Tag Archives: Artists

Profiles: 55-Year Old Canadian Artist Mark Laguë – “Painter Of Light”

Painter of Light

Canadian Artist MARK LAGUËMark has developed an international reputation and has won numerous awards, both in his native Canada and in the United States. A dedicated painter, Mark Lague was born in Lachine Quebec in 1964 and he has had a fascination with drawing since childhood, a skill he practices constantly, even to this day.

Mark Laguë Artist website collage

Upon graduation from Montreal’s Concordia University in Design, Mark embarked on a 13-year career in the animation industry, working primarily as a background designer and art director. During this time, despite working full time, he began receiving international acclaim for his watercolour paintings through competitions, juried shows, and solo exhibitions.

In 2000, Mark switched to oil as his primary medium, and in 2002 made the jump to full time painter. As an artist he is a realist, who is open to virtually all subject matter. What keeps him excited about painting is his endless quest to simplify and get to the essence of whatever he paints. Mark has been featured in numerous national art magazines, and continues to receive international recognition for his distinctive style of painting.

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Interviews: 72-Year Old Artist James Wrayge

Excerpts from a NextAvenue.org online article interview:

While Wrayge’s work has appeared in galleries and been bought across the globe, he prefers to focus on creating, not selling Photo by Elle Moulin in NextAvenue
While Wrayge’s work has appeared in galleries and been bought across the globe, he prefers to focus on creating, not selling Photo by Elle Moulin in NextAvenue

“I don’t like the word ‘evolve,’” he says. “Art means the same thing today as it always has. Styles change, but art doesn’t.”

Hesitant to put too defining a label on his work, Wrayge claims his paintings have “a landscape feel.” He doesn’t consider them to be abstract. “That’s a word invented by the press, not by painters,” he says. “What I prefer to say [about my paintings] is that they are a visual manifestation of my values.”

James Wrayge Fine Artist website pageIn James Wrayge’s quiet studio on an early winter afternoon, there is a tangible sense of  purpose. Wrayge’s paintings line the walls along the portion of the space he shares with another artist at the Northrup King Building in Minneapolis. There are also some paintings on the floor propped up against the same walls. And there is one — in progress — set on an easel in the corner.

James Wrayge website

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Art: “The Rediscovery Of Gaston Lévy’s Collection” Of Paul Signac & Camille Pissarro (Sotheby’s Video)

Known best as the author of Paul Signac’s first catalog raisonné, Gaston Lévy was perhaps the most remarkable art collector in pre-war Paris. After the Nazi regime seized his properties and dispersed his paintings, masterpieces were thought to have been lost to the Lévy family forever.

Camille Pissarro Gelée blanche Jeune Paysanne Faisant Du Feu 1888

However, This February Sotheby’s is proud to offer three recently restituted masterworks from the Lévy collection in our Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale. In this episode of Expert Voices, Sotheby’s Head of Restitution Lucian Simmons chronicles the story of Gaston Lévy’s collection and explores the extraordinary talent of Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro through their works Gelee Blache, Quai de Clichy and La Corne D’or.

Paul Signac Quai De Clichy Temps Gris 1887

(4 February | London)

Artists: Belgian Surrealist Painter René Magritte Linked “Consciousness And The External World”

From a Christies.com online article:

René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964
René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964

‘The creation of new objects, the transformation of known objects; a change of substance in the case of certain objects: a wooden sky, for instance; the use of words in association with images; the misnaming of an object… the use of certain visions glimpsed between sleeping and waking, such in general were the means devised to force objects out of the ordinary, to become sensational, and so establish a profound link between consciousness and the external world.’

René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines, Belgium. His father was a tailor and textile merchant; his mother committed suicide in 1912, drowning herself in the River Sambre.

René Magritte 1898 - 1967 Le Somnambule 1946

From the 1930s, Magritte sought to find ‘solutions’ to particular ‘problems’ posed by different types of objects, a method that enabled him to challenge and reconfigure the most ubiquitous and commonplace elements of everyday life. These problems obsessed him until he was able to conceive of an image to solve them.

This philosophical method had come to him after waking from a dream in 1932. In his semi-conscious state, he looked over at a birdcage that was in his room but saw not the bird that inhabited the cage, but instead an egg. This ‘splendid misapprehension’ allowed him to grasp, in his own words, ‘a new and astonishing poetic secret.’

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Fine Art: Magic Realism In The Work Of Dutch Painter Carel Willink

Sotheby's LogoCarel Willink was a pioneer of Magic Realism, an avant-garde movement of Dutch modernism closely associated with Surrealism. In this episode of Anatomy of an Artwork, discover how a visit to Italy’s Bomarzo Gardens following the death of his wife inspired a series of paintings featuring monsters, see how Willink drew further inspiration from dream-like images and illusions, and learn how his near-photographic style exudes a sense of mystery and enchantment.

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Art History: “The Rivalry Of Rembrandt And Jan Lievens” (Sotheby’s)

In this episode of Expert Voices, Otto Naumann explores their friendship and budding rivalry through Lievens’ masterwork Woman Embraced by a Man, Modelled by the Young Rembrandt. From the outset of his career, Lievens was at times bolder than Rembrandt, and the two constantly learned from one another during this critical period in their development.

The Rivalry of Rembrandt and Jan Lievens Sotheby's video January 17 2020

In early 17th century Holland, a young Rembrandt spent his days studying and working with fellow artist Jan Lievens. After apprenticing together in Amsterdam, the two likely shared a studio in their hometown of Leiden and even depicted each other in their compositions.

This signature audacity is on full display in in Woman Embraced by a Man, which will be offered as a highlight of Sotheby’s Master Painting Evening Sale. (29 January | New York)

New Art Books: “Caspar David Friedrich – Nature And The Self” (Yale)

Caspar David Friedrich Nature and the Self Nina Amstutz February 2020In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.

Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape.

Nina Amstutz is assistant professor in the history of art and architecture at the University of Oregon.

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Video Profiles: 86-Year Old Actress Kim Novak On Her Love Of Artwork (CBS)

Now on the cusp of turning 87, Kim Novak is still finding herself. The star of such classics as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” “Picnic,” and “Bell, Book and Candle,” the actress turned her back on Hollywood in the 1960s and has since pursued artwork and a love of animals. Mo Rocca reports.

Interviews: 59-Year Old Artist & Writer Jessica Helfand (CalTech)

From a CalTech Matters online article:

Jessica Helfand Caltech Matters Credit - Maggie Peters
Jessica Helfand – Photo by Maggie Peters in Caltech Matters

“Observation is observation. Looking, listening, thinking, conjecturing … all original ideas begin with a kind of scrutiny that is at once framed by discipline and open to discovery. Because I have always taught students in a university, not in an art school, I think I have a baseline understanding of what it means to approach the visual world from a different place. Teaching non-artists is always a little bit like being a foreign exchange student. Therein lies the challenge—and, I suspect, the fun.”

January 7, 2020 – This month, artist, designer, and writer Jessica Helfand joins Caltech as the Winter 2020 artist-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which is administered jointly by the division and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Helfand is a former contributing editor and columnist for PrintEye and Communications Arts magazines, and founding editor of the website Design Observer. She taught at Yale for two decades and has held artist residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. Her most recent book, Face: A Visual Odyssey, was published by MIT Press last fall. On January 16, Helfand will take part in a noontime talk with Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology Ralph Adolphs on the theme of the “face.”

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Exhibitions: 74-Year Old Artist John Alexander – “Landscape And Memory” (Berggruen Gallery)

JANUARY 9 – FEBRUARY 15, 2020

 

John Alexander The Temptation 2019 Landscape and Memory Berggruen Gallery January 2020Berggruen Gallery is proud to present John Alexander: Landscape and Memory, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Texas-born, New York-based artist John Alexander. This show marks Alexander’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view January 9 through February 15, 2020. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, January 16 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.

John Alexander’s most recent body of work presents a detailed collection of landscapes, botanicals, sea life, and animals – each subject an emblem of the artist’s own mind and memory. Alexander grew up between the bayous and the wooded wilderness of East Texas, enjoying camping and fishing trips within the lush, diverse landscape that would ultimately become so influential to him. Moreover, Alexander’s understanding and appreciation for the natural world was fortified by his father’s environmentalism. For Alexander, developing an environmental acuity, especially for his native Texas, was familial. Today, the artist creates work in reference to the nature-based consciousness he developed in his youth.

Berggruen Gallery San FranciscoThe introspective nature of Alexander’s work is revealed through the artist’s keen observations of his surrounding environment and the vivid way in which he paints it. Employing bold, painterly strokes, Alexander maintains an acute sensibility of his subject matter – whether it be the detailed rendering of the spiny lobster, an expressive portrayal of grackles and ibises perched in branches, or more expansive, floating florals. The artist also injects elements of whimsy; the playful monkeys he paints peer out of their canvases to almost directly engage the viewer. And thus each work is imbued with an authentic, raggedly pristine, emotional sense of the earth we all inhabit. In this way, Alexander creates scenes that are deeply personal, yet also shared…nostalgic yet ongoing…exotic yet familiar…of the world yet otherworldly. Saturating his landscapes with humor, sentimentality, and veneration, Alexander reveals as much about himself as he does about nature.

John Alexander: Landscape and Memory is comprised of nine paintings and four drawings, work that comes together in reverence for the formal tradition of landscape painting. Paying homage to an Impressionist Master, Claude Monet, Alexander paints dreamy hollyhocks. Invoking the more recent Hudson River School, Alexander carefully creates bucolic scenes of both reality and idealization. Perhaps most unexpectedly, Alexander also nods to the Abstract Expressionists, applying thick strokes of paint in a gestural, emotional meditation. In turn, Alexander’s work pays tribute to the long and varied legacy of landscape painting before him while simultaneously remaining true to his own, very personal, connection to nature. Through the amalgamation of art historical context, environmental conservation, and the integration of a more intimate narrative, Alexander produces a body of work that is raw, compelling, and perhaps above all else, natural.

John Alexander was born in Beaumont, Texas, in 1945. He received his B.F.A. from Lamar University in Beaumont in 1968 and his M.F.A. from the Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1970. Following graduate school, Alexander taught at the University of Houston. Though the artist’s Texas roots influence much of his work, to solely categorize Alexander as a “Texas” artist would be inaccurate. In 1979, having established himself in Houston as a prominent local artist, Alexander moved to New York City. Today the artist divides his time between his SoHo studio loft and home in Amagansett, East Hampton. Alexander’s work has been widely exhibited at such prestigious institutions as the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, both in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is featured in the permanent collections of several leading institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; as well as many other public and private collections worldwide.

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