ARTIST STATEMENT

The Landscape has and will always be important to me. Throughout my childhood, it was a place of escape. Every time I felt a need to flee reality, which as a young artist was often, I would go into the yard, lie on my back and look up at the trees and sky. That feeling of escapism is one that I want to recreate and share with all who view my artwork.

My body of work explores our surrounding landscapes. It is a reflection of my experiences and road trips throughout our beautiful country.

On my journeys, I stop at National and State Parks, I hike, I learn about the location, and I collect my subject matter.  I enjoy creating traditionally based artworks on a grand scale that envelop the viewer. I get satisfaction from the hard manual labor work of relief printing by hand. These hand pulled prints are off multiple relief blocks, cut out of sheets of linoleum that are 36 inches wide and a minimum of 72 inches long. This is the true challenge, working on a grand scale to create one registered image.

Influenced by artist/print-maker Swoon, I want the viewer to feel as though they are physically present within these environments, experiencing a specific attribute of a particular landscape. Too much of our country’s land has been destroyed by construction and over development. Climate change is playing an immense role in our surroundings and is changing the shape of our landscape.

My message is simple, to capture the environment in all of its pure and natural beauty, before it is permanently changed. My goal is to create works that allow the viewer to escape while inspiring them to preserve their precious surroundings.

John William Bailly is a French–American artist born in the UK. He received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University, and has been a Faculty Fellow of the Honors College at Florida International University since 2004. His work explores the random nature of information and the methods we employ we process it. Utilizing juxtapositions of diverse data and multiple historical references, Bailly’s work intends for us to reflect on the manner in which we conceptualize our realities. His works have been exhibited at University of Maine Museum of Art, Patricia and Philip Frost Museum of Art, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Texas State University, as well as other venues in the US and France. He was awarded the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists and a State of Florida Individual Artist Grant. In 2007, Bailly and critically acclaimed poet Richard Blanco produced a collaborative project, Place of Mind.

Merton Clivette (1848-1931) was highly regarded in his lifetime; we hope to rekindle well-deserved interest in his vivid and energetic paintings. A man of many talents, he led a varied career as an acrobat, palmist, juggler, astrologer, reporter, and author before devoting himself to art.  He settled in Greenwich Village in the first decade of the 20^th century where he was known as “The Man in Black,” a sobriquet from his vaudeville days.

A critic at the New York Times wrote that “Clivette was the forerunner of Soutine.” He also presages the abstract expressionist movement of gestural painting that would not blaze in Manhattan until after WWII, and is eerily predictive of the paintings of the English master, Frank Auerbach.

He left home at twelve to join a traveling circus, performing as an acrobat and magician, eventually moving to San Francisco, and briefly Seattle where he worked for newspapers, including the San Francisco Call, as a quick sketch artist. In 1891 he changed his act for the vaudeville stage billing himself as “Clivette, The Man in Black.” With his wife, the former Catherine Parker Chamberlin, he toured the United States and Europe on the Orpheum Circuit.

Around 1907, Clivette gave up his stage career to paint full-time; nearly 60 years old, he was to continue to paint vigorously and prolifically for the remaining 22 years of his life, producing a body of more than a thousand works – oils, temperas, and drawings in his New York studio at #1 Sheridan Square.  Clivette  played a central role in the colorful Bohemian life of Greenwich Village.

ALICE BABER (American 1928-1982)

Baber began her art studies early, studying drawing as an eight-year-old, and taking a college class by age twelve.  After living in Paris for several years, she moved to New York City where she became a member of the March Gallery, a Tenth Street co-operative gallery, with her first one-person show in 1958.  She attended the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York for the first time that year, supporting herself by writing, later becoming art editor of McCall’s magazine.

Baber was in a marriage from 1964-1970 to abstract painter Paul Jenkins; her stain paintings exploring variations of a single color, or in rich combinations of multiple colors, usually using free-form ovals and circles, are different from her husband’s wet-in-wet/ivory palette knife “flow” paintings.

Baber organized exhibitions of women artist, and was a distinguished writer and teacher as well as an artist, serving as artist-in-residence in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico’s Tamarind Institute lithography workshop.  Baber also taught painting at the New School, New York City; University of California at Santa Barbara; and University of California, Berkeley.

Several of her paintings form the nucleus of the Greater Lafayette Museum of Art in Indiana, and in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, the Guild Hall Museum created the Alice Baber Memorial Art Library. Her work is in the collections of major New York City museums: the Guggenheim; the Whitney; the Metropolitan; and MOMA; in Washington, D.C. in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Museum of Women in the Arts.  Other collections include museums in India; England; The Netherlands; Japan; Israel; Austria; and Germany. In California her paintings may be found at LACMA, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. There is an Alice Baber Memorial Art Library in Easthampton, New York, and a collection of paintings in Lafayette, Illinois.

Selected Articles:

James Jones, “The Tragedy of Color,” Studio International, September 1965

Norton T. Dodge, “Alice Baber: Color, Light & Image,” catalog, St. Mary’s City, Maryland, 1977

Ann McCoy, “Alice Baber: Light as Subject,” Art International, September-October 1980

Sylvia Moore, “Alice Baber,” Woman’s Art Journal, Spring-Summer 1982

Alexandra de Lallier, “The Watercolors of Alice Baber,” Woman’s Art Journal, 1982.

Johnny Gotthard Friedlaender (Polish-German 1912-1992)

Johnny Gotthard Friedlaender was born in Pless (Silesia) and his early studies were in Breslau under Otto Mueller. He later moved to Dresden and in 1935 he fled the Nazis by going to Czechoslovakia. In 1937 he moved to the Hague, in Holland, where he first exhibited.

It was not long before he went to live in Paris. During the war he worked in the French resistance, based in the south of France. After the war he returned to live and work in Paris though he paid frequent visits to the United States, where he taught and published some of his most important etchings.  Though a fine abstract painter, he was also one of the most important masters and teachers of colored etching of the post-war years. His techniques influenced S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17 and many others of his contemporaries. The early works, now becoming scarce, were almost figurative and monochrome but by the end of the 1960s had become almost completely abstract, in a colorful, very distinctive and instantly recognizable style. He produced hundreds of etchings and the still incomplete catalogue runs into four volumes.

There have been very many exhibitions world-wide; Friedlaender bequeathed an enormous collection of his prints to the German State.

Albrecht Dürer (German 1471-1528)

As a young boy, Durer started to learn the goldsmith’s craft in his father workshop, however he was more inclined towards painting. Seeing his talent, his father yielded to his son’s wish and the young Albrecht became an apprentice of the painter Michael Wolgemut. After three years of learning, in 1490 he left for his Wanderjahre.

In 1494, Albrecht Dürer returned to Nuremberg, where he married Agnes Frey. In the same year, Dürer was accepted as a member of the painters’ guild of Nuremberg, and in autumn he left for Venice alone. He returned from Italy in the spring of 1495. Between 1496 and 1498, he created the fifteen large woodcuts of the Apocalypse.

Dürer’s father died in 1502, and Durer recorded his last moments, noting that his father died like a Christian, after receiving the Holy Sacrament.

In the second half of 1505, Dürer set out for his second journey to Venice. He could extend his circle of friends, and make himself known beyond the limited society of Nuremberg. Indeed, in Venice for the first time, he was appreciated at his true value, and the society folk of Venice and artists alike were eager to meet him.

The Venetian Senate offered him a pension of two hundred ducats if he would stay in Venice; however, the artist returned to Nuremberg in 1507.

Albrecht Dürer’s biography is hard to trace between 1507-1520, as he did not leave an account regarding his private life in these years. However, the high number of works belonging to this period indicates intense, hard work. It appears that between 1512 and 1516, Durer’s activity as a painter ceased for a time, devoting himself to engravings and woodcuts.

In 1514 Dürer experienced the great sorrow of losing his mother, who died May 17th, after a long and painful illness.

On July 12th, 1520, Dürer set for Netherlands, accompanied by his wife and a maid. He went to Cologne and then to Antwerp, visiting Aix-la-Chapelle, Ghent and Bruges. While in Antwerp, he witnessed the coronation of Emperor of Charles V. During this journey, he made sketches of people, cities, buildings and animals. In the following summer the painter returned to Nuremberg.

In 1525, he published an important scientific work, “The Teaching of Measurements with Rule and Compass.”  In 1526, Dürer created his last great painting, “Four Apostles,” his gift to the City of Nuremberg’s Council. In 1527, he published the “Art of Fortification.”   Another large work, the four-volume “Human Proportions,” was in preparation to be printed when the artist died suddenly on April 6th, 1528.

Albrecht Dürer was mourned by all the great minds of the time; his death was regarded as a huge loss, not only for Germany, but for all Europe and mankind.

Francesco Tironi (circa 1745-1797) was an Italian painter, active in painting vedute of Venice in a Neoclassical style.  Among his works are views of the Riva degli Schiavoni; of a Large Crowd in a Piazza before the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo; of the Isola Santa Maria della Grazia, Venice; and of the Meeting of Pope Pius VI and the Doge on the Island of San Giorgio in Alga.  He also provided the drawings for Antonio Sandi’s twenty-four engravings (1779) of islands in the Venetian Lagoon. Many of the engravings depict thriving communities in islands that are now abandoned and desolate.

The eldest of four sons of William Holl the Elder (c.1771–1838), William the Younger (1807-1871) was taught engraving by his father – at first stipple and later line on steel. The first portrait engraving produced on his own was that of Thomas Cranmer in May 1829 for inclusion in Edmund Lodge’s “Portraits of Illustrious Personages.” He contributed further work to this publication between 1829 and 1835 after artists such as van Loo, Holbein, Van Dyck, Lely, Godfrey Kneller and Daniel Mytens. He was a founder-member of the Chalcographic Society started by several notable engravers in 1830.

Holl also produced portraits for William Jerdan’s National Portrait Gallery (1830–34) and for the 1834 Chambers’s “Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen.” Working with his brother Francis Holl (1815–84), he provided engraved illustrations to Finden’s 1837 “Tableaux of National Character and Gallery of Beauty” of 1841 and to the 1840 edition of “The Land of Burns”. The third brother Charles Holl (c.1810–1882) aided William throughout his career. The youngest brother Benjamin (1808–1884) also achieved notable success as a portrait and figure engraver and later emigrated to the USA.

In the 1840s his major works were engravings after William Powell Frith, illustrating the poems of Thomas Moore “Beauties of Moore” (1840) and scriptural engravings after various artists such as Raphael, Rembrandt, Benjamin West and James Northcote for inclusion in Blackie & Sons’ Imperial Family Bible (1844) and John Kitto’s Gallery of Scripture Engravings (1846–49). He also produced portraits for the Imperial Dictionary (1861) and Thomas Baines’s “Yorkshire Past and Present” (1871–77). We are fortunate to have located a portrait of the preeminent artist, J. M. W. Turner by the artist.

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991)

After graduating from Ohio State University Berenice Abbott moved to New York to study journalism, but eventually decided on sculpture and painting.

In 1921 she moved to Paris to study with sculptor Emile Bourdelle. Abbot also worked with the surrealist photographer, Man Ray (1923-25), before opening her own studio in Paris. She photographed the leading artists in France and had her first exhibition at the Au Sacre du Printemps Gallery in 1926.

Abbott returned to the United States in 1929 and embarked on a project to photograph New York. In 1935 she managed to obtain funding for this venture from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its Federal Art Project. Her view of “New York at Night” is an icon of American photography.

In 1936 Abbott joined with Paul Strand to establish the Photo League. Its initial purpose was to provide the radical press with photographs of trade union activities and political protests. Later the group decided to organize local projects where members concentrated on photographing working class communities.

Abbott’s photographs of New York appeared in the exhibition, Changing New York, at the Museum of the City in 1937. A book, Changing New York, was published in 1939. She is also published a Guide to Better Photography (1941). In the late 1950s she began to take photographs that illustrated the laws of physics. Abbott died in Monson, Maine.

Paul Grimm was born in South America in 1892 and moved with his family to Rochester, New York in 1899. From a young age, he showed promise as an artist, and at 18 won an art scholarship to study at the Royal Academy in Dusseldorf, Germany.

In 1919 he moved to Hollywood and began doing design and advertisiting work, as well as painting backdrops for movie studios, in order to support himself. He settleled in Palm Springs in 1932 and remained a resident there for the rest of his life. He maintained a small studio-gallery in downtown Palm Springs, which became a familiar stop for residents and tourists, and most notably President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Grimm’s early works depict magnificent views of the California landscape, highlighted by dramatic, cloud-filled skies. He painted scenes of the High Sierra, missions, and Indian portraits, but became best-known for Southern California desert landscapes.

Grimm died in Palm Springs on December 30, 1974.

Exhibited: San Diego Expo, 1935.

Works held: Sierra Nevada Museum, Reno; Bank of America, Palm Springs; Palm Springs Post Office.