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Archive for August, 2009

Buying folk art paintings has become a passion of mine. I’ve been looking for them everywhere it seems. I found a bunch of folk art paintings recently and I am having trouble deciding which one to buy.

There was a folk art painting by Rev. Howard Finster that is titled Howard in 1944. This is an all enamel folk art painting that was painted in 1988. The smile on this portrait is very engaging and makes me smile just as big.

I am also really taken by a folk art painting that was painted by painter Bill Dodge in Oct 1962. The title of the painting is First Trolley To Van Nuys. The painting is on board and depicts the center of town with all the people in town. They are in the windows and on the street. The town market, bakery, Hotel Van Nuys, an ice cream parlor and the Wing Lee Laundry are all depicted in vibrant color. The women in the foreground are against the Trolley and their signs say “Ban the Monster” and “Keep Van Nuys rural”.

Thomas Chambers is one of America’s foremost folk artists. I found a piece by him that I just don’t like very much. It is a bit austere for my tastes. The subject is a fishing scene with villagers and boats. I don’t think that I will purchase this folk art painting because I just don’t like it.

There was a folk art painting I found called Alligator Fisher that was painted in 1940 that I really like. The blue of the bayou is very calming and the trees give it a very Southern feel. There is a swamp house in the painting and I like this one very much. It reminds me very strongly of Louisiana.

My mother started this passion of mine for folk art paintings. She had a folk art painting by John Roeder in our parlor growing up. I used to spend hours just staring into it. The trees were so relaxing to lose myself in. I have asked her to give me this wonderful folk art painting many times, but she says that I will have to wait until after her funeral!

I found one folk art painting during my journey that I felt sad every time I looked at. The name of the painting is A Letter from My Mother. The look in the girl’s face is so serious and sad. I have no idea where this folk art painting should hang. The painting itself is magnificent; it just makes me feel sad.

There is a whole subset of folk art paintings that represent black Americana. I don’t usually buy any of these pieces as they don’t speak to my experience. I did find one piece that I purchased for a collector friend of mine that loves this type of art. The folk art painting had a whimsical feel to it and a woman relaxing in a hammock. He hung this in his hallway and has loved it for a long time.

My brother likes folk art paintings as much as I do. He prefers animals to be the subjects of paintings he purchases. I found a lovely clouded leopard folk art painting for him last Christmas and he has asked that I keep my eyes open for more like it. He said that he will buy any art I find for him because he trusts that I know and understand his tastes.

I have kept my eyes open for animal themed folk art paintings for my brother, but I just can’t seem to find any as nice as the leopard that I got for him. The grand extent of animal themed folk art paintings I’ve found recently was a painting of two owls on a limb and I know that he would not like it. Ever since we were kids, owls totally freak him out.

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I have a love for Asian botanical paintings. I’ve been seeking them out for a long time. I have many in my collection and love each and every one of them.

The first Asian botanical painting that I bought was Vietnamese. It was one of a series of twelve paintings that I bought that were created by Vu Viet Hung. I have them all over my home.

These oil landscapes by Vu Viet Hung are stunning. These Asian botanical paintings really set a serene tone in my home. The subtleties of the colors and the simple themes go so well on my walls.

I found a lovely Asian botanical painting quite by chance at a yard sale. I don’t usually make a habit of looking for paintings at yard sales, but this one was displayed out front and enticed me to stop. At first glance, I thought I was looking at a painting of a palm tree. At closer inspection, I found that the painting was of a bonsai tree.

My office has a more contemporary feel than the rest of my house. I have found that I like to have an abstract Asian botanical painting to ponder while I am thinking. I searched for a long time to find just the right piece to hang there. I finally found a piece by an artist named Soniei called Enlightenment.

Soniei has a collection called the New Zen Sho Collection. I love his work. The abstract that I bought is considered an Asian botanical painting because it features bamboo. In addition to the bamboo, there is beautiful calligraphy.

I have my eye on another Asian botanical painting by Soniei that has shades of sea-foam green. It is much more subdued than the one I bought called Enlightenment. This one is called Self-awareness and it is just lovely. It is another painting of bamboo.

My mother-in-law admires the Asian botanical paintings that I find. I found one that I really liked at a gallery in Hartford while I was on vacation. It did not fit with my home and so I bought it for her. She has really enjoyed it. It features two flowering trees in acrylic on two panels. The painting really is stunning with all of the shades of red. It looks great in her house.

My husband isn’t as big a fan of Asian botanical paintings as I am. They just don’t speak to him. He has allowed me to hang one painting in his office because he approved of the color scheme. The Asian botanical painting he chose for me to hang for him was a black and white.

Our daughter loves watercolor Asian botanical paintings on fabric. She keeps her eye out for advertisements in our local paper for people selling them. She has already purchased three. She is well on her way to her own collection.

Bamboo is the most popular subject in Asian botanical paintings. I have found so many paintings in so many different mediums that all feature bamboo. I catch myself buying so many paintings that I’ve started giving them as gifts for friends and family for house warming gifts.

My sister recently bought a condo and I gave her an Asian botanical painting of happy birds and bamboo. She liked the watercolor and asked me to find her two more to hang throughout her home. I was able to find several more at the same shop that were created by the same artist.

The other Asian botanical paintings were of snow bamboo in moonlight and green bamboo. I’ll keep checking back at that store for new paintings. She said that she could probably use one or two more.

I am planning to redecorate my kitchen. I do not like the French Country décor that the previous owner chose. I would prefer that my kitchen reflect my personality better. I will absolutely need an Asian botanical painting hung prominently in my kitchen.

I have the perfect Asian botanical painting in mind already. It is a nice Chinese painting that was done on rice paper with ink, water and color. It is mounted with nice silk border by an expert and is ready to frame.

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I have been buying modern oil paintings for a show in my gallery. I have found many nice pieces. I found a painting called Village in winter in a private collection in Illinois. The artist was Fern Isabel Coppedge and she was an American. I liked the piece because of the snowy scene. It reminded me of my childhood.

While on a buying trip, I found Clouds Over Buckingham. This was a really nice modern oil painting that was in a private collection in Pennsylvania. I have seen work by this artist before and it always resells very well.

Buying modern oil paintings has taken me to various places across the United States. I especially liked Main Line, Pennsylvania. That is where I acquired Leaning Silo. The artist of Leaning Silo was Arthur Meltzer. I had been previously unfamiliar with him.

I enjoyed my trip to Long Island City. I was buying modern oil paintings and found one from a French artist named Georges Antoine Rochegrosse that I really liked. This painting was painted around 1900 and it was full of flowers. I really liked it and think it will do well in the show.

I find that I can buy modern oil paintings very efficiently on the internet. I found an art dealer in the United Kingdom that finds me some very nice items to show. Recently, he sent me a painting of a nude beauty by British artist Allan Douglas Davidson.

The modern oil painting depicted a young Bohemian woman wearing only flowers in her hair. She also has large gold earrings. She is posed against a dark background which highlights the perfection of her creamy skin.

The still life I recently acquired was so amazingly real looking. This was one of the most beautiful modern oil paintings that I’ve found. The detail was exceptional and the representation of the blooming rose was breathtaking.

I was so lucky when I found an original Max Ernst modern oil painting. The title of the piece I found was Arizona Desert. I really think it will do well in my show and I didn’t even pay half of what I think it is really worth. It will make a great addition to someone’s collection.

I found a modern oil painting by the Spanish artist Grifoll that I liked. I’m not sure how well this painting of a clown will sell, but I liked it and I think that there is bound to be someone who just can’t live without it.

I just adore paintings that depict Paris. I don’t even care about the period or the style. I was able to find a really nice modern oil painting by Edouard Cortes for my show. The painting depicts flower vendors and a horse carriage. I almost feel like I’m in turn of the century Paris when I look into it for a long time.

There are a lot of modern oil paintings that depict roses. I plan to have a grouping of several at my show. I was able to buy a painting by Theresa Bernstein called Roses that she painted in the 1940s. She lived to be 111 years old and that is pretty amazing.

A popular theme among modern oil paintings is nautical. I really do not like nautical paintings and don’t want them in my show. I have had several friends implore me to change my mind. I keep being told that I can’t possibly have a show of modern oil paintings that does not include a ship.

I had an assistant bring in a modern oil painting that had an interesting history. It was more because of the history of the painting that I decided to hang it than because of its content. The ship scene was really not to my liking, but I bought it anyway.

I have been looking for an antique street scene painted by Bettylane Resnik. I saw a modern oil painting by her in an art catalog that depicted a really colorful street scene. I can’t seem to find the current owner, but I’m trying. I think that it would complete my show.

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Also known as Cubist Realism, and related to the Art Deco movement, Precisionism was developed in the United States after World War I. The term for this movement was coined in the 1920s, and influenced by the Cubist and Futurist movements; the main themes for these paintings were mainly regarding industrialization and modernization of the American landscape. These elements were depicted with the use of precise and sharply defined geometrical shapes, a reverence for the industrial age, but with social commentary not a directly fundamental part.

The degrees of abstraction ran the spectrum as some works had photo realistic qualities, and though the movement had no presence outside of the United States, the artists that made up this particular grouping were a closely knit collective remaining active through to the 1930s. Georgia O’Keefe remained as one of the leading proponents of this style, and stayed so for many years afterwards until the 1960s, her husband was a highly regarded mentor for the group. In a post post-Expressionist phase of life in the art world, Precisionism has affected and influenced the movements of magic realism which utilizes aspects such as juxtaposing of forward movement with a sense of distance, and pop art in which themes from mass culture were used to define art much there forward.

Just after the 1950s began, the movement of pop art was clear in places such as Britain and the United States, and employed elements of advertising and comic books to create a foundation that might have been taken as a reaction to the then popular movement of abstract expressionism. Though the term wasn’t coined until 1958, it was later linked with Dadaism from the beginning of the century, and at one point was called Neo-Dada because of the strong influence from artist Marcel Duchamp. Later affecting artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, bringing the definition to come to mean one of low-cost mass-produced and gimmicky artwork, and stressing everyday values with common sources like product packaging and celebrity photographs.

By exploring that fraction of everyday imagery, the artists found themselves working with contemporary consumer culture, and this became apparent in parts of Britain, Spain, and Japan around the same point in time. In Britain in particular, where pop art seemed to stem from at that point in 1947, and many works began blurring the boundaries between art and advertising. Whereas in Spain, the movement became interrelated with the “new figurative”, the work arose from the roots of informalism which began to be a critical aspect in this part of the world.

In Japan, pop art has been seen and utilized throughout much of the country’s native artwork through such means as Anime and the “superflat” styles of art, and became the means through which the artists could further critique their own culture through a more satirical lens. When choosing a stimulating piece by these artists, it may be a more invigorating exercise to find some of those other artists to whom these later artists owe much of their inspiration towards their own work, and Precisionism is just as appropriate a place to start for you as anywhere else in the artistic spectrum.

Today, Precisionism can be seen as fundamental influence in commercial and popular art, but cannot be too overlooked as being one of a few different movements to affect our present day stance on art’s utility and functions. With the postmodern present coming to light, maybe we shall once again be drawn back to the past that we have come to take for granted too often, and reveal a new age to define a new century of experience.

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Evoking a taste similar to the Romanticist tradition, but utilized mysticism and sensitivity through mythology and dream imagery, preceding the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung. With a strong philosophical touch, more so than a style of art, and Art Nouveau and Expressionist artists such as Edvard Munch. Beginning in France as a reaction to the movements of Naturalism and Realism, which seemed to capture the particular components of consensual reality, and presented spirituality and imagination reflecting some artists budding interest in religion and spirituality.

In literature, poet Charles Baudelaire was developing his work and the movement, and especially with such luminaries as Verlaine contributing to the collective effort of the literary movement during the 1860s and through to the 1870s. With the works of Edgar Allen Poe coming to popularity in the 1880s, the Symbolism movement in artwork represented an outgrowth into the darker and more gothic nature of Romanticism, and contrasted with Romanticism’s rebellious and impetuous sides. Symbolist writers wrote in very metaphoric and suggestive manner, to imbue the subjects with a sense of symbolic meaning, and made realistic images into representatives for more esoteric and primordial ideas.

In translating the language of dreams into artwork with symbolic leanings, discovering a visual style that draws upon that philosophical approach that captures a sense of art that has been influential on more than one movement artistically, and has evoked some of the more fantastic imagery to ever cross a canvas. The Symbolist Manifesto was published in 1886, leading to a description of the movement that included ideas such as being hostile towards plain and matter-of-fact meanings, and to express the ideal in a perceptible form was the sole purpose of this art form.

Symbolists that preferred poetic means of conveying their ideas, were known for their techniques of removing technical aspects to achieve a greater fluidity for their work, and became related with seeking use of symbolic images over raw description to evoke the state of the poet’s soul. Paul Verlaine was influential in an 1884 publication defining the essence of Symbolism, through many essays on the relevant poets of the day, and came to the conclusion of relating the works of this movement to the famed philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose own work delved into art as a means of refuge from the strife of the world.

These similarities, which presented a contemplative and artistic refuge using themes such as mortality and otherworldliness, created disparaging arguments between critic and artist alike. Leading to many Symbolist poets of the day to make their own publications and periodicals, and the literary Symbolism then reached its’ peak in the year 1886, with one particular periodical lasting until 1965. Though the two aspects of the movement were distinct, they would occasionally overlap each other, and became a continuation for mystical tendencies in a Romantic tradition, even flirting with the self-consciously dark Decadence movement.

There were several dissimilar groups of painters and visual artists within the Symbolism movement, and the artistic movement seemed to have a greater impact worldwide than the literary movement, reaching multiple artists and sculptors from such distinct parts as Russia. Many of the symbols found herein are not necessarily universal, but more personally affected with the artist’s obscure and private references, with some dreamlike subject matter influencing later Surrealists. Symbolism has had a strong link to music for a while, and mostly due to the enthusiasm for the work of Richard Wagner, whose own music reflected his influence from the philosopher Schopenhauer.

Symbolism even grew to affect some of the literary fiction contributed by Oscar Wilde and Paul Adam, and has a pronounced ring when speaking about movements that have literarily and artistically that have crossed over into other inner groupings of artistic work. The waters of Symbolism have even filtered down the centuries into the state of motion pictures today, and early on held influence with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, as well as Russian actor and director Vsevolov Meyerhold’s method of acting that influenced early motion pictures.

It is difficult to overlook Symbolism’s influence and repercussions throughout the timeline to the current period of the world, as it drifts through many aspects taken for granted on a daily basis, and many pieces of work for many artists from writer T. S. Eliot to painter Pablo Picasso and even the state of horror films as well. A decidedly different state of the world now has interpreted and reinterpreted all this throughout these hundreds of years, and created more and more material reflections of the state of things as they happen to be.

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