"Those Summer Nights"

 

 

6 x 8"

oil on panel

sold

As I finished this new painting, I realized outside the cold wind was blowing and snow flurries were falling on Christmas Eve in Atlanta.  Truly unexpected. And pretty darn cozy.  John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose - a most perfect painting in my opinion, depicts a warm, summer night - completely opposite of the evening outside my window.  

In 1884, Sargent had just experienced a scandal in Paris, resulting from the exhibition of his famous portrait Madame X.  It damaged his reputation all because the critics freaked out over the dress strap of Amelie Gautreau had fallen off her bare shoulder.  That was it. The prudes disapproved.

Seeking restoration, Sargent moved to England and spent summers in an artist's colony, where he completed Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.  He was staying at the home of his artist friend Francis Millet and the two girls he used as his models were the daughters of another artist Frederick Barnard.  His inspiration came from a boating trip where he saw Chinese lanterns hanging in the trees, combining that element with the girls.  

The painting was a hit at an 1887, and Sargent was once again the talk of the art world with his reputation restored.  It belongs to the collection of the Tate Museum in London, England.

 

~ Wishing you and yours a peaceful and beautiful Christmas holiday.

"Sweetie Pies"

 

 

9 x 12"

oil on panel

sold

I've said it many times on this blog - Wayne Thiebaud is an artist who has and still does greatly inspire me as a painter.

Here are the reasons I continue to admire and love Thiebaud. His work ethic, still, at the age of 100, is admirable.  He's a humble man despite being considered one of America's greatest living artists.  He is best known for what critics describe as an artistic appreciation for everyday objects - although he's been known to dispute that, describing his "humble goals to try and paint at any time any subject matter in any medium under the general heading 'people, places and things.'"  I told you he was humble.

Featured in my painting is Wayne Thiebaud's Pie Rows.  

Please click here for a larger view.

Special December Sale!

I'm clearing out 3 paintings that I've held on to - and I'd like to make a charity donation with a portion of the proceeds.  All 3 are framed and ready to hang.

Thank you for considering a purchase.

 

"Sun Protection"

sold

 

"Foot Rest"

6 x 6"

sold

 

"Tuckered Out"

sold

 

My 2021 Calendar

SOLD OUT!

My 2021 Calendars are here!

 This mini wall calendar measures 8-1/2" by 13" opened up, featuring 12 months of color reproductions of my paintings done in 2020.  

 

 

"Hair Solutions"

 

 

6 x 8"

oil on panel

sold

In Washington DC, you can see many paintings by the famous portrait painter Gilbert Stuart.  Stuart's most recognized is of George Washington which you'll find in the National Portrait Gallery among the Presidents - the one featured above, Catherine Brass Yates (Mrs. Richard Yates) shares a room in the National Gallery of Art with other notable Americans.

In 1793, Stuart had just returned to America from a long stretch in England where he enjoyed popularity and recognition as being one of the lead portrait artists.  And a different America it was.  Catherine Yates is thought of as one of Gilbert's most famous paintings both for the artistic masterpiece that it is and, what is known as a symbol of this young country's rectitude - meaning moral righteousness.  Personally, I always get a kick out of looking at this portrait every time I'm visiting the National Gallery.

~  Keep wearing your mask and stay healthy.

"Spooked"

 

 

6 x 8"

oil on panel

sold

When October comes around, I always think of the Wyeth family - as in N. C., his son Andrew and his son Jamie.  The enthusiasm for pumpkins and Halloween started with N. C., with costumes and Jack-O'Lanterns playing a large part of the celebrations.  All three of the artists painted many versions of pumpkins placed around the home, in vines, lit at night and then there's Pumpkinhead, painted by Jamie Wyeth, a self-portrait done in 1972.

The best way to explain how this painting came to be is by Jamie himself:

“I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself. Well, I didn’t want to do myself in a self-portrait, but I love pumpkins. It’s the sinisterness, the Halloween I’ve always loved. It’s a little bit edgy. So I did it and of course they were furious and rejected it.”

 

Imagine Jamie Wyeth's submission to a panel of stuffy art professors.  That's funny in and of itself.  It speaks to him messaging the art world's long standing rejection of the Wyeths being 'real artists' and more illustrators and saying 'take that'.  

 

Pumpkinhead has been and always will be one of my very favorite paintings by the great Jamie Wyeth.

 

"Milkin' It"

 

 

8 x 12"

oil on panel

sold

The next time you're lucky enough to stand in front of an original painting by Johannes Vermeer, imagine yourself, in 1657 in the Netherlands.  You're standing behind the artist as he's painting in his studio on the top floor of a nice townhouse and the only lighting is the blue daylight coming through a window and the candles lighting his palette and canvas.  Their maid, an older, sturdier woman poses beside the window, seemingly unaware of the viewer, pouring milk in a ceramic bowl with stale bread used as props on the table.  Nothing fancy.  Just a domestic woman doing her everyday chores.

The Milkmaid is one of Vermeer's most-famous paintings - one of a few that survived a fire. And lucky for us.  Vermeer appreciated light like no other artist of his time.  The woman against the white wall, the glimmer of white on the stream of milk being poured, the left side of her face and clothing lit as the rest recedes into shadows.  And his details.  Right down to the nails in the wall and seeds on the loaf of bread.  Just wow.

The Milkmaid has traveled all over the globe and is currently back home at the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam.  Thanks go to Cindy Pronk, a photographer who lives in Holland and offered her original photo for a painting reference during this time when traveling and museum visits have been put on hold. I really appreciate the generosity of others.

Please click here for a larger view.

" Connoisseur"

6 x 8"

oil on panel

sold

I had started a smaller study for Penguin Zen and decided to finish it because you have to find joy wherever you can.  Painting an animal does it for me.

Someone let me know the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri also invited some penguins as guests to browse their galleries during their shutdown, like the Art Institute of Chicago had.  The most charming result is these penguins stopped and seemingly took in many of the works of art, much like this little guy.  Claude Monet's Water Lilies spoke to him.  Or her.

"Face the Music"

 

 

6 x 8"

oil on panel

sold

 

 

Personally, I have a love/hate for Picasso's art.  I favor most of his Cubist style, top of the list being Guernica and the featured painting Three Musicians.  They are jigsaw-puzzle-like, flat planes of solid colors, overlapping like cutout paper making sense in the end.  

Three Musicians is a complicated composition, so much so, this study may have convinced me to not tackle a larger painting.  Don't know yet.  I find Picasso's painting just plain fun.  You see a recurring figures, a Harlequin and a masked Pierrot - both familiar characters in the old Italian theater stories. You see sheet music on a stand, a clarinet and guitar and even a dog's paws stretched out on the bottom left corner.  

When I paint these reproductions of artworks, there's always a deeper understanding of each piece - a valuable lesson every time.  

From the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

~ Stay healthy, stay safe and wear your mask.

"Freeze"

6 x 8"

oil on panel

sold

I've written about Andy Warhol, the famous Pop artist, and his fascination with idols like Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O, Mao Zedong and yes, Elvis Presley.  With movie stars, he was enamored with the oversize posters promoting the films, selling these celebrities like Campbell Soup labels sold soup. Warhol produced multiple silkscreens of Elvis, in many different ways - this one being two color silkscreens next to two grey-scale screens titled Elvis I & II.

Speaking of the King of Rock n' Roll, the image Warhol used was from the western Flaming Star that came out in December 1960.  His first "serious actor" role was void of any musical numbers.  A month, a month before, G.I. Blues came out and diehard Elvis fans LOVED it.  Plenty of music in that film satisfied audiences but the comparison was inevitable when Flaming Star premiered - proving his fans didn't share his dream of becoming a serious actor.  Another western was in the works, but the Colonel made sure he wouldn't attempt that again.

"Taking a Shine to Magritte"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

Brett's comment to my finished painting was "The shine on the apple looks like the shine on the man's bald head."  Such a great observation and it didn't occur to me. 

Rene Magritte's The Son of Man is widely known and endlessly satirized.  Magritte painted this surrealist self-portrait in 1964.  It's simplistic.  It's ambiguous.  Left to interpretation like most Surrealism-style works of art.  

Rene Magritte started his artistic career as an Impressionist but his wit took over, wanting to paint more thought-provoking subject matters.  His first gallery exhibition in 1927 left the art critics puzzled and expressing a thumbs-down review so he moved to Paris meeting up with fellow surrealist artist - Joan Miro and Salvador Dali notably.  Although he tried, the critics in Paris weren't much different so he moved back to Brussels jumping back on the Impressionist bandwagon for a time in 1930.  It wasn't until the late 40's did Magritte revert back to Surrealism and the time, after the war, critics and patrons seemed to click with his work for the first time.

The Son of Man features a bowler hat, a prop that appears constantly in Magritte's work.  They say the hat hinted at his political leaning to the Communist party.  It's the shiny green apple, hiding most of Magritte's face, that's most curious.  There is a theory it refers to Christianity, as a symbol of the common man surrendering to temptation like Eve in the Garden of Eden.  Another interpretation is the apple simply hides a man's true self from society.  That is Surrealism.  We see what we want to see.

~ Stay safe. Stay healthy. Wear a mask.

"An Open Book"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

During most of the 1700's the artist Jean-Honore Fragonard was a painting rock star.  The Rococo era, by definition, was characterized by "hedonistic freedom and a pursuit of all things aesthetically pleasing" and Fragonard was all about that.  His fantasy female figures are the epitome of femininity - calm, docile, frilly collars and dresses, playfully tossing their children in the air - you get the picture.  And that was the rage in the 18th century, with respect to how women were portrayed on canvas.

Although Jean-Honore Fragonard's style fell out of favor as the 1800's began, Young Girl Reading was and still is one of Fragonard's most popular images.  I can attest to that because I framed multiple prints of it during my picture-framing years.  It's a classic.

From the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

"Good Boy"

9 x 12"

oil on panel
sold

Jamie Wyeth, the son of the great artist Andrew Wyeth and the grandson of the illustrator and artist N. C. Wyeth is a giant to me.  He remains tireless and prolific - my favorites are portraits of Andy Warhol and the Soviet dancer Rudolph Nureyev, his gigantic portraits of pigs and any painting with a dog.

Meet Kleberg, Jamie Wyeth's yellow lab.  As the story goes, told by Jamie in a Saturday Evening Post article, one day, Kleberg got a little too close to his easel and he spontaneously painted a black circle around Kleberg's eye to make him look like Petey from the Little Rascals.  Kleberg seemed to enjoy the extra attention so Jamie switched to a black mustache dye that lasted longer, remarking "Kleberg would come to me when it needed touching up."  And that circle remained for the rest of Kleberg's years.

The painting Kleberg includes a Victorian skep or beehive, woven from straw - essentially a basket placed upside-down - used to house bees for some 2000 years. The books on the shelf reflect Jamie's favorites, including Treasure Island, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle's illustrated Pyle's Book of Pirates and a biography of John F. Kennedy, who's portrait Jamie was commissioned to paint.

Kleberg can be viewed in the Denver Art Museum.

Please click here for a larger view.

"Drink Up"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

I have a great admiration for the artist Winslow Homer.  He was self-taught.  He was an illustrator.  His mother was a watercolor painter and was his first teacher and nurtured his artistic abilities at a young age.  His father, on the other hand, sold his hardware store when Winslow was a teenager and took off for the California gold rush - which failed - then went to Europe to raise cash for a get-rich-quick scheme that failed.

Homer took on an apprenticeship for a lithographer at the age of 19, then joined the staff of Harper's Weekly that lasted over 20 years.  He was sent to the front lines of the American Civil War to document the battle scenes and soldier life, which didn't get much attention but it sharpened his skills.  When he returned to his normal life, he concentrated on paintings of rural life, scenes of childhood and young women - gaining great popularity with his images of nostalgia and simpler times.

Homer had this thing about portraying women and now-freed black men and women in a more dignified and strong way.  He corrected the disparaging images that publications like Harper's Weekly had printed for years in that respect.  

Homer's A Temperance Meeting is a perfect example, painted in 1874, hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Their description of this work is so well written - "Homer's painting cleverly refers to the rising American temperance movement, a crusade against drinking alcohol, by depicting a stout milkmaid pausing while a farmhand drinks from her ladle. Swaying under the weight of her pail and squinting into the sun, she presents the ideal of natural womanhood. Her powerful presence, marked by broad shoulders, muscular arms, and sunburned skin, counters the farmhand's relaxed stance and shaded face, visually reversing traditional gender roles. Far from flirting, the two figures awkwardly avoid each other's gaze, modeling rural wholesomeness and rectitude."

~ Stay healthy and wear your mask.
 

"Color is the New Black"

9 x 12"

oil on panel

sold

When it comes to really feeling the joy of a painting, top of my list is dogs.  Second is featuring any painting by Wayne Thiebaud.  He is a giant in my world.

Wayne Thiebaud has painted ordinary objects - wedges of pie, lipstick, sunglasses, neck ties, cupcakes, buckets of paint, gumball machines, shoes to name a few - for decades.  What sets him apart as a painter is he takes that subject, that thing, and injects life into it - with color.  Take one shoe you see in his painting Shoe Rows.  There is, approximately, no less than 10 colors of paint in that one shoe.  The edges vibrate. The devotion to every object and shadow is admirable.

And that's why this painting was pure joy to paint.

Please click here for a larger view.

"Mother and Child Reunion"

8 x 10"

oil on panel
sold

Well, after painting my smaller study you see on the post below, I jumped right into a larger, more-realized piece.  The Mary Cassatt painting is larger, the details are more crisp and that gives me so much more insight to her colors and edges.

Cassatt, like other artists in her time, were influenced by other cultures and their artwork.  Picasso found African masks his springboard to more geometric paintings which lead to Cubism.  Cassatt and Matisse were inspired by Japanese design and printmaking which lead to figures that appeared almost 2-dimensional or cut-outs.  They incorporated fabric patterns in backgrounds and clothing on figures, which was fairly uncommon in painting up until then.  That's why I say The Child's Bath is so quintessential Mary Cassatt.

Please click here for a larger view.

"Mother and Child Reunion" (study)

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

The whole time I was painting this, Paul Simon's song was going through my head.  A mother and daughter viewing Mary Cassatt's The Child's Bath.  Quintessential Cassatt - observing the intimate relationship between mother and child, with an influence of Japanese block print and patterns on patterns.

From the Art Institute of Chicago.

~ a thank you to Stephania for the partial use of her photo.

Taz

5 x 5"

oil on panel

A gift for my neighbor on this 4th of July - the late and great Taz digging the pool.

Have a safe and happy 4th my friends.

"Hard Act to Follow"

9 x 12"

oil on panel
sold

I spotted this painting on Instagram and recognized it as one of the popular prints I used to frame for customers back in the day.  People commonly referred to it as "the goose girl", its real title is To Pastures New by Sir James Guthrie.  The painting has traveled all over the globe but does reside at the Aberdeen Art Museum in the UK.

James Guthrie was a Scottish painter during the late 1800's - early 1900's, during the Victorian era and what is called the Gilded Age.  The wealthy commissioned portrait artists - think John Singer Sargent and others, including Guthrie, to paint large, elaborate portraits of their patriarchs, wives and children to adorn their mansion walls.  It was all the craze.

The young group of Scottish artists, the Glasgow Boys, who Guthrie was associated with, considered themselves rebellious, rejecting the older generation of artists and declared themselves to be anti-establishment.  Other groups, like the union of newspaper illustrators with members such as Winslow Homer, grew tired of the upper crust being depicted in popular art and felt the need to portray the working class and African-Americans who were experiencing prolonged lives of enslavement during Reconstruction.  They felt an obligation to show their dignity and contributions despite their suppression.

To Pastures New is a perfect example of Guthrie's commitment and sense of pride painting directly from nature and his surroundings in Scotland, portraying a young, hard-working peasant girl filling the canvas like a giant shepherding her animals through the field on a normal workday.  

Please click here for a larger view.

"Welcome Mat"

5 x 5"

oil on panel
sold

It is an afternoon of Zen painting a quiet, remote house.  Find peace whenever you can right?

Early evening outside of Sterling, Colorado.

"Looming"

4 x 4"

oil on panel
sold

Took a breather from a larger painting to do a little house, one of my favorite subjects.  I spotted this little homestead outside of Sterling, Colorado on a road trip - with ominous skies looming in the distance. 

It pretty much expresses how I feel these days.

"The Light of Day"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

If you venture out much of what you'll see resembles an Edward Hopper painting.  Isolated streets, quiet neighborhood scenes.  No artist has portrayed isolation like Hopper.  Keep in mind, he lived in New York City.

Hopper once said about his paintings "What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." and spent his lifetime pursuing light in his resonant paintings.  Morning Sun captures that beam of sunlight coming through the window, onto the woman on the bed - his wife, Jo, was often his model for his work.

What Morning Sun means to me, especially now in the midst of this pandemic, is even in isolation and darkness, look for the light.

Hopper's painting resides in the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and at one time traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago for a Hopper exhibition, which is where I had the pleasure of seeing it in person.

Karen Hollingsworth

A shout-out to my good friend and fabulous painter Karen Hollingsworth - tonight was to be her solo-show opening at Principle Gallery in Charleston. 

Doesn't mean you can't see her new paintings - they are all hung at the gallery and ready to for their new home.  Just go to Principle Gallery's page and look at these wonderful and uplifting pieces.

Brown Paper Packages No. 2

Duet No. 4

Better yet, go to her Instagram page here.

~ Best to you Karen!

Checking in.

Checking in and hoping everyone is well. 

I'm working on one of the hardest reproductions I've ever done of the masterpiece by Albert Bierstadt - getting lost in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  There's a certain Zen to painting a scene so peaceful and awesome. 

Albert Bierstadt was a German-American artist, born in Prussia, moved to America at the age of 1.  He traveled westward with a U. S. land surveyor to witness the unseen, vast, mountainous landscapes and returned to New York, completing several paintings from sketches done on his trip.  He went back west for a second time, this time staying a couple of months in the Yosemite Valley - returning back home and painting his massive-scale pieces that he is well known for.

Bierstadt's images were vital to the aspirations of Americans and Europeans who were immigrating to the United States.  It showed them a world that had scarcely been seen and explored.

~ Stay healthy my friends and please stay home if you are able.  There's light at the end of this tunnel.

"Mother Figure"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

Pablo Picasso's Mother and Child in the Art Institute of Chicago does seem to affect many visitors.  It moves them.  It's majestic. It's relatable.  It's a mother holding her child, surrounded by a serene background of sand, water and sky.  It's sweet.

Picasso painted this in 1921, the year his son Paolo was born.  In the following two years, he painted over a dozen works on the subject of mothers and children.  He had painted this theme during his Blue Period, depicting figures that were frail and in despair but this mother and child are noticeably more solid and happy - showing Picasso's general feelings of stability and sentimentality with the birth of his own child.

~ On a personal note, please take good care of yourself during these scary days.  Look out for your friends and family.  Be kind to strangers.  We'll get through this.

"Valued"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

A couple of years back, I got to see one of Amy Sherald's first exhibitions in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art - recognizing immediately this was the artist who painted the official portrait of the First Lady, Michelle Obama, unveiled just a few months before. 

Amy Sherald is a young 47 years old, from Columbus, Georgia - went to Clark University in Atlanta and after a chance encounter with a street artist who encouraged her to pursue art as a career, decided to do just that.  Her signature figurative paintings are large, featuring ordinary African-American people (some she knew and some she didn't), demonstrating everyone has value.  Her skin tones are in grey tones rather than brown "so the bright colors really pop out" and she's now one of the most successful black painters of our time.  I love everything she does.  

The painting above features Amy's portrait titled She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.  Amy's sister, a writer, often titles her paintings for her.

"Self Interest"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

I loved this man I spotted in the National Gallery of Art.  First glance, I assumed he was dragged to the museum but he stopped at every single painting during the five or ten minutes I watched him.  He seemed truly interested in any artist, any subject, and in any room.  He spent more time with Vincent van Gogh's work - most visitors do because they know who van Gogh is.

Vincent van Gogh painted 36 self-portraits in his short career of a mere 10 years.  Early on, he concentrated on landscapes and still life and a few portraits but after he admitted himself into the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, still painting the fields nearby and surrounding landscapes, he suffered a severe breakdown.  Many believe his demise resembled the symptoms of epilepsy, but the disease was not understood at the time.  Vincent was incapacitated for five weeks and retreated to his studio, during which he painted the Self-Portrait you see in my painting.

This self-portrait is a standout - done in a single sitting - the artist dressed in his smock holding his palette and brushes.  His face is somewhat haunting, his awareness of his gaunt, pale face is painted with stark greenish/blue tones, the brush strokes are thick with paint.  Most of all, it feels intense as if van Gogh's anxiety was portrayed so honestly.  Within a year, in 1890, the artist was dead at the age of 37.  

The astounding legacy Vincent van Gogh left, in just a decade, was about 2,100 artworks including 860 oil paintings.  A fact I still can't comprehend.

"Dream a Dream"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

The most enthusiastic audiences for Edgar Degas' ballerinas are little girls.  Especially popular is the bronze sculpture you'll find in several art museums The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer - it's real to those young girls in a way that one-dimensional paintings are not.  It's one of those moments that art impacts a human being at an early age.

An art historian wrote an interesting article for Vanity Fair and claimed Degas was "a bona fide misogynist".  He apparently took pleasure in watching his dancer/models contort in agony and even referred to them as his "little monkey girls".  Degas never married, known to be anti-Semitic - a result from the Dreyfus Affair when a French military officer, who was Jewish, was wrongfully accused of treason.  He blamed his family's business difficulties on Jewish competitors and grew more and more resentful. His bitter prejudice cost him many friends and certainly the respect of his more-tolerant Parisian artists friends and peers.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a little girl is mesmerized while viewing Dega's Dancers Practicing at the Barre, with the sculpture The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer next to her.

Out of the Blue

An astonishing thing happened to me this week.

Out of the blue, I got an email from a woman who explained she had inherited a painting that had been in her family most of her life.  Her words "When I was a kid, I never thought about what I wanted to inherit from my parents when they passed away … except for this piece!  It was the one thing I would fight for, I thought."

She did her research online looking for information on the artist Lee Jurick and couldn't find anything, but did find my name then read that my mom was an artist and "Viola!", the mystery was solved.  The magic of the internet. 

This was a meaningful gift to me - to see a tangible reminder of part of my mom's creative soul and it happened to be on the anniversary of my mom's passing 38 years ago.

The painting shows my mom's love for color and especially painting in the Cubism style.  She loved Picasso and Braque.  She really loved all styles of art.  She did pen and ink drawings of life around her in Thailand, then scenery in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  She did linoleum and wood prints and mono-prints, which is when I learned all about printmaking as a young girl.  She even sculpted.  She belonged to the Doylestown Art League during our time in Pennsylvania, where this painting changed hands to the parents of this wonderful woman, who took the time, found me and wrote me an email that made my day.  My week.  My year.

I'm lucky to have a dozen or so pieces of my mom's work.  This has encouraged me to photograph all of what I have and create a devoted page on my website - I'll let you know when that's published.

Good things happen when you least expect it.  Thank you Kris.

"Rest in Peace"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

I imagine chefs, who prepared elaborate dishes in their restaurant's kitchens all day, sometimes go home hungry and the last thing they want to do is spend their time off whipping up something as elaborate.  I imagine they kick off their shoes and wing it. Maybe a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup.

Today I opted for grilled cheese.  First staining a white panel with a rosy/lipstick red - then, without sketching anything out, just paint.  It's liberating.  It's necessary.

Part of my mindset this morning was to work with the paint much like one of my favorite artist, Jennifer McChristian.  Her paintings have life.  She shows constraint in overworking edges, using the rosy base color peeking through the colors she loads on top. 

From the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a woman rests in a sunlit area.

"Feast Your Eyes"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

There are some artists who don't have much in the way of biographies, especially those who practiced their craft in the early 1800's.  Henri Lehmann is one of those artists.

Henri Lehmann was a German-born French painter and at the age of 17, Lehmann's father sent him to Paris to study under the well-known classical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.  The portrait in my painting, The Girl, could very well be mistaken for an Ingres piece.  Very precise, classical pose, elaborate garb.  In fact, this painting shares the same room in the National Gallery of Art with his tutor Ingres.

Lehmann went on to teach at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris and taught notable artists such as George Seurat and Pierre Bonnard and you'll find many works of art in museums by those and other alumni.

"Autumn"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

The very wise art historian Sister Wendy once explained Mark Rothko's work as the natural world around us.  This painting, Untitled, 1952, reminds me of autumn tones - Indian summer skies, leaves of browns/reds/golds.

Painting Rothko's colors is my way of practicing the mixing of paints, perhaps discovering tones I may have neglected in my own work.  Kinda like adding different spices or herbs to a recipe.  It's good exercise.