Painting of the Day, October, 18, 2011

By Donna Poulton

Minverva Beretta Kohlhepp Teichert (1888 – 1976) studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and with Robert Henri at Art Students League in New York City.  At the urging of Henri, she returned to the West to paint “her heritage.”  She married and settled in Cokeville, Wyoming where she painted mural size canvases in the living room of her modest home.

Cowboy Round-up, 1943, oil on canvas, 38 x 71 in., Private Collection

Painting of the Day, October 17, 2011

My works attempt to merge ideas and memories.  Good art functions on many levels.  There is the surface appeal of subject, and below are layers that may be peeled off, revealing information about the individual artist and the psychology of his era.  There's the subject, but there is also the underlying theme. – Gary Ernest Smith

Gary Ernest Smith, Echo Canyon, 2009, oil on linen, 48 x 48 in. Private collection

Gary Ernest Smith was raised on a rural farm in Oregon and received his B.F.A and M.F.A. at Brigham Young University.  Considered a neo-regionalist who was influenced by Grant Wood and also by Maynard Dixon, Smith is nationally recognized artist whose work is in major collections and institutions and is the subject of a book by Donald Hagerty. Smith’s paintings find form in bold assertions of the western landscape, but appeal equally to an eastern audience because they capture a shared nostalgia—a collective memory of our foundation as an agrarian society.  The images tug at our most basic desire to return to an uncomplicated and honest period in time. 

Painting of the Day, October 16, 2011

By Donna Poulton

Harold “Buck” Weaver, Landscape—Cloud Patterns, 1935, oil on canvas, 34 x 36 in., Private Collection. Credit: Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

Many of Buck Weaver’s paintings are suggestive of his training with Maynard Dixon, but Landscape—Cloud Patterns reveals a more modern approach. The strong, vertically wedge-shaped clouds are perpendicular to the natural geometry of the horizontal landscape. The landmasses have been reduced in minimalist terms to their bare essentials, suggesting a breakthrough in his artistry.

This study for Cloud Design is a wonderful example of an artist’s decision making around design, but also around color.  The hues in this study are slightly warmer and less monochromatic.  His decision to limit the colors on his final canvas advanced the drama, clarity, and minimalism of his finished work.  Thank you Logan for submitting this painting by Weaver.

Harold “Buck” Weaver, Study for Cloud Design, Oil, 18 x 20 in. (inscribed to Milford Zornes verso), Collection of Logan Hagege

A Closer Look: Paintings by Connie Borup

By Donna Poulton

"Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, 
we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!" -  Humbert Wolfe

Image courtesy of Connie Borup. Light Touch, 42 x 42 in., oil

Connie Borup’s opening “A Closer Look” offers the viewer 13 large-scale oil paintings and a number of mixed media works.  The images are detailed … an intimate exploration of fall, a season often expressed in literature and poetry, but seldom examined in painting.  Borup’s depictions of fall foliage are not inherently nostalgic, in fact far from it. She avoids the spectacular colors of fall using instead a tonal palette of dry grays, browns and yellows. But the images act as a mainline for deep memories of fall, perhaps because as P.D. James wrote, “It was one of those … autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” 

The exhibition at Phillips Gallery opens on October 21^st and runs through November 11^th, 2011.

Image courtesy of Connie Borup. Crown of Leaves, 42 x 42 in., oil

Image courtesy of Connie Borup. A Good Place to Look, 42 x 42 in., oil

Image courtesy of Connie Borup. Looking Through, 42 x 42 in., oil

Image courtesy of Connie Borup. Leaf Dance, 45 x 52 in., oil

Image courtesy of Connie Borup. Glory, 52 x 40 in., oil

"The Indian Summer, the dead Summer's soul." -  Mary Clemmer, Presence

Birger Sandzén: Ecstasy of Color

By Donna Poulton

Sothebys (on the cover of the most recent New York action catalog) and major museums across the west. A month ago his painting Summer in the Mountains was estimated to sell at between $300,000 and $400,000 at the Santa Fe Art Auction and it sold for $632,500.

Summer in the Mountains. Credit: AskArt

And he is now featured in a new documentary by Josh Hassel titled Sandzén: Ecstasy of Color which aired on the PBS channel in Denver on 2 October 2011.

Sandzén studied in Stockholm, Sweden under Anders Zorn, and in Paris in the Atelier of Edmond-Francois Aman-Jean, who was closely associated with George Seurat.  In 1894 he emigrated to Lindsborg, Kansas to teach art at Bethany College, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. 

In Black Canyon. Credit: PSMuseum.org

By the mid 1920s, his reputation as an artist and as an exceptional teacher was growing and Sandzén was often asked to teach summer school classes in other states such as Colorado, New Mexico, Michigan and Utah.

Colorado Cedars, Manitou, Colorado. Credit: Birger Sandzén Gallery

He wrote “All color in nature is stronger than anything one can possibly have on the palette.  For instance, the shine of the moon-beam or the vividness of the newly opened flower.  There can be no danger of exaggerating nature’s color.” His painting Moonrise in the Canyon, Moab, Utah, reveals the moon rising over the Colorado River with tall spires on either side of the river.  He used short brush strokes for the sky and longer strokes for the rocks and water and analogous colors of red and blue for his palette. 

Moonrise in the Canyon, Moab, Utah. Credit: Donna Poulton and Vern Swanson Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

Whenever Sandzén was asked questions about his work, his answers were always those of a thoughtful and supportive teacher.  Of an artist’s work, he once wrote:

 … that one should be guided in both composition and use of color by the character of the landscape.  There are western motifs out here, especially in a certain light (for example, in gray weather), which are distinguished by their majestic lines as in protruding rocks, rolling prairie and winding ravines.  One should, when painting such motifs, first of all emphasize the rhythm and then sum up the color impression in a few large strokes…the color arrangement, however simple it may be, should support and enforce the lines.  A false arrangement of color may completely destroy the rhythm.  In the atmosphere in which the intensive light vibration and ring of color produce the great power of light, which is often the situation in the dry air of the Southwest—it is clear that a color technique should be used that emphasizes the most characteristic feature of the landscape.  One must then use pure colors which refract each other, but which through distance assimilate for the eye-the so-called “optical” blending—since the usual blending on the palette, the “pigmented blending” is not intensive enough and does not “vibrate.”

Heart Of The Rocky Mountains - Rocky Mountain National Park. Credit: AskArt

In the painting, Hour of Splendor, Bryce Canyon, Utah Sandzén used blue to evoke depth and tones of red and analogous colors to bring the spires forward.  His loaded brush was used to sculpt the surreal landscape of Bryce Canyon. Remembering the desert, Sandzén once wrote “The great romantic wonderland of the Southwest with its rugged primitive grandeur, its scintillating light, its picturesque people.  What a world of beauty waiting for interpretation in story, verse, color and line.”

Hour of Splendor, Bryce Canyon, Utah. Credit: Donna Poulton and Vern Swanson Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts