Warren Eliphalet Rollins (1861 – 1962) For many years Warren Eliphalet Rollins was known as the "Dean of the Santa Fe art colony." He was the first artist to have a formal exhibition there; it was held in 1906 in the old Palace of the Governors. He was a close friend of Carlos Vierra, Gerald Cassidy, Kenneth Chapman, Sheldon Parsons and most of the other famous artists who assembled in the New Mexican capital during the first half of this century.

Born in Carson City, Nevada, Rollins was raised in California and attended the San Francisco School of Design where he studied under Virgil Williams. At the completion of his studies, he was awarded the Avery Gold Medal and made Assistant Director of the school. Following his marriage in 1887, he and his wife settled in San Diego, and it was during this period that Rollins became interested in the Indian as subject matter. In search of material, Rollins, his wife, and their two daughters, Ramona and Ruth, traveled through every Western state from the Mexican to the Canadian borders. While in Montana, Rollins painted a portrait of Calamity Jane. The sitting took place in a saloon, and while Rollins drew, Calamity drank, wept and poured out the story of her life to him. The portrait was lost in a fire at The Billings Club.

In 1890 he operated an art school in Tacoma, WA, and during 1892-1902, he lived in Portland, OR. Traveling constantly throughout the Southwest, he lived among – and painted the Hopi, Crow, and Blackfeet tribes and was one of the first painters to be admitted to their ceremonies. These studies became very popular.

In 1910 he moved to the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena and the following year built a studio in San Gabriel. His constant search for new subject matter took him to Taos in 1917, where he had a studio near his friend Irving Couse; to Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, sketching and painting its ancient ruins; and to the Grand Canyon where he had a studio near El Tovar. His dramatic Canyon painting was purchased by the Santa Fe Railroad who had built a studio for him on the rim of the Grand Canyon and he became known as "The Dean of Taos and Santa Fe Art Colonies."

Rollins was the first president of the Santa Fe Art Club, and active in the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, which has an extensive collection of his work, including "Grief," one of his most famous paintings. He did murals for the Museum, the post office and Harvey House in Gallup, and triptychs depicting Zuni life for Bishop’s Lodge, Santa Fe. His "Mayflower Series," done in Crayo-tone, a medium he developed and used almost exclusively in later years, was widely exhibited on the East Coast. Warren E. Rollins continued painting well into his nineties and died at the age of one hundred years and five months in Winslow, Arizona.

Exhibitions: San Francisco Art Association, 1883-87, 1903, 1905, 1912 Mechanics’ Institute, San Francisco, 1887 Portland Art Club, 1890s Royar Gallery (LA), 1911 Panama-California Expo, San Diego, 1915 (silver medal).

Collections: Santa Fe Railroad; Nevada Museum (Reno); Huntington Gallery (San Marino); Oakland Museum (Alameda Shoreline, 1881); Museum of New Mexico; Orange Co. (CA) Museum.

Source: Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940" Who’s Who in American Art 1947-59; Artists of the American West (Doris Dawdy); Artists and Illustrators of the Old West (Robert Taft); Artists of the American West (Samuels); The West As Art; Southern California Artists (Nancy Moure).

On view until January 16, 2011 at the Hudson River Museum, Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth is a large and ambitious exhibition encompassing a subject that has not heretofore been undertaken: a critical analysis of autumnal scenery by American artists, whose works date from the time of the Hudson River School to the present.

Spanierman Gallery was very pleased to participate in this effort, with the loan of Robert Emmett Owen’s Autumn Harvest (1910s-30s).  The entry on the work in the show’s catalogue rightly observes how Owen captured the rhythms of the New England countryside in such images, focusing often through exuberant impressionist handling on the vivacity of fall foliage.

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With his own unique language, Michael Chapman interprets the world around him.  His themes are thoroughly modern, addressing the perception of reality and it’s mutability.  The parallels between his work and that of Edward Hopper are striking: geometric motifs, suggested narratives, and interiors with views through a window.  But Chapman describes the relationship as indirect, one that is responsive rather than imitative.
  Over the past nine years, the artist’s themes and subjects – beach scenes, interiors, city streets, trees and parks, and nocturnes- have become increasingly more complex in their content and composition.  Consistently featuring such objects as fire hydrants, chairs, tables, cars, and trains.  Chapman continually reconceives their arrangements, explaining that he has a “vocabulary of subject matter” that interests him.  “I resolve the same ideas in different ways,” he says.  “My mind keeps working on them without being conscious of it.  It’s almost as if it’s a matter of time before I will come up with a final solution.”

Matthew Cornell was born in Fairfield, CA in 1964. His first memories are of traveling across the United States in a car. His childhood was, in a sense, the quintessential American experience, because the notion of a “road trip” was conceived and perpetrated by Americans. The automobile and the family trip was, and still is, ours. It is these experiences driving across this land at a young age that formed his way of seeing things. Cornell says, ”Every year we traveled across the US and I spent most of my time looking out of the window and observing the landscape and weather. We moved a lot and I got to see almost every part of this country. It was a blessing. It made me aware of the variety and the vastness the US has to offer.”

The weather became the dominant influence on his early landscape painting. “I have always been fascinated by the extremes of weather and the power of nature,” he says. “It is in a constant state of creation and destruction, of origin and destination. With every day, the planet begins anew. Nature seeks equilibrium. It is in a never-ending cycle.” Cornell prefers the sublime and meditative observations of land and seascape, the narrative of majestic weather, and somber cloudscapes sweeping across the land and vast empty sea.

Recently his paintings have turned more complex, with dusk and night scenes, streetlights on secluded homes. The visual backdrop has allowed a subtle narrative of mystery and intrigue. “Landscapes at this hour are like ghosts that are unseen during the day, only to be revealed by the strange and myriad ways the night time glows”, Cornell says. These narratives include neighborhoods that mirror the kind he grew up in and the longing he now has to find home. “I spent a great deal of my childhood moving and this has greatly influenced my new work. I am searching for that elusive notion of where I come from and where I belong.”

Cornell has been part of many group, solo, and museum shows since 1997. He now lives and maintains a studio in Orlando, FL.

Born in rural Pennsylvania, Brad Kunkle spent his younger years exploring and romanticizing the beauty of the sparse countryside and the deep forests around him.  From an early age he was drawn to the worlds of Maxfield Parrish and the Pre-Raphaelites  –worlds, he says,  "where a subtle, supernatural beauty seems to be hiding under the breath of women –worlds where something beyond our natural perception is waiting to be found."
  He studied painting at Kutztown University mostly under George Sorrels, who was taught by a pupil of the 19th century Academic painter, William Adolphe Bougereau.  Filled with academic principles, Brad felt confident in his ability, but stifled by the structure of schools and dissatisfied with the boundaries of traditional imagery.  In an effort to discover his own artistic sensibilities, he worked as a commission-based portraitist, and began an almost decade-long journey of continued self-instruction and independent study. 
  Brad was searching for an unnatural quality in his paintings, and it was ironically discovered by reducing his processes to the elements of painting he felt came most natural to him.  His minimal palette is inspired by the grisailles of early European masters and the haunting quality of antique photographs and daguerreotypes.   "Grisaille has a mysterious quality to it, and that mysterious quality is also at times carried into the way I will treat an object or a dress.  Sometimes I like to give just enough information for the viewer to finish the details of what they are seeing." 

It was while he was a student at the California Art Institute that Jeremy Lipking learned how to see. In his younger days, he’d size up the figure as the sum of its parts, picking out the eyes, the nose, the mouth and the hands.  But his teachers at the institute taught him to detect the shapes created by light and darks and the subtleties of color. Although he’d always drawn and painted, Lipking says, at the end of his year in art school it was obvious that he’d made a tremendous artistic leap.
  Since then, the California artist has confidently and tenaciously chased the dreams he set out for himself while he was a student. He strives to master the fundamentals of painting and recreate the inspiration that generated each piece in the first place. From the looks of his career trajectory—he is only 27 years old—it is fair to say he’s well on the way to achieving his goal.

Lipking was born in Santa Monica and has lived in Southern California most of his life
  His father is an advertising designer, children’s book illustrator and landscape painter, so Lipking’s childhood was immersed in art. Under his father’s tutelage, he learned some of the basics of design, drawing and color. He might rather have been home watching cartoons, he says ruefully, but his father insisted they spend time at local museums and galleries.
  Despite the fact that he demonstrated early talent in art, it was music that drew him strongly. Throughout his teens, Lipking played guitar and performed in a punk and reggae band. He appreciated and played all types of music and considered the possibility that music might be his calling.
  For a semester after high school, he took art classes at a local community college. Then, at his father’s suggestions, he looked into the California Art Institute, an intimate academy in Westlake Village, California. Once his classes started, he became impassioned by the traditional approach that school fostered. “When I started studying, I painted still lifes, the figure and landscapes,” Lipking says. “Painting the landscape was a little easier than hiring a model or finding a place to paint the model or the still life. You could just go out and set up your easel.”

Lipking was attracted to a traditional style of painting because “it has so much to do with what’s happening right here and right now—you’re capturing the moment,” he says. “For example, if you’re out painting at the end of the day and the light’s coming down and hitting the side of a hill or a mountain, that’s it. That’s what you need to paint. That’s the here and now. Of course, that’s not the whole statement. It has more to do with capturing things the way you see them.”
  After a year of study and armed with the basics, Lipking set off determined to grow the way he likes best—on his own. Indeed, he acknowledges in retrospect, the most important thing he learned in art school was how to teach himself. “I was never taught one particular style of painting. It changed each time depending on the subject or how much time I had. I’ve learned many different ways of starting a painting from Richard Schmid’s book, “Alla Prima.”
  The result of his self-improvement efforts is an artist who is rigorously disciplined, rarely leaves his studio, and remains focused on improving with each succeeding painting. He studies the works of John Singer Sargent, Nicolai Fechin and Spanish plein-air master Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. He is especially inspired by artists such as Swedish painter Anders Zorn who is known for his depiction of nudes in landscape settings. “I can’t really paint the figure and ignore what’s behind it,” Lipking says of his recent images that combine the human figure and the landscape. “The figure looks the way it does because of the landscape behind it, and the landscape looks the way it does because of the figure.”

 In a place close to home, such as the Pacific Coast, Malibu Canyon, and the Santa Monica Mountains, Lipking will paint with a live model or, if conditions are prohibitive, take photographs as reference. He prefers to work outdoors and tries to lay out as many pieces as possible in one sitting. The ideal method, he says, is to make a quick painting from life, photograph his model, and then take the material back to his studio for completion. But he follows no set rules, opting instead for whatever process seems to best suit the painting.
  Lipking’s style is classic and romantic, akin to 19th century portrait and naturalistic landscape paintings. Dressed in long skirts, short jackets, shawls, and closely fitted hats; his female subjects seem to be of another era. In a single canvas, he will realistically render some sections—for example, a lone figure and nearby trees—while leaving the rest a soft field of color. “I paint that way because that’s how I see,” he explains. “You can’t see everything in focus at once.”
  Though his paintings of figures—some nude, some clothed, some in nature, some shown full-body and others cropped at the neck—are perhaps his most intriguing, Lipking’s still lifes and landscapes are equally as ethereal. The light in his paintings is enigmatic, cast with drama and subtlety.
  “I am attracted to the figure and the landscape because of how challenging they are. There’s something I need to learn about those,” he says. “And painting outdoors—there are so many different ways you can approach that.”

There is no doubt that Lipking’s work is steeped in art history, confident draftsmanship, a love of the human figure, and a penchant for romantic poses and locations. But that is not to say that the whole world of art doesn’t hold appeal. “I know some people who are militant traditionalists or extreme modern artists,” he says. “But I have an appreciation for all types of expression. Part of it comes from music. I don’t want to limit myself to one type of music or one type of art. I know the way I want my paintings to look. But appreciating art is another thing.”

There is a timeless quality to the paintings created by Malcolm T. Liepke. His imagery transplants viewers to a bygone era of late night haunts, couples lingering in smoky rooms and intimate private moments. While timeless, the imagery still manages to retain a distinct, contemporary flair. The sublime beauty of his subjects, often women lost in contemplation, are imbued with a sense of melancholy. The brushwork; thick, lush and bold make the canvas “breathe” with an intensity not often found in today’s more “antiseptic” art world. “I look at my own world and paint it,” says Liepke, “but I also want my paintings to be ultimately timeless. I’m a channel to express the human condition.”
 Liepke’s fascination with the art world began at a young age. During his senior year of high school, he realized that being an artist was the “only thing I was cut out to be.” So he packed his bags and moved from his native Minnesota and moved to California where he enrolled in the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He soon became frustrated, however, with the curriculum that emphasized abstraction and conceptual art. After a year and a half, he dropped out. “They weren’t going in the direction that I wanted to go,” he explained. “They were promoting superficial and trendy techniques. I wanted to learn from the masters that I saw in the museums.”
 Liepke, who was and continues to be drawn to the work of the 19th-century masters, did just that. He headed east to New York’s finest museums where he studied the work of Sargent, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard, absorbing technique and discipline while developing a unique vision all his own.

From the beginning, Liepke was drawn to the figure. “It’s not really like anything else,” he explains. “In landscapes, there can certainly be a great deal of emotion, but it is a different kind and not as strong to me as looking at the figure. There is a timeless quality to figurative painting that I really enjoy. If I look at a Rembrandt, while the clothing is certainly different, the people remain the same. They have not changed in hundreds of years. The emotional contact you get from looking at someone’s face is what inspires my work.”
 In the early part of his career, Liepke began working in the world of illustration and by the early 1980’s, he had earned an award-winning reputation as an illustrator with works appearing in magazine like Time and Forbes. Over time, Liepke grew tired of the lack of control in terms of subject matter, and by the mid-80’s decided to strike out on his own and become a full-time artist.
 Liepke’s commitment to traditional figurative painting coincided with the resurgence of figurative painting in general. “I came at a pretty good time. It wasn’t as difficult to find success painting figures in a realist style during the 80’s as it would have been in the 50’s or 60’s. Artists like Lucien Freud helped carve some paths, which helped me enormously,” he says.

 Not that Liepke really needed any assistance anyway. From his very first exhibition in 1986, all of the works in his shows have sold out. From Hong Kong to Los Angeles and London to New York, Malcolm Liepke’s works are much sought after and his audience continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Julio Reyes was born January 15th, 1982 in Hollywood, California. Even as a child he knew that he wanted to be an artist, and he drew constantly. His ever growing imagination was fueled by his family’s tradition of telling what were often fantastical tales of his lineage, imbuing his childhood with wonder. "Beyond my parents, there exists an incredible family saga, transmitted to me around dinner tables and fireplaces one story at a time. Through those experiences, I learned that I come from a long line of Indians, witch-doctors, and bootleggers, a lineage that stretches out across Mexico, and the American Southwest. I suppose it was there with my family that I got what I really needed to be an artist. It was in family and hearth that I discovered what it meant to feel deeply about things – the ability to move and be moved by others. At that dinner table, my soul was built up and made larger with noble thoughts. I learned that there were sacred things in life, and that I should devote myself to knowing them".
       By the time Julio was in high school his drawing skills were well developed. His teachers made note of his abilities, and encouraged him to pursue a life in the arts. It was about this time however that Julio was finding great success as an athlete. He excelled in soccer, and participated in tournaments all over the world. He was the youngest player on virtually every team he played for – only 16 years old when he toured through Europe, on a team of guys four years his elder. Reyes was also chosen for a select team of players from all over California, to participate in the famed Gothia Cup Tournament in Gothenburg, Sweden. With over 60 different nations participating, the tournament was, and still is, larger than the world cup. Their team proudly represented the United States in the championship game final, played in Ullevi Statium. Colleges were recruiting him with the promise of generous scholarships, but Julio made a surprising decision and turned them down.
          " I couldn’t see myself being an athlete all my life. I remember very clearly, I was in the Louvre in France, with a group of soccer guys who really only had girls on the mind. As I looked around, I was overwhelmed with this tremendous sense of longing. It felt as though I was the only one who knew we were surrounded by splendor. I never felt further from my dreams. Later that night, in my sketchbook, I secretly drew as many works of art as I could remember. As if by doing so, I could catch up to lost time; there was this rush, to get to my true vocation…I knew then what needed to be done."
         Julio enrolled in the Laguna College of Art and Design in the year 2000 and began painting with oils for the first time. He learned about art history and aesthetics, as well a classical approach to the materials and techniques of both painting and sculpture. It was here that he met and fell in love with his future wife, artist Candice Bohannon. He received awards from the Peter Plotkin foundation, and four years of portfolio based scholarships from the Laguna College. In 2005, Julio received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Laguna College of Art and Design, with a minor in sculpture. Upon graduating, Julio married and threw himself into the artists life. He became a juried member of the California Art Club in both painting and sculpture, participating in their 98th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition. He also received awards from the Art Renewal Center in their ’06 and ’07 salon competitions. His work has been featured in the 2008 December issue of The Artist’s Magazine, where he received high honors in their 25th Annual Portrait Competition. Mr. Reyes has been the subject of numerous published articles highlighting his art and talent. The most recent being the September issue of Southwest Art Magazine’s "21 Artists Under 31 – Young Artists to Collect Now."

Aron’s paintings depict enigmatic figures traversing desolate environments.  Both the people and the places seem familiar, yet oddly out of place.  He says “They are refugees, pilgrims, and wanderers, trying to get to the other side of a river that is forever out of reach.   I think they are answering a call that is not consciously understandable, but resonates somewhere inside them.  It draws them to a place they forgot that they knew about, something like a return to Eden.” 
  The settings of the works do not seem to depict specific places, but rather more archetypal landscapes.  Of this he says, “The word I use is ‘North.’ This is a place where words fail, they freeze in the throat before they can be spoken.  It is still, secret, ancient, unchanging, dark (even in the day), visceral, uncultured, unenlightened, and magical.  It is the place where all myth is enacted.  Yet there is also the intrusion of modernity: bridges and power lines cut through the organic natural forms.  Just like the character’s own natures are subjected to  manufactured notions of identity, to me these landscape elements are very metaphorical of their psychological states.  It is  the in-between quality of the places that appeal to me, which seem appropriate settings for the subject’s personal tragedies and rites of passage to play out.”
  When asked about the open ended aspect of his images, Aron answers, “ I just want to pose interesting questions.  For the answers I rely on the compulsion of the mind to create dreams and fantasies, which will be as varied as the people who see them.” 

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One of the first and most important of the American Impressionist painters, Theodore Robinson was responsible for introducing French Impressionism to many Americans.

He was born in Irasburg, Vermont, in l852 but moved with his family to Wisconsin when he was three. He was a sickly child; an asthmatic condition plagued him throughout his life and was responsible for his premature death at age forty-four.

Upon his return to America, Robinson taught in New York City and Boston, where he did decorative work under John La Farge for both public and private buildings. During this time he also made a number of journeys from the city: to Jamaica, Vermont, Boston and then to Nantucket where he summered with artists Joe Evans and Abbott Thayer and produced a number of paintings of local subjects. By l884, however, he had accumulated enough money to return to his beloved France to paint.

The turning point in Theodore Robinson’s artistic life came when he went to live at Giverny, near Rouen, and met the resident artist there, Claude Monet. Although never Monet’s student, Robinson became part of his inner circle. His colors became softer, his brushstrokes lighter and his paintings more sensitive, although he still retained decisive contours at this time. Like Monet he often painted serially, utilizing the same outdoor scene in different lights. 

A second trip to Italy and a brief return to New York City fall into this Giverny period. Robinson returned to America in l892 seeking to apply his fully developed Impressionist style to American subjects.  A steady stream of artists visited his studio on l4th Street, including many who would become Impressionists as a result of their acquaintance with Robinson’s advanced style. He also renewed his friendship with J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman. He was a frequent visitor to Twachtman’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut and spent long evenings with the Weirs in Branchville, Connecticut, discussing his new discoveries.

His style at this time had evolved closer to Monet’s. The outlines of the forms were hazy and the colors were applied with loosened strokes. But before Robinson could carry this style any further he suffered an acute asthmatic attack and died in New York City in l896.

Theodore Robinson’s work is in the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Terra Museum of American Art, the Georgia Museum of Art and in many other public and private collections.

Ó The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery, LLC and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery ,LLC and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from Spanierman, LLC nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery, LLC.