William Paxton is one of America’s most important figurative painters. Along with his colleagues Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson, they were key members of the Boston School of painting, which flourished during the first quarter of this century. Known for his descriptive paintings of the leisure class, Paxton placed his graceful figures in settings rich in texture and color. He approached them with the gifts of a true draftsman and instinctive colorist. His taste in color was singular and developed by much thought and observation. He delighted in blues and lavenders, orchid pinks and citron yellows. His deliberate use of color produced the most tactile and supple depictions of flesh tone in both his portraits and especially in his nudes.

Born in San Francisco, California, Robert Aitken first started painting as a pupil of Arthur Mathews and Douglas Tilden at the Mark Hopkins Institute. By the time he was eighteen, he had his own studio. In 1897, he studied briefly in Paris, where influences turned him to sculpture.

He taught at the Hopkins Institute until 1904 and won some of the premier sculpture commissions including monuments to the Navy and to President McKinley in Golden Gate Park. In 1904, he returned to Paris for three more years and then settled in New York City where he was a long-time teacher at the National Academy of Design.

Born in Baltimore in 1848, Hugh Bolton Jones attended the Maryland Institute and later worked in the studio of Horace Wolcott Robbins and Carey Smith in New York City. In 1876, Jones and his younger artist brother, Francis Coates Jones, traveled in Europe, studied briefly at the Academie Julien and spent time in London, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and North Africa. However, Jones spent most of his time at Pont Aven in Brittany painting plein air in the Barbizon manner. He completed landscapes that often included picturesque architecture and French peasants. Jones may have been attracted to this provincial village by Baltimore acquaintance, Thomas Hovenden, who was working there at the time.

Unlike many of the American painters who went to Europe for their training, Hugh Bolton Jones, was already an accomplished landscapist in Baltimore and well known in New York City when he went abroad in 1876. Upon his return, Jones divided his time between New York City and Baltimore. He also kept a cottage in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts where he spent most of his summers. His landscapes were widely exhibited in the United States and important collectors such as Thomas B. Clarke and W. T. Walters of Baltimore owned his paintings.

He exhibited and was an Associate at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Brooklyn Art Association, the Boston Art Club and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (after only two years of study). While in Europe his works were shown in the Salon of 1878 in Paris, the Royal Academy (1880) and the Suffolk Street Gallery in London.

Born on December 31, 1912 in Newark, New Jersey, from an early age Beatrice Mandelman was determined to be an artist. At age 12, she began taking classes at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. In the 1930s, she attended Rutgers University, the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and the Art Students League in New York City.

In 1935 Mandelman was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), first as a muralist and then as a printmaker with the Graphic Division of the New York Project. One of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit under Anthony Velonis, Mandelman worked in the WPA until 1942, when it was disbanded.

During this period she was associated with numerous New York School artists including Louis Lozowick, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Stuart Davis. By 1941, Mandelman’s works were included in important exhibitions at the Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In 1942 Mandelman married Louis Ribak and in 1944, they traveled to Santa Fe to visit Ribak’s teacher and mentor, the artist John Sloan, who’d recommended the climate and atmosphere. Finding Santa Fe congested, they took the train along the Rio Grande and a stagecoach up to Taos and decided to settle there. An impulsive and inspired move, it was a decision that would effectively remove them from the art world’s mainstream. In 1944 Taos was a well-known art community, but there were no galleries exhibiting modern art. A new influx of artists from New York and California during the late 40s and 50s would change this. A group of these artists, including Mandelman and Ribak, Ed Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn, would become known as the “Taos Moderns”.

Mandelman was an intensely dedicated painter. In the relative isolation of Northern New Mexico she found the freedom to develop a style that was distinctly her own. Inspired by the light, the local color, the landscape and the confluence of diverse cultures in Taos, her work flourished.

Through out her lifetime, together with Ribak and after his death in 1979, Mandelman was adventurous and profoundly curious about art and life and culture. She loved to travel and drew inspiration from it. Over the years she lived for extended periods in Mexico and traveled extensively in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Beatrice Mandelman died on June 25th, 1998 in her home in Taos. In the last months of her life, she produced the thirty-one works in the Winter series. Over the span of seven decades, Beatrice Mandelman produced a body of work consisting of hundreds of paintings, prints, collages, and works on paper.

Link to images on the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation website

Herb Jackson has had over a hundred one-person exhibitions in the U.S. and in England, Peru, Portugal and Canada. His work has been featured in group exhibitions throughout this country and abroad. Critic, Donald Kuspit, included Herb Jackson’s paintings in the first exhibition of contemporary American art presented in the former Soviet Union. His work is in over eighty museum collections.

In 1999, Herb Jackson was given the North Carolina Award by the governor. This is the highest civilian honor bestowed by the state.

Herb Jackson’s paintings are built up in many layers which are scraped off as they are being applied. Shapes and marks come and go as the painting develops to a hundred or more layers. The final outcome is the result of a process of discovery similar to the life experience itself.

by David Levi Strauss

One of the things I miss most about living on the plains is the way that landscape looks at high speed. Landscape and driving fast came to me together, as a package. What surrounded me growing up in Chapman, Kansas was land-measured by the acre, section, and man-hour-but not landscape. For that we had to get out on Old Highway 40 or Interstate 70 and drive. Dwight Eisenhower thought he was building the Interstate for wartime mobility, but everyone used it to get to a view. Thousands of pilgrims drove past Chapman every summer on their way to a view of the Rocky Mountains. Kansas itself was considered viewless-a vast monotony one had to endure on the way to a clarifying, uplifting view in Colorado and points West. Before it became fly-over country, Kansas was drive-through land, and the landscape one saw at 70 miles an hour was transitional, peripheral, and as ephemeral as a heat wave.

So what does one see in passing? Colors, stretched to their limits and blended; an undulating horizon; trees and telephone poles in rhythmic punctuation; the inarticulate sensuous presence of shapes in space. These are the actual effects of landscape in the fluidity of human vision. But in the history of photography, speed and landscape have generally been posed as antagonists. The impression of duration is defeated by photographic instantaneity, and that has tended to be the point. Photographic landscape is supposed to be timeless.

Of course, the visual/mental convention that says photographs are more real than paintings or drawings ignores the fact that in reality time does not stand still. We don’t see landscapes the way they look in Ansel Adams’ photographs, but neither do we see arrested blur. The blur in a photograph is not movement, but the representation of movement, the visual equivalent of an allusion to the way we see things in passing. And the illusion of movement, really of acceleration, is arguably the defining sensation of our time. Though we have precious little clarity about where we are headed, we all know we are rushing faster and faster on, and this precipitation determines what we see and how.

Gunnar Plake’s landscapes make indirect reference to the experience of seeing things in passing. Camera-shake alludes to the movement of head and body, making the visual effects in these images familiar to our eyes, even when they also allude to patterns of flow we don’t ordinarily see. Without fixing the attention of the beholder on any one point in particular, a rush of color and light is conveyed. This is an anti-focal art of diffusion and diffraction. A certain sublimity arises from being able to regard these effects over time, in this arrested state. The textures of frosted branches in a Yosemite copse or the salmon strokes into an azure Lake Powell are not visually foreign, but seeing them this way is. Those blended bands of blue sky and sea, purple and peach striated hills, and opaque jade green earth in Drake’s Bay are recognizable distillations, while the light lambent on Hidden Cliffs describes a temporal geology we are surprised to see fixed. At their best, these images trace the transformations light in motion makes on spatial volumes with a light touch, from those feathered white cliffs in Kodachrome Basin to the inscrutable mass and aura of Potato Ridge, and manage to avoid a predictable impressionism.

Plake’s images are less about Nature than about the nature of images. In this they resemble the photographs of Gerhard Richter. No contemporary artist has plumbed the relation between photography and painting as deeply as Richter has. For some time now he has described his paintings as “photographs which have simply been produced using a different means.”
In response to a question about his motivations, Richter said “I had nothing against describing my perception of landscape as nostalgia. Yet that is an imprecise term; it means a yearning reaching into the past for what has been lost, and that makes no sense. Why should I reach backwards if something is present in the Here and Now. . . .” When he began in the 1960s to make paintings based on his landscape photographs, he avoided the terms of photo-realism through lack of focus and blur caused by camera-shake.
This blurring of detail, which is usually described as “painterly,” is in fact purely photographic. The photograph, that more or less permanent image formed by the action of light falling on a sensitive surface, is utterly changed when the sensitive surface moves during the exposure, causing an interruption of the image. This break seems timely. There was a time when we saw things more clearly, but now we are in a hurry. Vision has become peripheral, at best, and a lot of what we see is blurred. The actual horizon recedes as virtual images proliferate. Certainly Plake’s indecisive moments are more appropriate to our present alienation from nature than any f64 sharp-at-the-corners image. In The World Viewed, the philosopher Stanley Cavell wrote: “Perhaps what we must be faithful to is our knowledge that distance from nature is no longer represented by perspective, which places us in relation to it, places nature before or away from us, and falsifies our knowledge that we are lost to nature, are absent from it, cannot face it. Then, upon such unpromising ground, an art that reveals without representation may give us perspective.” Beauty is no more temporary than the world is, but it may occur (and be apprehended) at different speeds.

David Levi Strauss is a writer and critic in New York. His recent books include monographs on photographers Miguel Rio Branco, from Aperture, and Francesca Woodman, from Scalo, a book on the Rwanda projects of Alfredo Jaar, Let There Be Light, from Actar in Barcelona, and Broken Wings: The Legacy of Landmines, a collaboration with the photographer Bobby Neel Adams.

Selected Collections
Adirondack Museum – Blue Mountain Lake, New York
American Craft Museum – New York, New York
American Financial Corporation – Cincinnati, Ohio,
Amoco Corporation – Chicago, Illinois,
ANA Hotel – Tokyo, Japan,
AT&T – Chicago, Illinois,
Bank of Tokyo – New York, New York,
Bastion Industries – New York, New York,
BMC Software – Houston, Texas,
Bohlke Veneer Corporation – Fairfield, Ohio,
Brown Forman Corporation – Louisville, Kentucky,
Burlington Northern Railroad – Fort Worth, Texas,
Champlin Oil Corporation – Fort Worth, Texas,
Chester B. Stem Incorporated – New Albany, Indiana,
Cornerstone Holdings Corporation – Aspen, Colorado,
Crown Associates Realty Incorporated – Beverly Hills,California,
Danis Industries – Dayton, Ohio
Duke University – Durham, North Carolina
Empire Capital Corporation – Southport, Connecticut
Ensign Bickford Industries – Simsbury, Connecticut
Fuqua Industries – Atlanta, Georgia
Ideal Textile Company – Los Angeles, California
International Woodworking Fair – Norcross, Georgia
Gary Kaplan & Associates – Los Angeles, California
Kimble International – Jasper, Indiana
Louisville Courier Journal & Times – Louisville, Kentucky
Midwest Woodworking Company – Cincinnati, Ohio
National City Bank – Marion, Ohio
National Reinsurance Corporation – Stamford, Connecticut
Northern Natural Gas Company – Omaha, Nebraska
Norton Simon Collection – New York, New York
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines – Oslo, Norway
Prime Holding Company – Austin, Texas
Seamless Technologies Incorporated – Morristown, New Jersey
Seemac Incorporated – Carmel, Indiana
Seven Bridges Foundation – Greenwich, Connecticut
Shipman Goodwin – Hartford, Connecticut
Southwest Psychiatric Associates – Torrance, California
Sperry Corporation – New York, New York
Takasago International – Rockleigh, New Jersey
Tropel Corporation – Fairport, New York
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, Michigan
Valley National Bank – McAllen, Texas
Victor Wire & Cable – Los Angeles, California
Wigand Corporation – Dallas, Texas

Selected Publications
American Art Collector Magazine, December 2005
Math Horizons Magazine, November 2001
Fragments of Infinity, Ivars Peterson, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., September 2001
The Mathematical Intelligencer Magazine, Fall 2000
Math Horizons Magazine, April 2000
Design Journal Magazine, June 1999
Forbes FYI Magazine, September 1997
Interior Design Magazine, June 1997
What Is Mathematics, Really?, Ruben Hersh, Oxford University Press, 1997
American Woodworker Magazine, March/April 1997
Design Book Seven, Taunton Press, 1996
Woodshop News, June 1996
Landscape Design Magazine, February 1993
Fine Woodworking Magazine, July/August 1991
California Art Review, 1989
Discover Art, Laura Chapman, Davis Publications, 1985
Adirondack Life Magazine, Sept/Oct 1983
Wood working, The New Wave, Donna Meilach, Crown Publishers, 1981
Newsday Magazine, July 1980
New York Magazine, June 1979
Plywood and Panel Magazine, September 1978
Furniture Design and Manufacturing Magazine, September 1978

Product Design
United States Patents issued:
#5,845,979 (1998)
#5,649,751 (1997)

Born in Oswego, New York, James Gale Tyler began painting at the age of fifteen. Fascinated by the sea and its vessels, he moved to New York City where he studied briefly under the marine painter, Archibald Cary Smith. The tutelage was the only formal training Tyler ever received, yet he went on to become one of the most notable marine painters and illustrators of his day.

During his lifetime and after, James Tyler’s marine paintings were greatly sought after by collectors. In fact, his works were so popular that they were forged even during his lifetime. In 1918 more than 100 works falsely carried his name. Luckily he successfully pursued several civil action suits to protect his work.

Tyler lived most of his life in Greenwich, Connecticut but also maintained studios in New York City from 1882 through 1899 and in Providence in the mid 1880’s. Later in his career, Tyler would travel each year from 1900 to 1930 to Newport, Rhode Island where he would paint pictures of the America’s Cup Race. Many of these works were commissioned; the remainder were widely exhibited and critically acclaimed. He also capitalized on the money to be made through magazine illustrations, and was a regular contributing writer and illustrator for some major publications of the time, including Harper’s, Century, and Literary Digest.

It was in France, where Martha Walter established herself as a plein air Impressionist of the first rank.  For Martha Walter, like may young artists at the turn of the century, an opportunity to study abroad was the next and most vital step in an artistic career.  At the insistence of her teacher William Merritt Chase, Walter entered and won the Cresson traveling scholarship.  In 1903, courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, she traveled to Paris to begin classes at the Academie Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Julian.  Walter soon found the rigid academic institutions rather stifling to her natural talents.  Her French teachers saw in her, as did Chase, an innate ability and naturalness that would only be inhibited by academic reins.  With her teachers’ blessing she was granted a special dispensation and allowed to pursue her studies out of doors in the French Countryside.  Walters was soon sharing a studio with several other young American women and would remain in France until the outbreak of World War One, producing many of her most important works in her very independent and unique Impressionist style.

 

Martha Walters returned to the United States at the outset of World War I and gravitated to the artist colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  Few artist colonies can equal the concentration of talent that passed through Gloucester during the early decades of the 20th century.  The list of artists gravitating to this charming New England fishing village represents a roster of the most gifted American Impressionists working in the United States.  She would return there frequently for the rest of her life.

George Clare lived and died in Barnet, Hertfordshire ‑ although it is known that he spent some time (during the 1860’s) in Birmingham ‑ evidenced by the fact that his address is given as 173, Bristol Street, Birmingham for the paintings he exhibited during the 1860’s.  As to George’s artistic training, one is not sure, however, his technique ‑ a delicate stippling ‑ is derived from William Hunt. 

 

Through his stippling technique, Clare was able to capture the beauty of nature ‑ giving life and individualize each aspect of the painting.

 

George exhibited his first works in 1864 ‑ exhibiting at the Royal Academy #356 Plums, etc.; the British Institution ‑ #395 Came­llia, etc. and at the Royal Society of British Artists ‑ #410 Grapes, plums, etc. and #741 Camellias &c.. He would continue to exhibit his works till 1874.

 

Two of George’s sons ‑ Oliver and Vincent ‑ were also artists and became quite famous for their still life and flower paintings.

 

 

References:

 

Johnson, J., The Royal Society of British Artists: 1824 – 1893, Antique

   Collectors Club, 1975, pgs. 87-88.

Johnson, J. & Greutzner, A., The Dictionary of British Artists: 1880-1940,

   Antique Collectors Club, 1976, pg. 107.

Maas, Jeremy, Victorian Painters, Barrie & Rockleff, The Cresset Press,

   London, 1969, pg. 173.

Mitchell, Peter, Great Flower Painters: Four Centuries of Floral Art, George

   Rainbird, Ltd., London, 1973, pg. 89-90 (ill).

Pavière, Sydney H., A Dictionary of Flower, Fruit, and Still Life Painters, F. Lewis,

   Ltd., England, 1964, pg. 29 (ill.).

Waters, Grant M., Dictionary of British Artists Working 1900 – 1950,

   Eastbour­ne Fine Art Publishers, England, 1975, pgs. 65-66.

Wood, Christopher, The Dictionary of Victorian Painters, Antique Collec­tors Club,

   England, 1978, pg. 91 (ill).