"Sizing Up"

 

 

12 x 12"

oil on panel

When I first saw Jamie Wyeth's life-size Portrait of Pig years ago, it was love at first sight.  From that moment, I wanted to paint a pig.  And one day, I will.

I'll start by saying I worship Jamie Wyeth.  And Andrew Wyeth, his father.  And N. C. Wyeth, his grandfather.  Three generations of artistic brilliance.  Matter of fact, the exhibit "Three Generations" is where I first saw this masterpiece.

Jamie grew up on a farm in both Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania and the Wyeth summer home in Maine. At a 2011 exhibit titled "Farm Work" that included over 70 paintings by Jamie Wyeth, he was asked what inspired him to paint so many scenes of the subject, he said "Had I been born in New York City, I'm sure I would have been painting subways or something, but it's just that this what I was raised around and what was familiar to me."

As for the story behind Portrait of Pig,  Jamie said it was on a neighboring farm where he frequently painted, where the pig had the run of the place.  "The farmer asked me to help him with something, and after an hour I walked back to where I was painting.  And there was a snorting, and her whole snout was covered with cerulean blue and cadmium orange."  She had eaten and swallowed 17 tubes of paint.  "I thought it's curtains for you because oil paint is highly toxic".  The next few days she seemed fine but all around the farm there were rainbow-colored droppings and the farmer kept saying "What's wrong with my hog?".  Jamie couldn't bring himself to tell him what happened.  

Jamie soon learned the farmer was going to send the pig to the butcher and said "Oh no. I've got to take her."  He paid for the pig, brought her to his farm where she lived to a ripe old age.

My painting will be included in the upcoming group show Looking Forward, *opening July 2nd at Robert Lange Studios.

Please click here for a larger view and purchase/contact information.

 

* Robert Lange Studios will welcome walk-ins during normal hours on Friday, July 2nd and Saturday, July 3rd.  Opening night for artists' shows will resume in the fall.

"That Was Then, This is Now"

 

 

12 x 9"

oil on panel

sold

The two young men taking in Pablo Picasso's iconic Guernica presumably cannot begin to comprehend the event depicted on the massive canvas.

Guernica is a town in the North of Spain. The Nationalist forces considered it the hub for the Republican resistance which made it a target during the Spanish Civil War.  In April of 1937, under the direction of Adolf Hitler, planes bombed the town of Guernica meant to intimidate the resistance.  Fires spread from building to building, destroyed roads and bridges and effectively trapped the people from escape.

The Spanish government asked Picasso, who was living in Paris during the German occupation of World War II, to complete a mural expressing the historic and horrific event for the Paris Exhibition in the same year.  He had read a reporter's eyewitness account of the attack, published in The New York Times, abandoning his original idea and creating his final painting based on that very detailed description. It received little interest despite the published eyewitness accounts and the Paris Exhibition, until the painting did a tour around the world.  The international community took great notice and raised funds and awareness for the Spanish war relief.

 

This new painting will be included in the upcoming group show Looking Forward, opening July 2nd at the Robert Lange Studios.

 

Please click here for a larger view.

 

"Peanut Gallery"

 

 

10 x 10"

oil on panel

Showcased in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hangs the extraordinary painting by Rembrandt, Syndics of the Drapers' Guild painted in 1662.

The "drapers" were elected to rate the quality of cloth that weavers offered for sale to the members of their guild.  These dudes accessed the textiles three times a week and had a 1-year term in office. They commissioned Rembrandt's group portrait, which hung in their hall for nearly 100 years.

You may recognize the painting used on the packaging of Dutch Masters cigars.

 

 

My painting is included in the upcoming group show Looking Forward opening July 2nd at Robert Lange Studios.

Please click here for a larger view and purchase/contact information.

"Poolside"

 

 

12 x 12"

oil on panel

What says summer like a swimming pool and being this is the unofficial start of summer I'm posting one of my new paintings for a group show Looking Forward, held at Robert Lange Studios and opening July 2nd.  

 

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972,  is one of many paintings David Hockney used a swimming pool as his main subject.  While flying into Los Angeles from England, his birthplace, he marveled at what he saw below.  ‘I looked down to see blue swimming pools all over, and I realised that a swimming pool in England would have been a luxury, whereas here they are not.’  Without realizing it, he found one of his greatest subject matters for the following two decades.

Hockney's first attempt at this composition, after months of working and reworking it, ended with a total wipe-off.  He set off to take multiple photographs until he found the exact reference he was looking for - imagined months ago.  With just four weeks until a gallery show opening, he worked 18 hours a day and completed the finished painting the night before the shipper was to pick up the piece and get it to New York City.

46 years later, Hockney's most widely-known and loved works of art sold for a record $90.3 million in Christie's auction.  In 2019, he left Los Angeles after residing in California for 55 years, and now lives in Normandy, France where he says he'll live out the rest of his days.  The 82-year-old artist describes a normal day is working in his studio in the morning, breaking for an afternoon meal and maybe a nap, then going back to his studio for the evening.  

Now that's the life.

Please click here for a larger view and purchase/contact information.

"Smile"

 

 

8 x 10"

oil on panel

sold

Inspired by a recent article in the New York Times about the Louvre Museum's renovations taking place while the museum is closed due to COVID - I imagined a more accessible viewing of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

In reality, the framed portrait is encased in bulletproof glass with a distanced railing for visitors to view the iconic masterpiece.  Here's the new set-up at the Louvre.

 

Please click here for a larger view.

"Red Neckwear"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

I have an affection for this Picasso portrait of Pedro Manach.  I especially love the pose and the black outlines of the figure.  

Picasso was a young 20-year-old on his first visit to Paris in 1900 - one of his paintings was exhibited in the World Fair show of Spanish art.  It is then he met the industrialist and art dealer Pedro Manach and it was then he signed his first contract that gave Manach his paintings for two years in exchange for a monthly income.  Not a bad start for a young artist.

Pedro Manach hangs in the National Gallery of Art in DC.

"Homebody"

9 x 12"

oil on panel
sold

I'm still working on paintings for my show Sargentology, but it's high time I posted those that I've completed, starting with the newest one.

Featured in this setting are three gentlemen - the viewer taking a rest on the gallery bench, Dr. Samuel Jean Pozzi on the left and the artist, John Singer Sargent to the right.

Sargent painted Dr. Pozzi at Home in 1881.  Dr. Pozzi was a good friend of Sargent's, he was a Parisian gynecologist and renowned dandy - described by a contemporary as 'himself a kind of beautiful work of art'.  Sargent painted his friend relaxed at home, wearing a plush, red robe with a puffy shirt underneath, with a peek of an embroidered slipper.  Notably, Pozzi's hands are a focus, elegant, one grasping the collar, the other pulling on the tie around his hip.  The attention to his hands suggests a reminder of Pozzi's method of examination in his profession as a gynecologist.  Dr. Pozzi at Home belongs to the Hammer Museum in LA.

Sargent painted his self-portrait in 1906 and belongs to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Please click here for a larger view.

All of my paintings for the show, opening March 2nd at Robert Lange Studios, can be seen here.

The Swamp

I'm making progress.

Just to catch you up....

Here's where I have them on my website.

"Suit Yourself"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

The Belgium artist, Rene Magritte clearly had a sense of humor.

Magritte's earliest paintings date back to 1915 - and like most artists of that time period, he dabbled in different styles, beginning with Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism then Surrealism after becoming involved with a group of surrealists in Paris.  Meanwhile, to earn a living, he ran an advertising agency back in Brussels, continued painting in a more painterly style - even earned a living at one time producing fake Picassos and Braques and believe it or not, forged banknotes during the postwar period. 

The Son of Man was completed in 1964 as a self-portrait.  The hovering, green apple obsures most of his face, as Magritte explained 'Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.  There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.  This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present'.

The Son of Man has been parodied multiple times in literature, film and artworks - notably a few - Norman Rockwell painted a homage titled Mr. Apple, the Simpsons had Bart behind a floating apple, and the film The Thomas Crown Affair included the painting in several scenes.

"Me Time" Show

Okay.

I'm going to plug the show one more time before the opening Friday night at Robert Lange Studios in Charleston SC.

All were delivered and hung today.  Those legs are not mine.

And here are the paintings in the show....

Aromatherapy

6-3/4 x 16" 
sold

Moms

12 x 12"
sold

Good Weed

9 x 12"

sold 

Folksy

9 x 12"

sold

Wayne's World

20 x 11"
sold

A World of Her Own

8 x 10"

sold

Laze Fare

9 x 12"
sold

Front Seats

9 x 14"
sold

Women of Color

9 x 12"

sold

In the California Sun

9 x 12"
sold

Two For One

7-3/4 x 16"

sold

World Domination

12 x 14"
sold

I See a Pattern Here

12 x 12"
sold

It's Not Always Black and White

16 x 16"

sold

Room Mates

10 x 10"

sold

For larger views on each painting, go to the gallery's page and click on the image.

Hope to see you on Friday night ~   Karin J.

"Give Me a W"

6 x 6"

oil on panel
sold

My homage to Rockwell and our World Series - a young Chicago Cubs fan viewing Norman Rockwell's The Dugout.

GO CUBS!

"A Way Of Life"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

When I began listing works of art I'd like to feature portraying the American Spirit, I remembered this exquisite painting in Crystal Bridges titled The Indian and the Lily by George de Forest Brush, done in 1887.  It's one of the many pieces in the museum that knocked my socks off.  It is so intimate in size, so beautifully painted, so tender, a glimpse of a moment in the life of a Native American Indian.

A little bit about the artist, George de Forest Brush - born in Tennessee, raised in Brooklyn and Darien, Connecticut, he trained in New York then later in Paris under the brilliant artist Jean-Leon Gerome.  Gerome is one of my personal favorites and I can use the same descriptions of his work - intimate, exquisite, precise realism, glimpses into personal lives.  The influence of Gerome is so very evident in Brush's paintings.

After Brush returned to America and in 1882, he ventured west with his brother and found his subject, America's native people.  For more than a year he lived among the Arapahoe and Shoshone in Wyoming and the Crow in Montana - creating paintings and etchings of Indians 'far removed from the reality of contempory Indian life'.  Brush chose to depict the Indians in a 'timeless environment undisturbed by the advent of the modern'.  He resented the rapid industrial revolution and how it negatively affected the Native Americans, instead he desired to portray them in their way of life and their connection to the natural world.

An article I found tied Brush's painting to the story of Narcissus, the perils of seeking an unattainable perfection and the novel Imensee, a story of a man reaching out for a perfect water lily but nearly drowns when he falls into the pond, getting tangled in the roots of this perfect flower.  He climbs out of the water, looks back at the water lily floating calmly - a metaphor for the struggle of the Indian tribes maintaining their way of life in a complicated, progressing world.

You should take time to look at more of Brush's amazing paintings.  They offer peace and tenderness in these days of anxiety and unrest.

"Bear In Mind" (study)

6 x 6"

oil on panel
sold

One of the star attractions in Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait's 1856 painting 'A Tight Fix - Bear Hunting, Early Winter'.  The scene brings to mind the movie The Revenant - a true story of frontiersman Hugh Glass, who's mauled by a grizzly and abandoned by his group of fur trappers.  Interesting is, although there's no direct evidence this scene is based on Hugh Glass, it is strikingly similar to scenes in the movie.  The Museum of Native American History, not far from Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas has one of the only rifles known to belong to Jim Bridger, one of the fur trappers in Hugh Glass's hunting group.

The summary of Tait's painting, in the museum, describes it as 'an icon of American cultural mythology and masculinity'.  When it was first shown, art critics said Tait 'botched the representation of the second hunter, making it unclear whether he's aiming at the bear - neither bear nor man is winning - so a bullet is the only solution to the 'tight fix'.  

More interesting, the summary goes on describing 'critics were particularly sensitive to an impasse between white and black fighters.'   Keep in mind, Tait painted this during the deadlocked war over slavery in the Kansas Territory.  The books of this time were Uncle Tom's Cabin and stories of Davy Crockett where hunting animals and runaway slaves were talked about in similar terms.  

Arthur Tait was born British, and moved to New York City at the age of 31.  He established a hunting camp in the Adirondack Mountains - completely immersed in the frontier life and sport hunting - he produced many paintings and lithographs of related scenes that were wildly popular during his career.

"A Tradition"

12 x 9"

oil on panel

sold

My homage to one of my all-time favorite movies Ferris Bueller's Day Off, on its 30th anniversary.  At the time it came out in 1986,  I was still missing my life in Chicago as a teenager just a few years back.  There's a scene in the movie when Ferris, his girlfriend Sloane and his best friend Cameron go through the Art Institute of Chicago - something I'd done dozens of times and even cut school to do so.  The three friends stop and stand in front of the three Picassos - here's a snapshot from the movie....

Well since then, many people have mimicked the pose - it became a tradition.  And their visit to an art museum proved to be an inspiration for young people to do the same.  That's a good thing.

I read a good article this week How Ferris Bueller's Day Off Perfectly Illustrates the Power of Art Museums - and a portion of the article, referring to Cameron's fixation on Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,  I really like this quote from the curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum - "I think that absorption of diving into a picture is as though you have seen yourself looking back at you and you have dived in so deeply you cease to exist," she says about life changing art. "What I tell people when they go through art museums is there will be a moment where you are dumbstruck in front of something and it changes your life forever."

About the Picassos - from left to right is The Red Armchair, Portrait of Sylvette David and Femme Assise, 1949, which was sold on auction.

Please click here for a larger view.

"A Voice" (study)

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

Jean-Michel Basquiat is probably the most recognized Neo-Expressionism artist of the 20th Century, born in Brooklyn, NY in 1960, his father was Haitian-American, his mother was Puerto Rican.  I would describe him as brilliant (he could read and write at the age of 4, fluent in French, English and Spanish at age 11) self-sufficient (at 15, he ran away from home, living in a park in New York City for a week, later supporting himself by selling paintings on postcards and T-shirts) creative (became a well-known graffiti artist under the pseudonym SAMO) musical (formed a rock band Gray and played all over New York) all before he found fame in the elite art world at the age of 20.  

Basquiat then rolled with the famous - David Bowie, Madonna, Julian Schnabel and collaborated with Andy Warhol - was on the cover of magazines - his paintings were selling for as much as $50,000 - all the while loosing his grip with a heroin addiction.  After his good friend, Warhol died in 1987, he sank into a more isolated existence and died of a herion overdose at the age of 27.

It's tragic, I know.  The man had a lot to say and express about race, love, beauty, culture, pain, success, snobbery (I could go on).  

One of my top-10 favorite movies is Basquiat - Jean-Michel played brilliantly by Jeffrey Wright, directed by Julian Schnabel who knew Jean-Michel well, David Bowie as Warhol - man, it is a great movie.  Watch it.

A big thank-you to my good friend for the reference photo - two young, African-American men soaking in Basquiat's Untitled (Cadmium), in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

"Party Crasher"

10 x 10"

oil on panel
sold

The span of days you didn't hear from me recently was largely due to my working on this new painting.  It tires me to drag out a piece for days - I suffer from a short span of attention, paint for a few hours and seek out other things to do around the house.  I truly love starting a painting in the morning and finishing in the evening.  

But Renoir's masterpiece Luncheon of the Boating Party is complex - you have a landscape, still life and fifteen figures and a dog all in one.  Sixteen figures including the my viewer.  

The famed painting is in the Phillips Collection, one of the off-the-mall museums in Washington DC - and a must-go-to place.  Especially to soak in Renoir's painting.

The Boating Party is a very interesting anatomy of Renoir's friends -

- the woman on the bottom left, holding a dog, is Aline, who married Renoir and together they had three sons.

- the man on the bottom left wearing the boater's hat is Gustave Caillebotte, an accomplished artist who painted Paris Street, Rainy Day - a crowd favorite which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.  Gustave was also an avid boatman.

- in the threesome in the upper right corner is the actress Jeanne Samary with two of Renoir's closest friends flirting with her.

- the man with the boating hat in the upper left and the woman in the boating hat leaning on the rail are brother and sister and children of the proprietor of the restaurant Maison Fournaise, where the scene takes place.

- the remainder are poets and critics and a wealthy art historian, collector and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.

Clearly the in-crowd.

Please click here for a larger view.

"Loners"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington houses a few paintings by one of it's native sons, Howard Pyle.  Pyle is referred to as 'the father of illustration'.   He was why, as a little budding artist, I wanted to be an illustrator.  He founded the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art in the early 1900's, later named the Brandywine School.  If Brandywine sounds familiar, it is where the artists of the Wyeth family lived and painted.  N.C. Wyeth was a student of Pyle's - becoming one of the most extraordinary book illustrators of his time.

If you were a student of Howard Pyle, you and other fellow students and painters would set off to historical sites - often taking along costumes and playing out the scenes - reaching into their imaginations of maybe what the life of a pirate was or how the Pilgrims dealt with their new land in Plymouth.  It had to be a wonderful, unique experience for those artists.

The painting I feature is one of my personal favorites titled Marooned.  The painting is quite simple in composition but it really tells the story.  Marooning was a punishment for a member of the crew who violated the pirate's code.  It was first mentioned in Treasure Island and it was a real practice where they would banish the poor guy to a deserted, bleak island with a little water, food and a pistol to commit suicide.  Historically, a few survived their punishments and lived to tell.

I learn something new every day.

"Dandy"

5 x 7"

oil on panel
sold

Here's one of my favorite paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City - a large portrait of the artist 'James McNeill Whistler' by the friend and fellow artist William Merritt Chase.  I've read when the two painters met, they became instant friends and both agreed to paint a portrait of each other.  They probably were trying to hone their portrait skills to compete with fellow painter John Singer Sargent who was all the rage at the time.

Chase presented Whistler with this finished painting, even inscribing in the upper left corner the words 'To my friend Whistler, Wm. M. Chase, London 1885'.  Chase painted this portrait honoring Whistler's low-key palette and painterly style - only Whistler was apparently offended, exclaiming it a 'monstrous lampoon' which started a rift between the two men for a long time.  It is believed Whistler destroyed his painting of Chase, never to be seen.

"Sunday Best"

8 x 10"

oil on panel
sold  

A woman dressed for such an occasion as 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte'.   George Seurat's famous painting can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Please click here for a larger view.

"Celebrity Sighting"

6 x 6"

oil on panel
sold

I love this story - record crowds have been 'flocking to the Frick Collection' to see the Dutch painter, Carel Fabritius's oil titled 'Goldfinch' - which is the inspiration for the novel by Donna Tartt.  It is a wonderful thing when masses of people are interested in art and get to the museums.