White and Pink Roses by Henri Fantin-Latour, Private Collection.

A friend of the Impressionists Manet and Bazille, in his early career Fantin-Latour was part of the traditional academic salon. He loosened his brush strokes after he came to know the Impressionists and their techniques.

click on the image to enlarge the paintingOn The Inside Corner
original by Peter Yesis
6"x6"
oil on canvas board
SOLD
I couldn't think of a good name... I started with Baseball No.2 or it could have been: Strike Two or Ball Two or Ball in a Box. But On the Inside Corner was the only one I liked.

I kept this one a little looser than the first, also used thicker paint. I was more interested in the light than I was in the detail. Some of the best practice pieces come when you don't care about detail. They always end up having more feeling to them.

Jewel Box, c. 1900 by Archibald Knox, MoMA, NY.

Knox used Celtic designs as influence for the line of precious metal products he designed for the famous Liberty & Co. department store in London. His line was introduced in 1903.

Oceans of vegetable greens ripple in the wind. The valley that runs from Piru to Santa Paula is a quilt of farms, hemmed in by eucalyptus and poplar trees. Orange groves stop and start varying the view. This painting is a tiny glimpse of the beauty of Piru this spring.

Oil on Linen, 9" X 12"

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“My constitutional nature has presented formidable obstacles to the attainment of that truly desirable character, a consistent and exemplary member of the Religious Society of Friends,” wrote Edward Hicks in his posthumously published Memoirs, “ one of which is an excessive fondness for painting, a trade to which I was brought up, being connected with coach making, and followed the greatest part of my life.” Born April 4, 1780 and reborn around 1800 as a Quaker minister, Hicks continually fought his “fondness for painting,” which he saw as worldly and sinful, “a link in the chain of anti-Christian foibles next to music and dancing.” Hicks found resolution in creating religious images promoting the pacifism of the Society of Friends, most famously the sixty or so works known as The Peaceable Kingdom. The example above (from 1833-1834) not only depicts the words of Chapter 11 of the Book of Isaiah, where the lion lays down with the lamb and a little child leads them, but also shows the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, forming a peace treaty with the local Lenape tribe. In 1999, I saw nearly half of the Peaceable Kingdom paintings all together at an exhibition at the PMA. The sheer repetition of the imagery wore me down a bit, but I wish now that I’d have gone back to look more closely at this unique figure in American art.



Because he painted the words of Isaiah so many times, it’s hard to imagine him painting anything else. Of course, Hicks grew up painting carriages and store signs first as an apprentice and later as the owner of his own business. “I should be a burthen on my family or friends were it not for my knowledge of painting,” Hicks wrote, acknowledging that all his service to the Society of Friends brought him no income. I’m fascinated by Hicks’ Washington at the Delaware (above, from 1849) in how it portrays Hicks’ perception of the heroic George Washington, whose mythology bloomed beyond reason immediately after his death and continued to grow throughout the nineteenth century. Living in the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania, Hicks undoubtedly knew people who had seen Washington in action and perhaps even fought at his side. Characteristically, Hicks shows Washington during a moment of peace, being too much of a pacifist to show the Father of His Country in battle. Hicks’ painting of Washington’s horse is wonderful. After riding horseback for thousands of miles, preaching the Quaker way as far as Canada, Hicks clearly knew every inch of what a horse looked like.



Hicks’ memoirs frustrate for the most part those looking for some glimpse into his painting style. Most of the memoirs deal with his faith, sprinkling disparaging remarks about painting here and there. I’d love to know what was going through Hicks’ mind when he put those human-like features on the animals in some of his Peaceable Kingdom paintings or where he saw some of the more exotic animals gathered in his Noah’s Ark (above, from 1846). Hicks, however, does end his memoirs by evoking the words of Isaiah: “Finally, my friends, farewell! May the melancholy be encouraged and the sanguine quieted; may the phlegmatic be tendered and the choleric humbled; may self be denied and the cross of Christ worn as a daily garment; may his peaceable kingdom for ever be established in the rational, immortal soul; then will be fulfilled the prophetic declaration of the infinitely wise Jehovah, through his evangelical prophet—“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them… Nothing shall hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” How amusing it would be to Hicks that his most lasting legacy of his pacifist faith would be the paintings he saw as a sinful diversion from God’s work.

Into the light

Originally uploaded by .koltregaskes

This was taken on my trip to Hampshire and the New Forest where we found some wonderful donkeys . I was visiting my Aunt who lives with her dog in a mobile home very nearby. The couple in shot are my brother and his girl friend. As you can tell it was cold but you don’t know the half of it - it was really cold. We were having a quick wander around while my Aunt had a rest and over the hill we found a few horses and gusts of winds only normally found in the Arctic, lol.

I took this shot and a closer shot but went with this one. From the original I tried to up the mood and atmosphere here.

Matthias Grunewald, The Isenheim Alterpiece (detail), c. 1510-15, Musee d'Unterlinden, Colmar, France.A shrine with two moveable wings, the Isenheim Altarpiece contains some of the most facinating creatures ever portrayed.

When Max Ernst joined the German army to serve in World War I he felt like his life had ended, writing later that "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914." Born April 2, 1891, Ernst’s rebirth as an artist took place in the wake of the Great War as the madness of a generation’s self-destruction called for the Dadaism and Surrealism that flourished where reason failed. In Pietà or Revolution by Night (above, from 1923), Ernst addresses his father issues by mimicking the familiar image of the pieta, replacing the Virgin Mary with his cold, distant father and Christ with himself as cold, hard marble. A figure resembling Sigmund Freud lurks in the background just to clear up any doubts that a psychodrama’s playing out here.



Ernst learned from every artist he encountered in his travels, from Paul Klee to Giorgio de Chirico. The Elephant Celebes (above, from 1921) pays homage to de Chirico in creating a monstrous machine-elephant set to rumble down the ominous streets of an unpopulated de Chirico town. The Elephant Celebes also confounds nature and technology in a way that anyone intimately familiar with the mechanized murder of World War I would still have nightmares about. Ernst’s Elephant could easily share a surrealist zoo habitat with the bizarre creations of Salvador Dali.



When fascism began to spread across Europe in the run-up to World War II, Ernst responded with Une Semaine de Bonté (one image from which appears above, from 1934), a series of collages made from cutting apart Victorian Era magazines and books and building bizarre images set in deceivingly tranquil, homey situations. Joseph Cornell saw these images and borrowed the technique and the spirit of Ernst for many of his own “boxes.” Ernst himself never found a truly stable home. He left his lover, the artist Leonora Carrington, behind when he fled France after the German occupation of World War II. Once in America, he wed art patron Peggy Guggenheim, only to divorce her and marry fellow surrealist Dorothea Tanning in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner—perhaps the only double wedding in art history. Ernst’s work puzzles me, but in a good way. The instability of his life and his artistic vision match the instability of the world crumbling around him. In his second life, the surreal had truly become the real.

Tuesday Night I am giving a talk and Demo at the Bellevue Artists Association. The talk is about Daily Painters, blogging and selling on Ebay. THe Demo is how I do a typical daily painting practice piece. The speaking part I will work on tomorrow. I have only done this demo /talk thing once before so I need a little practice to help me organize what it is I am going to do.

I thought I would demo how I used to paint when I started my daily painting practice blog.



For those of you who have read this blog for a long time, you may remember how I use to show the set up and the progress shot at the same time. Here's a look at the composition in abstract shapes of light and dark. If it holds your attention here you should be good to go.



I went back to the wipe off method I used for a while. This is fun but I get so much paint on me. I hope they enjoy watching me cover the canvas more than how I cover myself.



Something strange and mystical starting happening to my painting of the pear. I wasn't paying attention to the drawing side of things and didn't notice what was happening until I was finished...



click on the image to enlarge the painting
The Magical Floating Pear original mistake by Peter Yesis
8"x10"
oil on canvas board

The pear looks like it is starting to float away. I was so engrossed in laying in the thick paint I never went back to check the position of the pear. This was a good lesson for tomorrow. Maybe I'll bring it along and show them. You never learn more than when you make a mistake....still, it looks pretty,floating in the air that way.

The perfume of orange blossoms hung heavy throughout the grove. I sat painting in the middle, a small lizard sunning a few feet away and off in the distance I could hear the laughter of strawberry pickers lunching. Thirty plein air painters attended the Ranchos Spring Plein Air Day. The costumed docents welcomed us with hot coffee and pastries, served tortilla soup and an array of salads for lunch, offered tours and posed. The artists were pleased to be so well cared for. I saw some beautiful paintings that were born today, thanks to the loving staff of Rancho Camulos.

Oil on Linen Panel, 8" X 10"

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