More Frank Duveneck Studies

Frank Duveneck (1848-1919) was an American painter who was influential in certain circles in the late 1800s. I wrote here about illustrator Greg Manchess being influenced by Duveneck's method of making studies for final paintings. The Wikipedia entry on Duveneck is here and a site devoted to him is here.

As with most artists' studies, Deveneck's seem to have been dashed off fairly quickly, though some have evidence of greater effort. The latter make use of a "square brush" technique whereby each brush stroke can (and often does) indicate a plane of the subject. Manchess tends to use a square brush style, so it was Duveneck's similar handling that served as inspiration.

Below are some examples from Duveneck.

Gallery

Guard of the Harem - study - 1879
This is on display at San Francisco's de Young museum. The subject's body and clothing are depicted loosely, but the face receives a careful square brush treatment.

The Music Master - 1879
Hardly any square brushwork here.

Seated nude - c.1879
But more here, especially on the subject's face and left arm.

Elizabeth Boott - study - 1886
Despite her father's disapproval, Boott wanted to marry Duveneck, and they did. The title (which might not be a formal one) suggests this was painted before they were wed.

Elizabeth Boott Duveneck - 1888
Here is Duveneck's portrait of his wife, completed around the time she died. An account of Deveneck and Boott's relationship is here. Note that square brushwork is not evident in this finshed work.

Karl Albert Buehr's Ladies and Parasols

According to this account, it seems that Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952) was a successful Chicago area artist and teacher (at the Art Institute), one I hadn't heard of until recently.

He was born in Germany and emigrated to America as a teenager with his family. He later spent time in the Giverny, France artist colony near where Claude Monet lived. So Buehr was Impressionist-influenced, but his non-landscape paintings were of the American version of Impressionism that featured stronger drawing than the classical French style of Monet.

Sometime around when he was in Giverny, Buehr did a number of paintings of young women that included brightly colored, Japanese inspired parasols. Here are a few:

Gallery

Red-Headed Girl with Parasol - c.1912

In Repose - c.1915

Picnic on the Grass

Under the Parasol

Woman with Parasol

Painting One Area at a Time

My readings in the How To Paint genre usually advise that a painting should be worked up as a whole rather than completed area by area. The concept is that balance can be maintained regarding colors and values (degree of dark-light).

This seems to make sense, but not all artists follow the advice, portrait painters in particular. I suppose that they think it's best to make sure that a likeness is captured. Once that is accomplished, then the remainder of the painting can be completed. The alternative would be to risk spending too much time on an overall workup and then failing to achieve the likeness.

Here are some examples of development by area.

Gallery

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson - Napoleon

Sir Thomas Lawrence - unfinished portrait

George Romney - unfinished portrait

Nancy Guzik at an early stage of painting a portrait

Boris Vallejo - illustration in progress
Vellejo is a well-known fantasy - science fiction illustrator. I'm not sure about his present practices, but 30 years ago when the above image was created, he would paint from background to foreground. The main subjects would be painted by section in a systematic manner.

Mel Ramos - Unfinished Painting #5 - 1992
Ramos usually likes to have a little fun. In the early 90s he made a series of paintings titled "Unfinished Painting" wherein outlines and a little shading were introduced to create an mostly monochrome image that was supplemented around the subject's face by a full-color treatment.

The Gallery Scene

I really should devote more time to the gallery scene, but for some reason I get inhibited because I am not at all a buyer of serious art and don't want the sales people to get their hopes up. Nevertheless, I'm trying to shed this hangup. In March I actually did manage to prowl through some of the galleries along El Paseo in Palm Desert, California while my wife was in Indian Wells watching the tennis tournament. And a while ago I visited and wrote about my favorite Santa Barbara, California gallery.

El Paseo galleries run the painting gamut from modernist to semi-schlocky to traditional. As of early 2013, my favorite of the lot is the SR Brennen gallery that was displaying some works by contemporary artists that I'd previously viewed in art magazines and on Web sites. So I got a real treat.

Here are a few of the paintings I saw. The images are from the SR Brennen site linked in the previous paragraph.

Gallery

Daniel Greene: "Antiques Dealer with Folk Art"
Greene is a true veteran, pushing 80 years old, but still doing fine work. Some information about him is here.

Adrian Gottlieb: "Anticiaption"
Gottlieb, on the other hand, is under 40 and well launched on his career. Here is a post dealing with his technique at Matthew D. Innis' outstanding Underpaintings blog.

Steve Hanks: "Classical Elegance"
Hanks is a brave soul who works mostly in water-based media, though the results seem as solidly done as if they were in oil. Information about Hanks is here.

Nelson Shanks: "Salome"
I previously posted Shanks' "Salome" here, and plan to write more about him soon. For those interested in learning more about him click here.

Separated at Birth: Hudson Step-Down and Jaguar XJ

My e-book on automobile styling argues that there hasn't been much evolution in the appearance of sedans since about 1950. Yes, technology has improved in terms of metal stamping, autoglass forming, headlamp structure and other fields related to how cars look. And there has been increased attention since the early 1980s regarding improved aerodynamic efficiency as a means of reducing fuel consumption. But the dominant factor is fashion. Automobile styling fashions come, go, and occasionally return.

A case regarding the return of a style is the design of the current Jaguar XJ model. It took me a while to make the connection, but it finally dawned on me that the XJ can be considered a modern version of the "step-down" Hudson of the 1948-1954 model years.

Let's take a look:

Here are the cars in profile, the XJ above, the Hudson below.

And here are rear 3/4 views that offer more information on the treatment of the "greenhouse" -- styling jargon for the glassed-in top part of a car.

Both designs might be called "almost-fastback," where the top gradually curves downward and meets the lower body slightly in front of the back of the car. Both designs use a "six-window" treatment, each door having a window plus a window placed to the rear of the rear door. (A "four-window" style has only door windows.)

True, there are differences in appearance. The XJ makes plenty of use of technological refinements and wind tunnel testing, but the most visible difference is that its rear wheels are exposed, whereas the Hudson's are skirted. Nevertheless, the cars separated by the Atlantic Ocean and 60 years are conceptually similar in terms of basic shape.

Up Close: Saul Tepper

This is part of an occasional series dealing with detail images of paintings featuring the brushwork of the artist. Previous posts can be found via the "Up close" topic label link on the sidebar.

The present post deals with Saul Tepper (1899-1987), a leading illustrator from the 1920s into the 1950s. Additional information on Tepper plus a number of his illustrations can be found here.

Featured here is a painting that clearly seems to be an illustration. But so far, the Kelly Collection people (see below) do not have the date it was painted, nor is it known if it was ever used in a publication.

The source of the detail images is explained below:

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The Kelly Collection has what is probably the outstanding holding of American illustration art by private individuals (not organizations). I was able to view part of it at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California towards the end of a January 12 - March 31, 2013 exhibition run. The collection concentrates on illustration art created roughly 1890-1935 and one of its purposes is to further knowledge and appreciation of illustration from that era.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took a large number of high-resolution photos of segments of those original works. This was to reference the artists' techniques in a manner not always easy to obtain from printed reproductions. (However, the exhibition catalog does feature a few large-scale detail reproductions.)

I thought that readers of this blog might also be interested in seeing the brushwork of master illustrators up close to increase their understanding of how the artists worked and perhaps to serve as inspiration for their own painting if they too are artists.

Below is an image of the entire illustration coupled with my work. Click on the latter to enlarge.

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This image is from the Kelly Collection website.

I prefer other Teppers in the Kelly Collection (see here), but this and another one that I liked even less were what got exhibited. Still, the detail image shows Tepper's style from his heyday as an illustrator. Along with the likes of Mead Schaeffer, Dean Cornwell, Harvey Dunn and other illustrators treated in this series, Tepper painted his oils thickly (impasto) and used strong brushwork. He was also something of a colorist: note the touches of green on the girl's skin in shaped areas.

Guy Rose: Impressionism from Giverny to Laguna

Guy Orlando Rose (1867-1925) was essentially an Impressionist. In America, he is known as a California Impressionist, but he spent about a third of his professional life in France, many of those years at the artist colony around Giverny, home to prototypical French Impressionist Claude Monet.

Certain oil paints are known to provoke lead poisoning, and Rose was particularly susceptible. Diagnosed in his late 20s, he dropped painting for illustration for a while but returned to oils. He eventually suffered a stroke and died a few years later. I have no idea if the stroke was related in any way to lead poisoning.

A brief Wikipedia biography of Rose is here. A slightly more informative one from a museum specializing in California Impressionism is here. There are also books dealing with Rose himself as well as California Impressionism.

Aside from growing up in California, Rose spend comparatively little time in the state. Nevertheless, he created a number of fine plein-air paintings of its coast and a few of its mountains.

Gallery

The Potato Gatherers - 1891
When Rose painted this he seems to have been influenced by Bastien-Lepage rather than the Impressionists.

The Poppy Field - c.1910
Claude Monet painted poppy fields, and so did Rose.

The Bridge at Vernon - c.1910
Giverny fans know that Vernon is the first sizable town downriver on the Seine from Giverny, and a convenient point to get to the south bank.

The Blue Kimono - 1909
Monet and many others were entranced by Japan.

From the Dining Room Window - c.1910
I find this interesting because the interior is painted in a crisp style, and the bit shown outside the window is Impressionist.

Carmel Valley
This is pretty much what the valley still looks like, though a dotting of houses is now evident.

Carmel Coast - c.1919
Hmm. 1919. That's the year that the Pebble Beach Golf Links was established. On that distant shore, approximately.

Laguna
Compared to the Carmel area, Laguna now has buildings covering several of its hills. When Rose painted this, the place was an artist colony.

San Gabriel Road

San Gabriel Mission
Scenes from where Rose was born and raised.

Marguerite - c.1918
One of his later portraits. This and some of the other California paintings indicate a drift from French to American Impressionism with its greater focus on drawing and solidity of subject matter.