For more than fifty years he has set a standard for American art. Like so many of the famous artists I’ve studied, many of them had their roots of art take hold in childhood. From the age of five Jasper knew he wanted to be an artist.

His work depicts commonplace emblems such as flags, targets, maps, and numbers, and through his genius manipulation to the canvas’ surface texture, he raises the images to iconic status. Constantly challenging the technical possibilities of printmaking, painting and sculpture,  Johns laid the groundwork for a wide range of experimental artists.

Jasper is one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar art. His work from 1955 to 1965 was pivotal, and he laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism.

Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favored by collectors and due to their rarity, it is known that Johns’ works are extremely difficult to acquire.

Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy.

Media Highlights

Johns had painted his first American flag in 1954, and it is the image with which the artist is most often associated. His White Flag (1955) hangs in the Metropolitan; Three Flags (1958) is in the Whitneys permanent collection. A 1973 piece, Two Flags, sold for $12.1 million in 1989 — the second highest auction price ever achieved by the artist.

The National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns’ proofs in 2007. This made the Gallery home to the largest number of Johns’ works held by a single institution.

Sources:
christies.com/lotfinder/prints-multiples/jasper-johns-flags-i-5313639-details.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Johns

The post Jasper Johns – Iconic American Artist appeared first on Art and Design Inspiration.

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882-May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker; his style conforms to the movements of Modernism and Social realism. Hopper’s work is divided between lonely landscape visages and illustrations of subjects in isolation. Essentially, Hopper captures the ambiance of his subject’s mood through the arrangement of the color scheme. Hopper’s rise to eminence as a figurehead in American modern art will be gleaned in connection to his trademark aesthetic.

The art movement of social realism burgeoned in the 1930s amid the Great Depression and correlated with Hopper’s artistic affluence. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hopper began his career as an illustrator by enrolling in New York School of Art and Design. His mentors included Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase who were the important figures of the Ashcan school- an art movement that strived to convey city life in New York’s poorer regions. Norman Rockwell was among the famous artists involved in the Ashcan school. Hopper’s time spent in art school proved seminal, as he sought to translate the standards of the Ashcan school in a different light. Instead of following the paradigm of his peers and Mentors who detailed crowded and bustling spaces, Hopper shifted the focus of social realism into encapsulating the loneliness of living in the city.

Automat: The Looming Atmosphere of the City

For a short spell, Hopper sought employment as an illustrator after he finished his career in school. Hopper spent several years venturing across Europe and studying the tradition of French realist artists, such as Édouard Manet. Hopper was inspired by the French realists to lend his powers of observation towards evincing the lackluster isolation that lurks in the backdrop of incessant bright lights and city noise.

His famous works- such as ‘Automat’ (1927) and ‘Office in a Small City’ (1953) – channels the collective distress of capitalist modernity. Hopper fashions the exterior spaces in these portraits to signify the subject’s interiority. In Automat, the starkly green background silhouettes the female subject who forlornly studies the content of her beverage. A murkiness shades both the city street in the environment behind the café and the woman’s clothing, which associates the looming atmosphere of the city with her despondency.

Office in a Small City: Reality Over-saturated with Artificiality and Confinement

The alienation of post-world war two American business is translated in ‘Office in a Small City.’ Hopper portrays a minimalist visage of a man seated in his office while absent mindedly observing at the city skyline. A sense of drab unmitigated confinement materializes from the man’s vacant response to performing everyday business tasks. The everyman’s claustrophobic boredom in this picture alludes to a pallid cost of perusing the American dream, which is the insipid routine of modern life. Hopper conveys the effects of a reality oversaturated with artificiality and confinement. A concern for the question of what constitutes an examined life in midst of monotony persists in the body of Hopper’s work. Hopper’s eminence as a prominent voice in the Age of Anxiety– see Munch’s ‘The Scream’– is attributed with conveying the mental rigors, or lack thereof, during capitalist modernity.

Nighthawks – One of the Most Recognized Paintings in American Art

Nighthawks painted in 1942 in New York City (and sold within months for $3,000), expresses lonely moments in time. The empty and flat composition expresses the following:
Coldness – the time of day – late at night, cool dark shadows, empty streets, lifeless.
Disconnected – the unsmiling interaction between the bartender, woman and man seemingly avoiding eye contact as a protection of personal space.
Man in a dark suit also disconnected with his back to the large window illuminating the dark and deserted urban streetcape.

The characters living in their own reality in the same space, yet apart. The painting invites a narrative interpretation. If you are reading this, what is your narrative on the painting?

Other favorite works:

The post Edward Hopper’s Portrayals of Alienation appeared first on Art and Design Inspiration.

Wyeth was born July 12th 1917 and passed away January 16th 2009. He started drawing at a young age and was home-tutored because of his frail health as a child (interesting that he lived until 91 years old!). His father was an illustrator and artist (N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth), and his primary teacher who is said to have kept him sheltered and “obsessively focused”. Wyeth recalled of that time: “Pa kept me almost in a jail, just kept me to himself in my own world, and he wouldn’t let anyone in on it. I was almost made to stay in Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest with Maid Marion and the rebels.”

By the time Wyeth was a teenager he had ongoing art lessons by his father, the only lessons he ever had. Under his father’s guidance he mastered figures study and learned techniques of many of the masters, especially Winslow Homer. His father guided him into illustration which was not his passion, however he produced these works under his father’s name while in his teens.

At the age of twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings sold out, and his life path seemed certain.

His art path and talent was most certain, however tragedy struck Wyeth’s life when his father died in a tragic train accident when his car stalled on the tracks. Not only did this change his life but also the style of his work, the melancholic style that he is best known for today. The seed of creativity took root in not only Wyeth’s life but years later in his son, Jamie Wyeth, who followed his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, becoming the third generation of Wyeth artists.

Christina’s World

In the 1940’s, Wyeth married Betsy Janes and through her met Christina Olson, who would become the model for the iconic Christina’s World. Wyeth was inspired by Christina, who, crippled with polio and unable to walk, spent most of her time at home. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone. It was dignity of a particularly dour, hardened, misanthropic sort, to which Wyeth throughout his career seemed to gravitate.

The painting however is actually composed with three different models. The figure’s wasted limbs and pink dress belong to Christina Olson. The youthful head and torso, however, belong to Betsy Wyeth who was then in her mid-20s (as opposed to Christina’s then-mid-50s). The most famous “model” in this scene is the Olson farmhouse itself, on the National Register of Historic Places since 1995.

Snatched up for $1,800

When Wyeth completed Christina World he thought the work was a “complete flat tire”. He sent if off to the Macbeth Gellery in Manhattan in 1948. It was hardly noticed after its completion, mainly because the Abstract Expressionists were making most of the arts news and the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, purchased it immediately for $1,800. A smart move and intuition on a masterpiece that would become the icon for Wyeth.

Popularity – In the 1980’s collectors paid more that $1 million for his paintings.

After “Christina’s World” Wyeth’s fame skyrocketed. In 1949, Winston Churchill asked for Wyeth watercolors to decorate his room at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Harvard gave Wyeth an honorary degree in 1955. He made the cover of Time in 1963 when President Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He painted portraits of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. A show of his work toured the country in 1966 and 1967, attracting huge crowds at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1980’s during the 80’s, Japanese collectors were paying more than $1 million for a Wyeth.

In 1963, he was the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the following decade, he was the first American since John Singer Sargent elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts, and he was asked to join the Soviet Academy of the Arts; he was subsequently the first living American artist elected to the British Royal Academy. In 1988, he was awarded the Congress Medal of Honor, the highest civilian honor awarded by Congress, with appreciation of an “austere vision” that “has displayed the depth and dignity of rural American life.”

In 2007, Wyeth received the National Medal of Arts, cited by the National Endowment for the Arts for portraying “an inner life that is elusive and enigmatic.” The artist’s reputation for secrecy had become intensified when his ample portfolio of neighbor Helga Tesorf was revealed in 1986. Working with this striking model for fifteen years, Wyeth made 246 sketches, studies, drawings, and paintings, and the magazine-cover stories were accompanied by speculation as to the nature of their relationship.

The implication of sex and Wyeth’s celebrity propelled Helga onto the covers of Time and Newsweek. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which rarely organized shows of living artists, leapt to do an exhibition of the Helga pictures in 1987. The catalogue, with reproductions of Wyeth’s soft-core renditions of his recumbent model, became a Book-of-the-Month Club best seller.

The works and a few others were sold to a Japanese collector reportedly for $45 million.

Wyeth reached great and deserving fame as an artist. He stayed true to his style and passion though art was being redefined all around him by the Abstract Expressionists, who by the way didn’t like him.

For myself, Wyeth is my favorite American Artist. His style of work strikes a cord of nostalgia, an expression of solitude and sometimes sadness.

The post Wyeth – The Master Artist of Expressing the Depth and Dignity of Rural American Life appeared first on Art and Design Inspiration.

Born June 6, 1756 John Trumbull was an American artist of the early independence period.  Trumbull’s greatest achievement was receiving a commission from the US government to paint 4 gigantic murals in the US Capitol after its destruction during the War of 1812. President James Madison personally picked out the paintings, which were Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence, The Surrender of General Burgoyne, The Resignation of Washington and The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis. It took Trumbull 8 years to finish the paintings. When it was all said and done it was not a great success in the eyes of many who were critical of his work.

The Declaration of Independence

The goal of the The Declaration of Independence painting was to preserve the exact likenesses of those extraordinary individuals—aristocrats, lawyers, doctors, farmers, shopkeepers—who had put their lives and fortunes on the line. Trumbull worked on the Declaration for more than three decades, hoping to include all fifty-six figures, but he was unable to obtain all the likenesses. Of the forty-eight portraits here, thirty-six were taken from life; others were copied from an existing portrait or taken of a son as a substitute.

In the event of The Declaration of Independence, the 13 American colonies severed their political connections to Great Britain.

Surrender of General Burgoyne

Painted in 1826, the scene shown in this painting is the surrender of British General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York on October 17, 1777.

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis

The subject of this painting is the surrender of the British army at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, which ended the last major campaign of the Revolutionary War.

General George Washington Resigning His Commission

This painting depicts the scene on December 23, 1783, in the Maryland State House in Annapolis when George Washington resigned his commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. The action was significant for establishing civilian authority over the military, a fundamental principle of American democracy.

What do these paintings mean – and why are they important?

The paintings express and document the break from Britain and its King to claim the power of an independent country.
In the early 1770s, more and more colonists became convinced that Parliament intended to take away their freedom. In fact, the Americans saw a pattern of increasing oppression and corruption happening all around the world. Parliament was determined to bring its unruly American subjects to heel. Britain began to prepare for war in early 1775. The first fighting broke out in April in Massachusetts. In August, the King declared the colonists “in a state of open and avowed rebellion.” For the first time, many colonists began to seriously consider cutting ties with Britain. The publication of Thomas Paine’s stirring pamphlet Common Sense in early 1776 lit a fire under this previously unthinkable idea.

The Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To read the entire document, click here.

To this day, United States celebrates the 4th of July. The tradition of setting off fireworks on July 4th began in Philadelphia in 1777, the first organized annual celebration of Independence Day while Congress was still occupied with the ongoing war. The Ships’ cannon fired a 13-gun salute in honor of the 13 colonies.

As Thomas Jefferson once said: “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!”

The post Iconic Paintings in America’s Quest for Freedom appeared first on Art and Design Inspiration.

Winslow Homer was born February 24th, 1836 in Boston, MA. He is regarded as one of the greatest American painters of the 19th century and created 145 artworks. He produced a broad range of work in illustration, oil painting and watercolor. Many of his artworks were from places he visited. From the Civil War battlefields where he documented the war to the desolate coast of Portland Maine.

One of his most nostalgic oil paintings, Snap the Whip, was created in 1872. The portrait depicts the simplicity of rural life as a group of children play crack the whip in front of a red schoolhouse. Homer spent summers in New York’s Hudson Valley and was inspired to paint this scene by local boys playing.

The work that defined his style was not undertaken until his middle age – after the age of forty-five when he settled into a solitary life in his coastal home and studio in Prouts Neck Maine.

His artwork depicted marine scenes, the rugged coastline and tumultuous sea which was inspired by the setting in which he spent the rest of his life.

In 1910, Homer died at the age of 74 in his Prouts Neck studio. His Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River remains unfinished, however sheds insight on his painting process.

“Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems.”
– Winslow Homer

Sources:
mainepreservation.org
Wikipedia.com

The post Homer – Master Artist of Depicting Heroic Struggle appeared first on Art and Design Inspiration.

Charlie Russell was an artist of the Old American West who created paintings of cowboys, Indians, and landscapes set in the Western United States and in Alberta, Canada. He is known as the Cowboy Artist.

Charlie Russell was born into a wealthy and socially prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri, the second of five sons. His family numbered among the earliest American settlers in the St. Louis area. He was sent to a prestigious art school, but he hated its rigidity and formalized exercises and quit after only a couple of lessons. In a last-ditch attempt at formal education, his desperate parents sent him to a boarding school in New Jersey. Less than three months later, just short of his sixteenth birthday in 1880, Charlie hopped a train for Montana to live the life of a cowboy and artist.

After an unsuccessful stint working on a sheep ranch, he found work with a hunter and trapper turned rancher named Jake Hoover. The two men remained lifelong friends. After a brief visit to his family in 1882, he returned to Montana, where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked as a cowboy for a number of outfits, and documented the harsh winter of 1886-1887 in a number of watercolors.

In 1896, Russell married his wife Nancy. He was 32 and she was 18. Under her support and guidance, Russell gained national recognition and successfully marketed his art. Along with her promotional talents and his observations, Russell and his art improved dramatically after 1903 when he and Nancy began making regular visits to New York.

Near the end of his life he told one reporter:

“I don’t lay any claim to being a genius, but I will say my wife has been an inspiration to me in my work. Without her I would probably never have attempted to soar or reach any height, further than to make a few pictures for my friends and old acquaintances in the west. I still love and long for the old west, and everything that goes with it. But I would sacrifice it all for Mrs. Russell . . . ”

He was a “real” cowboy, lived with a mountain man and was an adopted brother of the Blackfoot tribe.

His oils, watercolors and bronzes reflect an intimate knowledge of his subjects, and no one was more surprised than he when they began fetching high prices.

Russell completed approximately 4,000 artworks during his lifetime.

Living 46 years in the West, he knew his subject matter intimately, setting the standard for many western artists to follow. Charles M. Russell died in Great Falls, Montana on October 24, 1926.

Some sources from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Marion_Russell

The post Cowboy Artist – Charles Marion Russell: The Art and Soul of the West appeared first on Art and Design Inspiration.