May 9, 2012
If there’s one thing you don’t expect from a mega-casino resort on Las Vegas’ famous strip, it’s that there will be an art gallery inside. It’s also fair to say that this is no afterthought – the gallery space was clearly incorporated as part of the design as if whoever was building a gigantic casino and hotel also wanted to make a statement about art. In fact that’s not quite true – the original gallery was sited in the Conservatory area; where the art is now displayed was once an space reserved for CEO Steve Wynn’s personal collection.
The Bellagio opened in 1998 and could perhaps be described as the first mega-casino resort. It’s also possibly the most recognisable Las Vegas casino for those who’ve never been to the city in the desert. It’s famous fountains are recognisable from the closing scenes of Ocean’s Eleven and the aforementioned Conservatory area featured Julia Roberts from the same film.
Other parts of the building also contain some astonishing pieces of art so if you don’t feel ready to pay to get into one of the exhibitions you don’t have to. The lobby ceiling contains an amazing glass sculpture by American artist Dale Chihuly – it consists of 2000 hand-blown glass blossoms which are suspended 18 feet in the air. Chihuly’s work can also be spotted in the Baccarat Lounge, the Conservatory and the Botanical Gardens.
Dale Chihuly's Bellagio Sculpture
Exhibitions are fairly regular at this casino and that’s a statement you don’t hear very often – it’s a little way off but from January next year there will be a Monet exhibition here. Entitled Claude Monet: Impressions of Light, it will feature 20 works by the French Impressionist which will be loaned from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Also on display will be paintings by some of Monet’s contemporaries such as Eugene Louis Boudin, Camille Pissarro and Jean-Baptists-Camille Corot.
Perhaps an art gallery in a casino is not so strange – why should Blackjack and Poker players not appreciate art? Why would those at the Roulette wheel or the Craps table not want to take in a Monet exhibition after some hours gambling? Of course there’s no reason so next time you’re in Vegas check it out, even if you’re preference is something more profitable.
Categories: American Artists, Watercolour Facts.
Tags: bellagio art gallery, casino art gallery, casino gallery, dale chihuly ballagio, las vegas art gallery, monet exhibition, steve wynn
December 8, 2011
John Pike – American Watercolour & Combat Artist
One could argue that John Pike is perhaps one of the United States less well known practitioners of watercolour art; perhaps this was because of his predilection to undertake a huge amount of industry work; advertisements, illustrations and the like. Nothing wrong with that of course, it pays the bills but in the eyes of some purists it can detract from the art for art’s sake mentality that we project onto some painters.
Red Barn
Even Pike’s date of birth appears to be a little sketchy although it seems to have been around 1910 in the United States. He was a student of Charles Hawthorne and Richard Miller in the period in which was learning his trade but in 1933 he headed to Jamaica. It was here that he married and had his only son. He remained in the West Indies for the next five years, working in the advertising industry there, in particular for the rum industry. He also became involved with interior design of nightclubs, theatres and the like.
Following his return to the United States in 1938, he enrolled in the U.S Air Force, completing his pilot training but becoming head of the Combat Art Section, attached to the Engineering Corps. The role of this group was initially to record the United States occupation of Korea in 1945 but in subsequent years he also completed assignments in Columbia, France, Greenland, Japan, Formosa, Ecuador and Germany. It is these paintings which make up the bulk of the collection which can be viewed at the United States Airforce Academy.
Tropical Beach With Palms
Added to this was Pike’s continual work for industry and he undertook contracts for a large number of American institutions such as Equitable Life, Reader’s Digest, Life and Standard Oil. From 1960 to his death in 1979 he ran the John Pike Watercolor School which catered for a variety of students from those wishing to study watercolour techniques for art’s sake to those sent by industry to pick up some advertising tips. By the time of his death he had also exhibited at more than sixty one-man shows.
Categories: American Artists.
Tags: charles hawthorne, combat artist, industry artist, john pike biography, john pike watercolour artist, red barn, richard miller, tropical palms
September 27, 2011
A watercolour painting by the American singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan is expected to fetch at least £30,000 when it goes under the hammer at an auction house in Louth, Lincolnshire, England next month. The watercolour is titled “South Dakota Landscape” and was painted in 2008 as part of Bob Dylan’s Drawn Blank Series.
Auctioneer Alastair McPhie-Meiklejon said: “This is one of the first times a painting such as this has come under the hammer in an auction. Art is a great investment – what you are doing here is buying a painting not only by an artist and musician, but by an icon. We are expecting a lot of interest in the picture, not only on the day, but also online with international bidders. It is a well-painted image and the Dylan exhibitions have always attracted critical acclaim. We are very privileged to have a piece like this come to our auction house. It is more than just a picture, it is an appreciating asset. There is already a sizeable growing interest in the painting.”
The auction will be taking place at the Old Woolmart in Kidgate, Louth on October 11th, and the painting is likely to come up for sale sometime in the afternoon. If you are unable to get there in person on the day, the auction house will be taking phone bids.
Bob Dylan’s reputation as a watercolour artist has been growing over the years. The first public exhibition of his work, ‘The Drawn Blank Series’ opened in October 2007 in Chemnitz, Germany and showcased more than 200 watercolours. From September 2010 until April 2011, the Statens Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark exhibited 40 large-scale acrylic paintings by Dylan, entitled ‘The Brazil Series’.
'South Dakota Landscape' which is expected to fetch at least £30,000
In July 2011, a leading contemporary art gallery, Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan announced their representation of Dylan’s paintings and the exhibit, titled ‘The Asia Series’ opened at the Gagosian last week. This is the first exhibition of Dylan’s paintings in New York City, and features works the rock icon created while in Japan, China, Vietnam and South Korea, presumably while he toured those nations earlier this year. According to the Gagosian Gallery, many of Dylan’s works in ‘The Asia Series’ are “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape,” while others are “cryptic paintings often of personalities and situations.”
Categories: American Artists, Watercolour News.
Tags: bob dylan exhibitions, bob dylan paintings, watercolor, watercolor painting, watercolour, watercolour painting
September 13, 2011
Another founder of the American Watercolor Society, who went on to become it’s president between 1870 and 1873, was William Hart.
Hart was born in Scotland in 1823 but was taken with his younger brother, James (who also became an artist) to America by their parents in 1830. Hart began his career as a carriage and ornamental painter in Troy, New York, and his first artistic experience was in decorating the panels of coaches with landscapes. He also spent time travelling throughout Michigan as a portrait artist before returning to Scotland to study.
By the time he returned to America, Hart had shifted his energy to landscape painting. In 1848, he exhibited his first work at the National Academy of Design where he became an associate member in 1855 and a full member in 1858. In fact he continued to show his paintings there regularly through the mid 1870s. He also exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association and at major exhibitions around the country.
Like most of the major American landscape artists of the time, Hart settled in New York City, where he kept a studio, working out of the 10th Street Studio Building from 1859 to 1870. His mature landscape style embraced the mannerism of the late Hudson River School by emphasizing light and atmosphere and he became particularly adept at depicting angled sunlight and foreground shadow.
However, as strong as Hart’s technical abilities were, he was also known for his prolific and occasionally formulaic paintings of cows. Cattle were a popular motif in Hudson River School art, and nearly every artist included them in at least some of their landscapes but some artists, including William and his brother made a speciality of cow portraits. These paintings, which were very popular with late-19th-century American collectors, typically featured several cattle grazing or watering in the foreground or middle distance with the landscape playing a supporting role.
Hart died at Mount Vernon, New York in 1894 but a collection of over 400 sketches, water colors, and sketch books which were retained en masse from the artist’s studio after his death are now held at the Albany Institute of History & Art.
Categories: American Artists, Watercolour Facts, Watercolour Societies.
Tags: american watercolor artists, american watercolor society, james hart, watercolor artists, watercolour artists, william hart
September 7, 2011
As highlighted in our last post, Samuel Colman was one of the founders of the American Watercolor Society and became it’s first president between 1867 and 1871.
Colman was born in Portland, Maine in 1832 and moved to New York City with his family as a child where his father opened a bookstore. It is thought that the literate clientele that the bookshop attracted is one of the main reasons Colman developed his artistic talent.
He is believed to have studied briefly under the Hudson River school painter, Asher Durand, and he exhibited his first work at the National Academy of Design in 1850. By 1854 he had opened his own New York City studio, and the following year he was elected an associate member of the National Academy, with full membership bestowed to him in 1862.
'Storm King on the Hudson'
His landscape paintings in the 1850s and 1860s were heavily influenced by the Hudson River school – a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose work mainly depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area. Colman is himself probably probably best remembered for his paintings of the Hudson River and one of his best-known works is his ‘Storm King on the Hudson’ (1866), now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Musuem in Washington, DC.
However Colman was also a keen traveller, and many of his works depict scenes from foreign cities and ports. He made his first trip abroad to France and Spain in 1860-61, and returned for a more extensive four-year European tour in the early 1870s in which he spent much time in Mediterranean locales. Colman often depicted the architectural features he encountered on his travels such as cityscapes, castles, bridges, arches, and aqueducts.
Colman’s artistic activities became more diverse late in life. He became skilled at the medium of etching and published popular etchings depicting European scenes. By the 1880s he worked extensively as an interior designer, collaborating with his friend, Louis Comfort Tiffany. He also became a major collector of decorative Asian objects, and wrote two books on geometry and art.
Colman died in New York City on 26 March 1920.
Categories: American Artists, Watercolour Facts, Watercolour Societies.
Tags: american watercolor artists, american watercolor society, samuel colman, storm on the hudson, watercolor artists, watercolour artists
August 22, 2011
The American Watercolor Society (originally known as the American Society of Painters in Water Colors) is a nonprofit membership organisation devoted to the advancement of watercolor painting in the United States.
The organisation was founded in 1866 by a group of eleven artists who met in Gilbert Burling’s studio in the New York University Building and their purpose was singular – to promote the art of watercolor painting in America. Obviously, this was intended as a way of combating the feeling of many artists, as well as non-artists, who viewed watercolor only as a sketching medium.
Minutes of First Meeting - December 5 1866
Among those present were Samuel Colman, who was elected as the Society’s first president, William Hart, William Craig, and Gilbert Burling and one of their first actions was to plan an exhibition, which was held at The National Academy in conjunction with the Academy’s own winter exhibition of 1867-68. The relatively young society profited hugely from the endorsement of the highly respected National Academy and it was the first truly watercolor exhibition in America. It opened on December 21, 1867, and remained open to the public for three months.
Requirements for membership to the Society were rigid, although the number of painters in watercolor was still relatively small. The Society wished to keep the quality of it’s membership high, but many top painters hesitated to join, because women had been allowed membership.
When William Hart, NA, became president of the Society in 1870 there were two categories of membership. They consisted of artists who lived within the city, called “Active Members,” and any others were known as “Associate Members.” This second category consisted of artists not residing in the city, and amateurs i.e. anyone whose major source of income was not based upon sales of their art work. This meant that non-resident artists were in the same category as amateurs. It is possible that this categorisation was based upon the prejudice that anyone living outside New York City could not possibly be as fine an artist as one residing within the city limits.
Categories: American Artists, Watercolour Facts, Watercolour Societies.
Tags: american watercolor artists, american watercolor society, samuel colman, watercolor artists, watercolour artists, william hart
May 10, 2011
It might not be a name you’re familiar with but J.W.S. Cox was an innovative watercolorist who’s claim to fame was ‘inventing’ and exploring the full possibilities of the wet-on-wet watercolor technique; in other words immersing paper in water and painting wet watercolor pigments on to the wet paper, so that the pigments could spread and take on a life of their own with some fascinating results.
So what more can we tell you about this artist? Well, he was born in 1911 in New York and was the son of an architect and his artistic tendencies were evident from an early age. He graduated from Pratt Institute in New York City in 1933 and despite having to work at various jobs during the Great Depression, he still found time to study the works of some of the famous watercolorists at the time including Turner and Cezanne.
In 1936, Cox got his first break when he went to Paris to study at the Academie Colarossie and also with ‘Fauvist’ artist, Othon Friesz, but found this style too sloppy. So in 1938 he returned to Boston and entered the Eliot O’Hara summer classes and by the end of that year, he had illustrated a historical novel ‘Listen for the Voice’. In 1939 he joined the Art Department of Boston University where he taught huge classes of students how to paint in watercolor, and established a studio in Rockport, where he developed his “sponge painting” and palette-knife watercolor techniques.
Wanting to remain “his own man” and not paint commercial pictures, Cox developed a unique and individual style, and despite becoming a member of various societies, including the Boston Watercolor Society and the American Watercolor Society, he shunned publicity and preferred to paint rather than socialise.
In summary, Cox was a ‘Renaissance Man’ and as well as being a great artist and travelling the world painting scenes few had ever seen, he can also be accredited with being a teacher, art school administrator, illustrator and lecturer. He was once quoted as saying his goal was “to present myself and the soul of nature as truthfully and with as much inspiration, vitality and freshness as is possible, through the medium of watercolor.”
He died in Florida of a heart attack in 1982.
Categories: American Artists, Watercolour Facts.
Tags: american watercolor artists, j.w.s. cox, watercolor artists, watercolour artists, wet on wet watercolor technique
April 21, 2011
It won’t have gone unnoticed that the majority of the biographies we have written on this
site are for men. However, there is one female watercolorist, Georgia O’Keeffe, who is one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century and we thought we should find out a bit more about her life and works.
Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887 and she longed to be an artist from an early age. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago between 1905-06 and a year later she went to the Art Students League in New York where she first became aware of modernist art. Even though her student work was well received and she became an award-winning artist at the League, she found it unfulfilling and decided to quit painting to work as a commercial artist.
During the summer of 1915, she began her re-entry into the world of painting when she enrolled at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she stayed until she was offered a teaching position at Columbia College in South Carolina. Between 1916 and 1918, she headed the art department at West Texas State Normal School in Canyon, and it was during this time that she made a handful of charcoal drawings, which she sent to a friend in New York. The friend, Anna Pollitzer, showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and gallery owner who was so enthused with O’Keeffe’s work, that he showed them in his “291 Gallery”.
Within two years, Steiglitz had convinced O’Keeffe to move to New York and devote all of her time to painting and six years later the two would marry. While living in New York, O’Keeffe painted some of her most famous work including a series of New York City skyscraper scenes and her botanical paintings which became a signature part of her work.
It was in 1929 that she first visited the Southwest and it was this trip that would alter the course of her life forever. She returned every summer to New Mexico to paint and when her husband died in 1946, she took up permanent residence there. She settled in Abiquiu and produced the landscape and architectural paintings for which she is best known and have come to represent her unique gift.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, O’Keeffe’s fame continued to grow throughout the world and in 1970 she was categorised by the Whitney Museum of American Art as one of the most important and influencial American painters. She passed away in March 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of 98 but her work remains a prominent part of both the American and international art world to this day.
"Oriental Poppies"
Categories: American Artists.
Tags: american watercolor artists, famous watercolor artists, georgia o'keeffe biography, watercolor, watercolour
March 9, 2011
John Singer Sargent was an American painter by birth right, although he spent most of
his life in Europe. He was the leading portrait artist of his time and throughout his career, he created over 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors.
He was born in Florence, Italy in January 1856 to American parents and spent his early years travelling throughout Europe. In fact, he did not step foot into the States until just before his 21st birthday in order to retain his citizenship.
He received his formal artistic training in France and was therefore influenced greatly by the Impressionist movement. He was initially the ‘darling’ of Paris, however when he was 28 years old, there was a scandal involving one of his paintings, Portrait of Madame X, which received an extremely controversial reception at the Paris Salon of 1884. This ultimately led to Sargent’s failure to build a career as a successful portrait painter in France, and he therefore left Paris and moved to England.
Despite reaching the height of his fame as a portrait artist in England (it was said that to be painted by Sargent was to be painted by the best), he decided to move away from being a portraitist and instead devoted all his time to landscape painting and watercolors.
Sargent painted more than 2,000 watercolors during his career and of many different subjects and landscapes, from the English countryside to Venice to the Middle East and North Africa and Montana, Maine, and Florida in the States. He is particularly noted for the hundreds of watercolors of Venice which he created, many of which were done from the perspective of a gondola. In the Middle East and North Africa, Sargent painted bedouins, fishermen and goatherds and the watercolors he produced in the last decade of his life in Maine and Florida mainly featured fauna, flora, and native people.
He also loved painting his family and friends in watercolors, capturing them relaxing in
brightly lit landscapes or playfully portrayed dressed in Oriental costume.
It is hard to put a label on Sargent as he mastered so many different painting styles. He was an impressionist, a portraitist, a landscape artist and watercolor painter but above all he was simply a great Artist.
Categories: American Artists.
Tags: american watercolor artists, john singer sargent biography, watercolor, watercolour
March 1, 2011
As discussed in our previous post, ‘The history of watercolor painting in the United States’, Winslow Homer is considered to be one of the foremost painters in 19th century 
America and a dominant figure in American art.
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836 and grew up in Cambridge. He had no formal artistic training until he became an apprentice to a lithographer. However he disliked lithography work and instead moved onto become an illustrator. He worked from New York for Harper’s Weekly and between October 1861 and May 1862, he was one of their Civil War illustrators. It was from this period that he gleaned the subject matter that ultimately became some of his most outstanding paintings.
After the Civil War, he traveled and studied in Europe for several years before returning to New York where he lived and worked in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building. Much of his early New York paintings reflected his time in Europe, particularly France and the influence the European Impressionist artists had had over him. It wasn’t until 1873 that he actually began to work with watercolor, but most of his acclaimed works are in fact in that medium.
He stayed in England between 1881 and 1882 in a small fishing village on the North Sea coast and it was here that he began doing scenes which were harsher in tone, such as people struggling heroically in landscape and his work here was almost exclusively in watercolor.
After his trip to England, he returned to the States and settled permanently in the secluded area of Prout’s Neck on the coast of Maine, where he liked the solitude and the similarity of this coastline to that he had experienced in England. At Prout’s Neck, he was able to indulge his love of the sea and the coast, and the peace and serenity of the Maine Coast dominated his later work, in contrast to the horror of the Civil War which was captured in his early work.
Homer never married and in the main lived a highly secluded but content life. He died on September 29, 1910.
Categories: American Artists.
Tags: american watercolor artists, watercolor, watercolour artists, winslow homer biography
February 23, 2011
The earliest watercolor paintings known to have been produced in America were around the 1560′s when artists began to create visual documentation of the “new world” for European explorers to take back to the “old world”.
Mark Catesby was one of the first artists who documented hundreds of different species
of American plant and bird life through his hand-colored prints. Catesby’s work was the forerunner for the popular depictions of American wildlife by John James Audubon who devoted himself to recording this aspect of the North American continent in a style which has been seldom equaled in any other medium.
However, watercolor painting did not become really popular in the United States until the late nineteenth century. Up until this time, American artists had worked in the shadow of their European counterparts but the gradual emergence of skilled and talented artists like Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), Winslow Homer (1836-1910) and James A. M. Whistler (1834-1903) began to challenge European artists.
By 1866, the interest in this medium was so popular that the American Society of Painters in Water Color (now the American Watercolor Society) was founded and for the first time, watercolors were shown in galleries in the United States alongside oil paintings.
Although Americans inherited their techniques from the English artists, they were
interested in experimenting with watercolor in their own way which led to the creation of works which were extremely individual and less rigid than the traditional English work. The American school exploded with an abundance of important figures between the 1870′s and the early twentieth century, including John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), John Marin (1870-1953) and Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924). Since there was no particular style of watercolor, each artist represented a unique approach to the medium.
During the 1940′s, artistic experimentation continued to be a major focus, particularly in the New York art scene and this resulted in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Unfortunately, watercolor therefore began to lose a certain amount of its popularity because they were small and intimate in scale and did not play a role in the huge canvasses of the Abstract Expressionists.
Categories: American Artists, Watercolour Facts.
Tags: american, american watercolor artists, watercolor, watercolour