"Little Surfer"

7 x 5"

oil on panel
sold

A girl and her boogie board in the ocean in Miami Beach, Florida.

"Life On Marsh"

16 x 4"

oil on panel
sold

I decided to paint a serene landscape today, 1 - because I haven't painted a landscape in some time and 2 - it's a mellow Sunday and 3 - because I rocked out to the 30th Anniversary for Bob Dylan all afternoon while I painted.

 left half detail

right half detail

A panoramic view from the coast on Rock Harbor, Cape Cod.

"Flooded"

6 x 6"

oil on panel
sold

This was a study I did in the spring and decided to hang on to it - but this seems like the right time to offer it on auction to raise money. 

I donated the proceeds to the Red Cross Louisiana Flood Relief Fund - join me in an effort to help our friends in need.  To donate directly to the Red Cross Flood Relief Fund, click here.

"Wife Guard"

6 x 6"

oil on panel
sold

I just  L-u-r-v-e  how this painting turned out.

From the beach on Cape Cod, a man keeping watch over his sunbathing wife.

"Cypresses"

6 x 9-1/2"

oil on panel
sold

Most of you know bits and pieces of the life of Vincent van Gogh.  I promise you, if you've never seen a painting of his in person, you're really missing out on the splendor of brush strokes, the thick, rich colors swirling around the canvas, the movement, the passion that van Gogh had of the world around him.  

Van Gogh was 36-years-old when he painted 'Cypresses' - during his year-long stay at the asylum in Saint-Remy and a year before his death.  It is a more close-up view of the the tall and massive trees he found 'beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Eyptian obelisk'.  

"Head and Shoulders"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

Since I was a teenager, I've been fascinated with realism - or in this case, hyper-realism.  Just the idea of how an artist executes the artwork boggles my mind.  You see paintings in museums that look like a photograph, so precise it's staggering.  I wanted to do that for years, until I realized I wasn't up to it.  I'm more interested, now, in realism with a looser style - although you'll notice some paintings lean tighter and some, like much of these smaller pieces I frequently auction, are more painterly.  It keeps me sane.

The hyper-realism sculpture I feature in this new painting is by Evan Penny titled 'Old Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Will (Not) Be'.  Not only is this work of art insanely precise, down to every wrinkle and whisker and fold, the cast of shadows under the strong lighting is so very cool - not to mention the reactions of the museum patrons.  Evan Penny has a great website and on the Crystal Bridges Museum's website, you can read 'A Conversation With Evan Penny' that will give you insight of the artist's thoughts.

That's Progress

I've started on a larger painting for an upcoming show that features Rockwell's 'The Problem We All Live With'.   If you're interested, I'll be posting my progress on my blog Karin Jurick Paints. 

~ Happy Monday

"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.

"Walk A Mile" (study)

6 x 6"

oil on panel
sold

Norman Rockwell's profound 1964 painting 'The Problem We All Live With' is on the top of my Rockwell list.  It depicts 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, an African-American girl, being escorted to an all-white public school in New Orleans, by four deputy U.S. marshalls.  What is so very effective is the viewer is seeing the point of view from the angry crowd, the hint being the racial slurs on the wall and the tomato splattered in between the figures.  

The image was published in a 1964 issue of Look magazine - Rockwell's contract with the Saturday Evening Post ended in 1963 due to Rockwell's continued frustration with the magazine's limitations on his expressions of progressive social interests, including his personal views on civil rights and racial integration.

Norman Rockwell's granddaughter, Abigail, recently wrote a compelling article in the Huffington Post titled Would There Be Norman Rockwell Without The Saturday Evening Post?  Rockwell undoubtedly evolved as an illustrator between 1916 and 1963 - becoming a storyteller with his images like no other.  His career with the Post yielded 322 covers before he ended his contract.

Ruby Bridges, at the age of 56, visited the painting in the White House in 2011 - at the request of President Obama.

The CNN writer, Bob Greene, wrote about that event in this article.  Within that article, these words struck me "..the message of the painting is so powerful that it goes well beyond the incident it portrays. The message transcends our usual Democrats-vs.-Republicans, conservatives-vs.-liberals, left-vs.-right squabbling.  Rockwell was a genius not just because of the technical skill of his artistry, but because of his eye for the telling detail. And in "The Problem We All Live With," the key detail is how he framed the four U.S. marshals who are accompanying that child to school. We do not see their faces; in the painting, the men are cropped at their shoulders.

That is the power and the story of the painting: Four men were accompanying Bridges to school, yes, but the point was, the United States of America was accompanying her. We see the men's "Deputy U.S. Marshal" armbands, and that is what matters. The painting tells us: This country may have its flaws, but when right and wrong are on the line, the nation, in the end, usually chooses to stand for right."

"Coast Guard"

10 x 9"

oil on panel
sold

Hoping this basset hound puts a smile on your face.

From the beach on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Please click here for a larger view.

"Ziegfeld's Girl"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

Jessica Penn, the sultry woman in Robert Henri's painting, was an actress and dancer in the famous Ziegfeld Follies.  I love Robert Henri's work - he introduced a new way of portraiture by painting on a mostly black background where the model's face is the main focus, emerging out of the dark surroundings. 

Robert Henri has an interesting bio - his last name was Cozad, his middle name was Henry.  His father founded the town of Cozaddale, Ohio. In 1882, Mr. Cozad was in a dispute with a rancher over the right to pasture cattle on the Cozad family's land - he ended up shooting and killing the rancher, cleared of wrongdoing, but the town turned against him and his family.  Mr. Cozad fled to Colorado with his family, changed their names to erase the incident and his sons posed as adopted children under the surname Henri.

As a young man, Robert was a student at the famed Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, went back and forth to Paris, taught at the New York School of Art - students were famous painters like Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, George Bellows to name a few.  Also to note, Mary Cassatt was his distant cousin.  

Robert Henri led a successful, celebrated life as a painter and died at the age of 64.

From the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a woman admires Robert Henri's portrait of 'Jessica Penn in Black with White Plumes'.

"Sunroom"

5 x 7"

oil on panel
sold

A visitor resting in the sunlit passageway in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas.

"Lean In"

9 x 12"

oil on panel
sold

I've been hard at work on this new painting that took a good part of a week to complete.  And that, my friends, is why I frequently veer off and paint small, quicker piecess.  It keeps me sane.

My painting depicts a museum visitor leaning in on Pablo Picasso's iconic 'Guernica'.

Please click here for a larger view.

Speaking of icons,  Bill Cunningham, a fixture in New York City, passed away at the age of 87.  If you don't know, Bill was a legendary fashion photographer for the New York Times for over 40 years.

He was easy to spot, on his bicycle, wearing his signature blue jacket and always with a camera - spotting and capturing fashion trends up and down the sidewalks of NYC.  He inspired me to see the great diversity of humans and having the guts to get out there with my camera.

A really charming and interesting documentary to watch is Bill Cunningham New York  (available on Netflix) - you'll love it.

"Enlightened"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

On my recent trip to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, I spotted this young lady - she really impressed me with her genuine interest in the art.  I suspect she was taking personal notes of the pieces she really liked.

The painting she is studying is 'Landscape' by Robert Seldon Duncanson.  The artist, at 20 years of age, decided he'd rather paint canvases than houses, which he'd been doing up until then.  He was largely self-taught, had a long career as an artist until his death at age 51.

Shortly after the Civil War broke out, Duncanson exiled to Canada,  seeking out a place where racism would not get in the way of his profession as an artist.  There he studied the landscape paintings of Canadian artists, moved to the UK and toured with his artworks - he was well received and the prestigious London Art Journal declared him a master of landscape painting.

Duncanson had an important impact on American art.  His father was Scottish-Canadian, his mother was African-American and it was said Duncanson had infused his paintings with an African-American sensibility although he once wrote 'I have no color on the brain; all I have on the brain is paint.'

Duncanson's 'Landscape' depicts, very small, loggers floating rafts of timber down the Saint Lawrence River near Montreal with the glow of the sunset, a signature subject of the artist's, of a mundane workday activity in a beautiful setting.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Listen Up

I wanted to start this first week of summer with a highly-recommended trip you must take - to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.  I've wanted to go for a while and just packed a bag and took a long road trip to the small town of Bentonville in Arkansas.  The red star shows you where Bentonville is....

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art was founded by the Walton Family Foundation - the Walmart Family as we know it.  The philanthropist and arts patron and collector, Alice Walton, is to thank for this amazing museum.

On arrival, I parked my car right in front of this banner - featuring one of my very favorite American painters, Wayne Thiebaud.  I was soooo excited.

The museum is part of a 120-acre park, with nature trails and sculpture gardens throughout.

Did I mention it was free?  And parking is free too.

I am very partial to American Art and this museum takes you in a timeline of our country, from colonial times to contemporary - just outstanding.  A few of my favorites were....

 Alexander Hamilton by Giuseppe Ceracchi

Ward by George Tooker

Provincetown by Richard Estes

Haystacks by Martin Johnson Heade

Ambulance Call by Jacob Lawrence

About the town of Bentonville, Arkansas - 

It is a charming, middle-America, safe and friendly place to visit.  I recommend staying at the 21c Museum Hotel in downtown, a block from the town square and very near Crystal Bridges.  I loved my stay and wanted to spread the good word.

~ Happy Summer

"A Paper Trail"

5 x 7"

oil on panel
sold

In times of sorrow and grief, I paint.

A young lady enthusiastically sketches on the floor in the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco.

"Floored"

6 x 6"

oil on panel
sold

From the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, a young woman sketches on the floor in front of John Singer Sargent's 'The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit'.

"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.

"Go With The Flow II"

Here is the companion to Go With The Flow I  -

Go With The Flow II

5 x 5"

oil on panel
sold

"Go With The Flow I"

Go With The Flow I

5 x 5"

oil on panel
sold
 

I've been playing around with my photos - looking for possible diptychs and triptychs - and tried it out with a small group of women sitting on the beach, watching the ocean tide flow.  It's tricky, and takes time matching up the colors and composition and the goal is that each painting could stand alone as well as together. 

And here are the two paintings together -

"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.

"Wait Up"

4 x 4"

oil on panel
sold

This was fun to paint.

From the sunny beach on Hilton Head Island, a little sidekick trying to keep up.

"At Ease"

4 x 4"

oil on panel
sold

After working pretty hard on a lot of detailed paintings, I was in need of letting loose with a few small, painterly pieces - no sketching out, just jumping right in.

And because the beach is on my brain ...  you'll see more coming up.

"Gentleman Farmer"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

Everyone knows this iconic painting.  People from all over the world recognize the farming couple. If you observe people in the Art Institute of Chicago, when they see Grant Wood's American Gothic, they immediately stop to look closely. 

Truth be told, the man and woman were models for Grant Wood's vision of 'the kind of people I fancied should live in that house'.  The woman was Wood's sister and the man, their dentist.  The house still stands in Eldon, Iowa - I've seen it myself.  We took a road trip along the Grant Wood Scenic Byway several years ago - a most splendid drive through rolling hills, all too familiar in Wood's paintings.

Grant Wood is in my top-10 favorites list of artists.  I have books of his work dating back to the 70's.  I have a love affair with the Regionalism artists - referred to as American Scene painting done from the 20's thru the 50's.  Thomas Hart Benton, John Curry, Grant Wood are the most recognizable of that art movement.  It is said that their depictions of rural life in the American heartland made people feel better during the Great Depression - specifically American Gothic came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.

Wood entered his painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago and although the judges poo-pooed it, a patron convinced them to award it with a medal, a cash prize and persuaded the museum to buy the painting, where it is today.

"Catching Waves"

6 x 8"

oil on panel
sold

Geezaloo - I wanted to tell you about J.M.W. Turner, the painter of Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish the day after I posted this painting, but, when an A/C guy came to my house to check on a simple thing, he ended up breaking my A/C.  No sorry ma'am, just said he'd order the broken parts and he'd call Monday.  I promptly told the jerk never to return and someone else find the parts.  I was kinda in a snit most of the weekend.  I still have no word on the parts.  And no A/C.  In Atlanta.

About Turner - an Englishman born in 1775, he was a talented, budding artist at age 13 selling his drawings and at 17, the Royal Society of Arts gave him the top award for landscape drawing and he was off and running.  He sold his drawing designs to engravers and gave private lessons at that young age.  He exhibited his works up until 1850, sold approximately 2,000 paintings, 19,000 drawings and close to 300 finished and unfinished paintings were still in his studio by his death.

Turner was known as the 'painter of light'.  Not to be mistaken for the hack artist, Thomas Kinkade. (is that too personal?)  There was a great movie that came out a couple of years ago, Mr. Turner, and if you've seen it, you know as an older man, he became an eccentric.  He was a recluse, had few friends except his father, who lived with him for 30 years.  He never married but had two profound relationships with two women, the second one, Sophia Booth, became a widow and Turner took his place in her home as Mr. Booth for 18 years until his death in 1851.

Turner died and left a small fortune that was grabbed up by his first cousins, who contested his will and won a portion.  The remainder went to the Royal Academy of Arts, which named an award given to accomplished students the Turner Medal.  His paintings were scattered around, into museums in Europe and beyond and some selling for millions in auctions in the last two decades.  Stephen Wynn, the casino magnate, bought one in 2006 for $35.8 million.

So if someone ever asks you who the most famous landscape painter was, it's J.M.W. Turner, hands down.

From the Art Institute of Chicago, a woman viewing Turner's dramatic seascape.