. Unquestionably, the exceptional quality of Harry Vincent’s mature work does not correlate with the modest amount of scholarly writing about him. One must conclude he was likely a reserved, perhaps even shy person who preferred to paint than to talk about it. Chicago-born and trained, little is known of his life prior to settling in Rockport, Massachusetts, in 1918. Apparently he was quickly recognized as a significant artist since, a short three years later, he was appointed the first acting President of the Rockport Art Association, formed in 1921. Probably best described as a painter’s painter, and an artist other artists respected, Vincent is generally considered largely self-taught. (mcdougallfinearts.com)



 
The Provincetown Boats in Rockport Harbor


Rockport Harbor
Images from mcdougallfinearts.com


Although he painted in the Chicago area early in his career, by the turn of the century he was painting and exhibiting in New England and gaining a strong reputation for his marine views. Vincent's paintings were widely exhibited and the artist won many awards. He was noted for his heavy use of pigment and colorful compositions. He held membership in the prestigious Salmagundi Club where he won awards in 1907, 1916 and 1918 and was both a member and associate of the National Academy of Design where his work was exhibited in 1892 and 1897.
With his studio in Boston, Vincent was also one of the many accomplished artists that made up what became known as the Rockport School. The visually abundant region around Rockport, Massachusetts attracted a wealth of talented painters in the early part of the century. H. A. Vincent painted many of his finest works in and around the Rockport area.
(vallejogallery.com)


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BRUSH AND KNIFE

August 14, 2013, 8:23 pm
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Xiao Song Jiang
From inkdancechinesepaintings.com


Xiao Song Jiang
From blog.oilpaintersofamerica.com


Xiao Song Jiang was born in 1955, in Wuhan, China. In 1978 he studied fine arts at the China Academy of Art, formerly the Zhejiang Art Academy, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in 1982, then began lecturing watercolor at the City of Wuhan Construction College. Four years after, Song was selected to further develop his skill at the provincial Hubei Art Academy. During his time there, he accumulated years of experience, painting, sketching, and working for a refined grasp of color and technique.
Throughout his early career, Song has received numerous awards as one of the representatives of Chinese paintings with works displayed at international art exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Singapore. He also had the honor of having four representative works collected and preserved at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) and three works at the Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum.
In 1988, Song immigrated to Canada and invested a passion for its vivid scenes of the broad North American landscape. While there, he travelled widely from coast to coast and gained some 20 years of experience forming his unique style of a mixture of brush and knife with attention to the unique natural detail, richer handling of light, shadow and depth in each piece, which has won him numerous awards in North American exhibitions and art festivals.
He now lives by the lake in Toronto, Canada with his wife and son. He is influenced by the beautiful land and friendly people. Through his paintings, he wishes to express his love to the North American landscape and all its people.
(blog.oilpaintersofamerica.com)


Boat Place
From wallsgallery.com


Tide
From oilpaintersofamerica.deviantart.com


Morning

Dawn

Birch

Lane of Venice
Images from jrmooneygalleries.blogspot.com


Brown’s Memory


Evening of July


Fishing Port

Harbor of the Fall
Images from southwestart.com


As he had done every day when his factory shift was finished, the young man had bicycled to the Yangtze River in the middle of the large industrial city of Wuhan, where he grew up. There, for an hour and a half each day, he spent his only free time making oil sketches of river traffic and docks. There was no money for canvases, so he painted on cardboard. He’d received no formal art education, since Mao Tse-tung’s communist government closed schools before Jiang reached high school, and he—along with millions of other students—had been forced to leave the cities and work on farms. As a teenager with an artistic sensibility, Jiang sought out books of Western poetry and novels by Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas. Libraries had been shut down, and all aspects of Western culture were banned, so he borrowed books in secret from friends.
(Excerpts from China-born painter Xiao Song Jiang, reflects on his artistic journey and goals by Gussie Fauntleroy at southwestart.com)


Reflection of summer

Rest

The Noon
Images from Eric Smith Artexpo/Spectrum Art Show's photostream


As a boy in Wuhan before the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, he thought he wanted to be an architect. His father was a technical engineer, and his mother worked as a primary-school principal. But the closing of schools eliminated that option, and his creative energy was funneled instead into teaching himself to paint. When Chinese society was reopened and began to modernize through the policies of Mao’s successor, Jiang saw his persistence in self-education begin to pay off. Out of hundreds of applicants from his home province who underwent the highly competitive examination process, he was the only one accepted into the Zhejiang Art Academy (now the China Academy of Art.) Because he had worked more than five years at the factory, Chinese policy at the time granted him a stipend for studying, allowing him to purchase better art supplies. He was placed in the printmaking department, his second choice, but his watercolor instructor allowed him to work in oils during class.
After earning a bachelor of arts, Jiang taught watercolor to architecture students at a government-run construction college in Wuhan. Then came further studies at Hubei Art Academy and the selection of his paintings by the Chinese government for inclusion in several international exhibitions. Jiang’s sister-in-law had studied in Canada, and through her he learned of an opportunity to show his work in Edmonton, Alberta.
In 1988 he traveled to Edmonton for a one-man show. Following the show he intended to return to China, where his wife and 6-month-old son remained. The Chinese government further encouraged his return by offering him a voucher to buy a motorcycle, a rare and hard-to-obtain commodity during that period in China. Then came Tiananmen Square. The massive protests in major Chinese cities—including Wuhan—and ensuing massacres by the Chinese army became symbolized internationally by a lone protester facing down a row of tanks. Having published writings critical of the government in a Chinese newspaper, Jiang was concerned about the government’s response should he return.
He obtained asylum in Canada and remained, joined two years later by his wife and son. In 1992 the family moved to Toronto, which offered a vibrant art community and proximity to other large cities. Initially Jiang supported his family as a street 
artist creating charcoal portraits, but his landscapes soon began to catch collectors’ eyes. For 13 years he attended Art-
expo New York, where galleries purchased virtually everything he brought.
(Excerpts from China-born painter Xiao Song Jiang, reflects on his artistic journey and goals by Gussie Fauntleroy at southwestart.com)


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ANDERS ASKEVOLD

August 15, 2013, 8:26 pm
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Landskap med kor vid vattendrag

Boskapen flyttas
Images from bukowskis.com


Norwegian fjord landscape
From commons.wikimedia.org


Anders Monsen gained greater popularity than most of his contemporaries. He took his art education under Hans Gude in Dusseldorf, and as an independent painter quickly built up renown as a landscape and animal painter. He combined the two genres for a striking artwork, where landscape and livestock united in a National Romantic expression or a pastoral ideal. It can perhaps be emphasized that Askevold became a victim of his own popularity. Demand was great, and he would gladly paint a variety of the most highly prized motifs, this resulted in his production loosing some of its freshness and taking on an air of routine. Askevold traveled frequently, and his contact with the international milieu also opened his eyes to the new French outdoor painting. In Askevold’s later paintings we see a freer brush stroke, less detail and a fresher color. The pictorial aspect adopted a greater importance in his work, but in this case did not stretch to a new kind of painting. He remained faithful to the National Romantic motif throughout his life.
(painting-palace.com)


Village by a Fjord, 1892
Source mohn-auksjon.no
From mellymirror.blogspot.com


Fjord landscape with sailing boats
From bukowskis.com


Sognejekt ved brygge

Vetlefjorden ved Balholmen (1886)

Ved Dalen i Nærøfjorden (1886)
Images from pinterest.com


Norwegian fjord with snow capped mountains
From artrenewal.org


Anders Monsen Askevold was born in Askvoll, in Sunnfjord, Norway. He was the second oldest of ten siblings. His father was a teacher. His early training started at the age of thirteen in Bergen under Hans Leganger Reuch (1800-1854) . He was educated as a painter in Düsseldorf, but continued his studies in Paris and Munich. Askevold came to Düsseldorf in 1855 and stayed for 3 years. He trained in Düsseldorf under Professor Hans Gude from 1855 until 1859. He was known as a member of the Düsseldorf school of painting with others like Adelsteen Normann. From 1861 to 1866 he was in Paris. In 1866 Askevold moved back to Norway and settled in Bergen. After this he moved back to Düsseldorf where he would spend his winters in Germany and his summers in Norway.
He died in 1900 in Düsseldorf. His paintings were shown at numerous international exhibitions, including world exhibitions in London (1862), Paris (1867) and (1878), Vienna (1873) and Philadelphia (1876). In Vienna and Philadelphia, he was honored with medals. In 1884, in London he won the gold medal. A monument was erected in his honor by the municipality of Askvoll during 1934. A painting by Askevold sold for over £5,000 in 2009.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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TERENCE TENISON CUNEO

August 18, 2013, 11:20 pm
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Out of the Night
From masterart.com


Cuneo was born in London, the son of Cyrus Cincinato Cuneo and Nell Marion Tenison, artists who met while studying with Whistler in Paris. Cyrus Cuneo's elder brother Rinaldo Cuneo was also an acclaimed painter in San Francisco, as was his youngest brother Egisto Cuneo. Terence Cuneo studied at Sutton Valence School, Chelsea Polytechnic and the Slade School of Art, before working as an illustrator for magazines, books and periodicals.
In 1936 he started working in oils, continuing with his illustration work. During World War II he served as a sapper but also worked for the War Artists Advisory Committee, providing illustrations of aircraft factories and wartime events. He served and became good friends with fellow artist Cyril Parfitt.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)


Big Boy on Sherman Hill
From masterart.com


The Union Pacific Big Boy, the largest successful engine ever created, was not only a technological achievement and trophy piece, rather a necessity for the Union Pacific Railroad. Built for one purpose and one purpose alone: to pull large tonnage over the 1.55% continuous grade up Sherman Hill, based in the Wasatch mountain region, just east of Ogden Utah. Before Big Boy, a helper service was required. This is where a smaller engine is coupled to a mainline freight to ‘help’ it over the hill. The engine would then return to the bottom of the hill and await the next through train. Not only was this a slow process, but rather expensive. A new engine was needed, one that could pull a train up the hill unassisted.
The UP Class 4000 (4-8-8-4) articulated Big Boy was the answer. The American Locomotive Company (Alco) Locomotive Works was commissioned to build the engine. Starting in 1941, twenty engines were built: 4000 to 4019, then again in 1944 five more were delivered - 4020 to 4024.
At 6.00pm on 5th September 1941, the first Big Boy, 4000, strode through the east end of the UP’s Omaha yard. After testing and trials the 4000 was immediately put into active service. Mainly used during the peak season from July through November, the 4000s were used to take the massively heavy ‘red balls’ over the Hill. The ‘red balls’ are also known as PFEs, or Pacific Fruit Express Reefers, basically produce trains. Due to the heavy nature of these cars when fully loaded, prior to Big Boy, it wasn’t unusual to see 2, 3 or even 4 engines struggling up Sherman Hill. Now, just one Big Boy and one engine crew was needed, saving the Union Pacific a lot of money. Big Boy served as king of the hill for twenty-one years, travelling an astonishing one million miles each (4016 had the lowest mileage at 1,016,124 and 4006 the highest at 1,064,625). They accumulated more service than most, fighting their way relentlessly up the grades every day. They reigned supreme over Sherman Hill until the summer of 1957. Normally, it was not uncommon to see anywhere from three to six Big Boys travelling from Cheyenne to Laramie every day, all pulling separate trains.
(macconnal-mason.com)


Forgan's Trench, Pontruet

'Golden Arrow'

Tyre Production

'Flying Cheltenham'
Images from bbc.co.uk


After the war, Cuneo was commissioned to produce a series of works illustrating railways, bridges and locomotives. A significant point in his career was his appointment as official artist for the Coronation of Elizabeth II, which brought his name before the public worldwide. He received more commissions from industry, which included depicting manufacturing, mineral extraction and road building, including the M1. He was most famous for his passion for engineering subjects, particularly locomotives and the railway as a whole. But in fact Cuneo painted over a wide range, from big game in Africa to landscapes. Further success was achieved in his regimental commissions, battle scenes and incidents as well as portraits.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
In 1934, Cuneo married Catherine Monro and from 1940 they lived in Ember Lane, East Molesey. He had two daughters, Carole and Linda, and three grandchildren, Andrew, Melanie, and Cindy. He was a well-known figure in the neighbourhood, contributing to its cultural life and bringing many famous figures to the area, including Prince Philip. He was President of the Molesey Arts Society, and the Thames Valley Art Society.
(elmbridgemuseum.org.uk)


Invasion scene

Production of tanks
Images from wikimedia.org


Many of his works include a small mouse (sometimes lifelike, sometimes cartoon-like), his trademark after 1956. They can be difficult to detect, and many people enjoy scouring his paintings to find one. Even some of his portraits of the famous contain a mouse. Cuneo was awarded the OBE and was a CVO. A 1.5 times life size bronze memorial statue of Cuneo, by Philip Jackson, stands in the main concourse at Waterloo Station in London. It was commissioned by the Terence Cuneo Memorial Trust (established March 2002) to create a permanent memorial to the artist, together with an annual prize at the Slade School of Art, given by the Trust. In tribute to Cuneo's trademark, the statue includes a hidden mouse peering from under a book by the artist's feet, and another carved into the statue's plinth near the ground.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
His work has been used in a variety of ways, from book jackets and model railway catalogues to posters and jigsaws and even Royal Mail postage stamps. His work can also be found in many museums and galleries, including the Guildhall Art Gallery, Lloyds of London, the National Railway Museum, the Royal Institution and many Officers' Messes around the country. Terence Cuneo was granted Freedom of the City of London in 1993. Sadly Terence died in London on 3 January 1996. However, his paintings live on in so many places around the globe, a permanent reminder of such a wonderfully talented man.
(cuneosociety.org)
Terence Cuneo was always searching for new subjects away from the studio. He first made his mark as a racing artist in the 1920s, with his "Pitwork" series depicting Le Mans and other racing circuits. This was the training ground for future subject matter - the excitement of speed, busyness and movement which would come into his later works of equestrian subjects. His technique and skill developed when he became a war artist in the Second World War - another field for him to conquer - and later with his many travels to such places as Ethiopia and the Far East.
An exhibition of his work soon after the war demonstrated his inquisitive eye. The many military works that came out of the war and later are to be seen in the various messes around Britain: the Royal Artillery and the Rifle Brigade among others. There is always a place for an artist who observes, records and illustrates. The camera can lie, so can an artist to himself, but never to his public. Terence Cuneo was a public man; it shows in his work, the time he gave to many committees and in his universal friendship.
(Part of Obituary for Terence Cuneo, Tim Coates, The Independent, 8 January 1996)

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JOHN HENRY TWACHTMAN

August 21, 2013, 12:05 am
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Newport Harbor
From chinaoilpaintinggallery.com


Venice

Spring Morning

The Ledges

Gloucester Harbor
All images from wikipaintings.org


Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to German immigrant parents, Twachtman found his first employment in his hometown at Breneman Brothers, a design firm that produced window shades, where his father also worked. At age fifteen, he enrolled as a part-time student in the School of Design at the Ohio Mechanics' Institute.
In 1871 he transferred to the McMicken School of Design where his classmates included Kenyon Cox, Joseph DeCamp, Robert Blum, Lewis Henry Meakin, and William Baer, all of whom achieved artistic prominence in their later careers. Frank Duveneck, however, was the most important contact of Twachtman's Cincinnati years. Twachtman had known Duveneck through mutual ties in the Cincinnati German community, but the younger Twachtman came under the slightly older artist's influence when he joined the evening class Duveneck taught at the Mechanics' Institute in 1874-75 on his return from four years of study at the Munich Royal Academy.
(johnhtwachtman.com)



Connecticut Shore, Winter
From poulwebb.blogspot.com


My Summer Studio
Current Loc The Phillips Collection
From commons wikimedia.org


Duveneck invited Twachtman to paint in the studio he shared with Henry Farny and the sculptor Frank Dengler, and in 1875 when Duveneck returned to Munich, Twachtman accompanied him. Enrolling in the Munich Royal Academy in the Fall of 1875, Twachtman studied under Ludwig von Loefftz, a painter of realist genre scenes. In the summer of 1876, Twachtman visited the small Bavarian town of Polling, which had attracted a large community of artists including many American painters. American artists Charles Ulrich and Walter Shirlaw also spent time in Polling in the summer of 1876.
(johnhtwachtman.com)


Arques-la-Bataille, 1884
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
From pubhist.com


After a brief return to America, Twachtman studied from 1883 to 1885 at the Académie Julian in Paris, and his paintings dramatically shifted towards a soft, gray and green tonalist style. During this time he painted what some art historians consider to be his greatest masterpieces, including Arques-la-Bataille, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Springtime, in the collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)


The White Bridge
Current Loc Minneapolis Institute of Arts
From wikimedia.org


The Cascade
From wikipaintings.org


Horseneck Falls
From allpaintings.org


In addition to his oil paintings, Twachtman continued to create etchings as well as drawings in pastel. Twachtman taught painting at the Art Students League from 1889 until his death in 1902. Twachtman was close friends with Julian Alden Weir and the two often painted together and both also had close associations with the Danish-born painter Emil Carlsen.
In 1893, Twachtman received a silver medal in painting at the Columbian Exposition; the same year, he also exhibited his work with Claude Monet at a New York gallery. In Connecticut his painting style shifted again, this time to a highly personal impressionist technique. He painted many landscapes of his farm and garden in Greenwich, often depicting the snow-covered landscape. He executed dozens of paintings of a small waterfall on his property, capturing the scene in different seasons and times of day.
Late in life Twachtman visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, another center of artistic activity in the late 19th century, and produced a series of vibrant scenes that anticipated a more modernist style yet to gain prominence in American art.
Twachtman died suddenly in Gloucester of a brain aneurysm, aged 49. Today, his works are in many museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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A PAINTER OF 'IDEAL FIGURES'

August 29, 2013, 2:39 am
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Abbott Handerson Thayer
Source Nelson and Henry C. White research material
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
From wikimedia.org).


Roses
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of John Gellatly
From americanart.si.edu


A virgin
From theartoftheday.blogspot.com


Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) was born in Boston to Dr. William Henry Thayer and Ellen Handerson Thayer. After his birth his family moved to Woodstock, Vermont, and in 1855 settled in Keene, New Hampshire.
As a child Thayer developed a love of nature that was encouraged by his close family, which included three sisters, Ellen, Margaret, and Susan. At the age of fifteen he was sent to the Chauncy Hall School in Boston, and while there he met Henry D. Morse, an amateur animal painter. Under Morse's instruction Abbott developed his skill in painting birds and other wildlife and began painting animal portraits on commission.
In 1867 Thayer moved to Brooklyn, New York and attended the Brooklyn Academy of Design where he studied under J. B. Whittaker for two years. In 1868 he began showing his work at the National Academy of Design and enrolled there in 1870, studying under Lemuel Wilmarth.
He met many emerging artists during this period, including his future first wife, Kate Bloede and his close friend, Daniel Chester French. Thayer became part of progressive art circles, showing his work at the newly formed Society of American Artists, while continuing to develop his skill as an animal and landscape painter.
Thayer and Kate Bloede were married in 1875. They moved to Paris and he studied at the cole des Beaux-Arts, first under Henri Lehmann, and then with Jean-Léon Gérome. While in Europe he befriended fellow artists Everton Sainsbury, Thomas Millie Dow, George de Forest Brush, and Dwight Tryon.
His daughter Mary was born in 1876 and his son William Henry in 1878. The family returned to America in 1879 and settled in his parent's home in Brooklyn, where he changed his focus to portraits. After the tragic deaths of William Henry in 1880 and of their second son, Ralph Waldo, in 1881, the family led a migratory existence living in various parts of New England. In 1881 while living in Nantucket they met Emmeline (Emma) Beach (1850-1924) who would become close friends with Abbott and Kate and would be known as "Addie" to the family. In 1883 their son Gerald was born and in 1886 their daughter Gladys was born. In 1887 Thayer settled his family in Keene, New Hampshire, and began teaching a small group of students. Around this time his wife began suffering from severe depression and went to a sanatorium in 1888. She died in 1891 and that fall Thayer married Emma Beach who had helped to care for him and his children during his wife's illness.
(www.aaa.si.edu)


Blue Ribbon

Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest


The Favorite Kitten
Images from allpaintings.org


He and his second wife spent their remaining years in rural New Hampshire, living and working productively with the three remaining Thayer children, Mary, Gerald and Gladys. Throughout this latter part of his life, among Thayer’s Dublin neighbors was George de Forest Brush, with whom (when they were not quarreling) he collaborated on matters pertaining to camouflage. By his own admission, Thayer often suffered from a condition that today is called bipolar disorder. In his letters, he described it as “the Abbott pendulum,” by which his emotions precariously swung back and forth between the two extremes of (in his words) “all-wellity” and “sick disgust.” This condition apparently worsened as the controversy grew about his camouflage findings (most notably when they were denounced by former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt). As he aged, he increasingly suffered from panic attacks (which he called “fright-fits”), nervous exhaustion, and suicidal thoughts, so much so that he was no longer allowed to go out in his boat alone on Dublin Pond. At age 72, Thayer was disabled by a series of strokes, and died quietly at home on May 29, 1921.
(smithsonianmag.com)
Thayer cut a singular figure. A smallish man, 5 feet 7 inches tall, lean and muscular, he moved with a quick vitality. His narrow, bony face, with its mustache and aquiline nose, was topped by a broad forehead permanently furrowed by frown lines from concentration. He began the winter in long woolen underwear, and as the weather warmed, he gradually cut off the legs till by summer he had shorts. Winter and summer he wore knickers, knee-high leather boots and a paint-splotched Norfolk jacket.
His Thoreauesque communion with nature permeated the entire household. Wild animals—owls, rabbits, woodchucks, weasels—roamed the house at will. There were pet prairie dogs named Napoleon and Josephine, a red, blue and yellow macaw, and spider monkeys that regularly escaped from their cages. In the living room stood a stuffed peacock, probably used as a model for a painting in the protective coloration book. A stuffed downy woodpecker, which in certain lights disappeared into its artfully arranged background of black winter twigs and branches, held court in the little library.
Promoting to ornithologists his theory of protective coloration, Thayer met a young man who immediately was adopted as an honorary son. His name was Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and though he would become a famous painter of birds, he began as an affectionate disciple. Both men were fascinated with birds. They regularly exchanged skins and Fuertes joined Thayer on birding expeditions. He spent a summer and two winters with the family, joining in their high intellectual and spiritual arguments—the exact interpretation of the Icelandic Sagas—and their rushes to the dictionary or relief globe to settle questions of etymology and geography. On regular walks in the woods, Fuertes summoned birds by whistling their calls—like Thayer, who stood on the summit of Mount Monadnock in the twilight and attracted great horned owls by making a sucking sound on the back of his hand. One owl, it is said, perched on top of his bald head. 
(smithsonianmag.com)



My Children

The Sisters
Current Loc Brooklyn Museum
Source Google Art project
From wikimedia.org


It is difficult to categorize Thayer simply and conclusively as an artist. He was often described in first person accounts as eccentric and mercurial, and there is a parallel contradictory mixture of academic tradition, spontaneity and improvisation in his artistic methods. For example, he is largely known as a painter of “ideal figures,” in which he portrayed women as embodiments of virtue, adorned in flowing white tunics and equipped with feathered angel’s wings. At the same time, he did this using methods that were surprisingly unorthodox, such as purposely mixing dirt into the paint, or (in one instance at least) using a broom instead of a brush to lessen the sense of rigidity in a newly finished, still-wet painting.
He survived with the help of his patrons, among them the industrialist Charles Lang Freer. Some of his finest works are in the collections of the Freer Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago. Thayer was also resourceful in his teaching, which he saw as a useful, inseparable part of his own studio work. Among his devoted apprentices were Rockwell Kent, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Richard Meryman, Barry Faulkner (Thayer's cousin), Alexander and William James (the sons of Harvard philosopher William James), and Thayer's own son and daughter, Gerald and Gladys.
In a letter to Thomas Wilmer Dewing (c. 1917, in the collection of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), Thayer reveals that his method was to work on a new painting for only three days. If he worked longer on it, he said, he would either accomplish nothing or would ruin it. So on the fourth day, he would instead take a break, getting as far from the work as possible, but meanwhile instruct each student to make an exact copy of that three-day painting. Then, when he did return to his studio, he would (in his words) "pounce on a copy and give it a three-day shove again". As a result, he would end up with alternate versions of the same painting, in substantially different finished states.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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NIKOLO BALKANSKI

September 9, 2013, 12:12 am
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End of March
From opaonlineshowcase.com


Nikolo Balkanski plays with light and texture and employs strong thick brush strokes to convey a complete image. Within his landscapes, pallet knives layer pebble upon rock, creating depth until streams appear to trickle from their frames. "For me it is a real luxury to work on location." Nikolo said of his opportunity to paint such things as mountain scenes in the field.
Since his move to the States, his work has undergone a natural metamorphosis. The subjects he paints are not the only things that have changed, but his techniques as well. "Before I did the Baltic Sea, and now I do the mountain streams of Colorado."
Art critics call Balkanski an impressionist - but more complex. Upon seeing Nikolo's exhibition in London, John Allen described his work as "Alert, a moment of being, engaged with a world that could dissolve to chaos but harmonized by attention...moment of meaning the fateful conjunction of type, personality and environment." The painter's years of work have produced a good variety of subject and color which appear in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe. He received his formal training in Bulgaria and Finland and currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado.
(copyright 2003 The Evergreen Gallery)


Willow Pond

Chicago Creek, Colorado

Welcoming of Winter

Taos Canyon

Spring Sunday
Images from nikolobalkanski.fineaw.com



Sunny Winter Day

Taos Clouds

Santa Mae
Images from mwfaquickdraw.com


His love of nature is evident in his work. Within his landscapes, pallet knives layer pebble upon rock, creating depth until streams appear to trickle from their frames. Nikolo Balkanski studied fine art in Bulgaria and Finland and exhibited his first one-man show at age twenty-one. He built a strong following in Europe as a master of portraiture and landscapes, with major exhibitions in Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, England, France, and the United States.
He is highly regarded as an inspirational teacher and mentor. Balkanski’s work has been exhibited with Artists of America, the Colorado Governor’s Invitational where he received the Collector’s Choice Award in 1999, Great American Artists, Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale,(Artist’s Choice Award 2007), Artists of the West, Bradford Brinton Museum, Arts for the Parks where he won Best Landscape in 1995.
His work currently is represented by Evergreen Fine Art Gallery, Colorado, Hayden-Hays Gallery, Colorado Springs, CO, Knox Galleries, Denver, Beaver Creek, CO, Harbor Springs, Michigan, Spirits in the Wind Gallery, Golden, CO and Weatherburn Gallery, Naples, Florida.
(mwfaquickdraw.com)


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