A Gallagher Moment

October 12, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
By Lisa N. Peters

In the middle of our last 8 am (groan) staff meeting, Ira Spanierman, who was conducting the meeting, rose from his chair mid-sentence. Looking toward the wall of the gallery to his left, he seemed elsewhere for a moment, and then said: “THAT is a really beautiful watercolor!” Even though Sears Gallagher’sPine Trees and Coastline, Monhegan, Maine has been in our inventory for a while, and even though hundreds of watercolors have passed through the gallery over the years, this one struck a nerve for Ira. It was as if he was seeing it for the first time and in doing so momentarily left the work day behind to imagine being in this peaceful natural place. Those of us who could crane our necks to see this image felt similarly.

What I think Gallagher caught in this watercolor, and in others, is a sense of places and times when being in nature is comfortable, calming, and pleasurable. Here we can imagine coming out of a thick woods to an open sunlit ledge, with grooves perfect for sitting and relaxing. There is just the right level of warmth: the temperature is not too hot, the sunlight not too bright. Pine trees rising in front of us provide shelter and imply safety from the steep drop to the water’s edge, but instead of blocking our view, their forms are spare and leafy enough that we can see through and around them to the sea. The composition probably prompted Ira’s comment also. The vertical arrangement is a golden section, with the trees measuring approximately double the height of the rocky ridge. The scene’s feeling of harmony evokes the truth of Pythagoras’s “music of the spheres.”
Gallagher’s handling is varied, moving between broad translucent washes and tighter, Impressionist dabs. The seeming effortlessness of his method matches the expression of satisfaction in the outdoor life that I believe was what he was after in his art. (There must have been a reason, after all, that he spent “50 summers” on Monhegan Island.)
It would be interesting to compare one of Gallagher’s Monhegan watercolors with one of Edward Hopper’s, created at the same time, to consider how the artists’ visions of life translated into the way they saw and depicted the world around them. Whereas Hopper’s images so often have a subtle uneasiness, Sears Gallagher’s so often have a subtle sense of ease.
Posted in Notable Paintings. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

John Whorf Watercolors

October 5, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC

By Lisa N. Peters

What strikes me in looking at the watercolors of John Whorf, featured in our current show of five American watercolorists, is a feeling that I’d like to be in the places that Whorf painted and that this might actually be possible!
 
Although Whorf depicted many of the same types of subjects as those of Winslow Homer and Frank Benson in their own watercolors, what stands out as distinctive in Whorf’s work is the sense that the experiences he shows us are accessible ones. Large expanses often open up before us within his frames, yet there is always a point of reference from which to look out and see through the artist’s eyes.

Rather than statements of artistic dexterity (although he was dexterous) or poetic rumination (and there is certainly poetry in his sensitivity to light in particular), what appears to have interested Whorf time after time were those moments when, in the course of doing something active or sportive in the outdoors, we are struck with a sudden sense of amazement at just how beautiful nature is—it’s as if we hadn’t noticed what is around us because we are too busy, and then there’s a moment where we look up and become aware of our surroundings.

Whorf’s duck hunters (seen above) seem to experience one of these times. Standing at the shore at the crack of dawn, ducks paddling innocently below them, the hunters have lowered their guns to gape at the open sky where the soft-rimmed lavender clouds are set in relief against the crepuscular light. Countering the stillness of the hunters, whose forms seem locked with the land, the clouds sweep upward and away from us, cropped by the edges of the work as if to take us beyond the frame. Often Whorf’s images are like this. They show a view from the shore toward the distance, creating a feeling of anticipation in us as we look outward and ponder where we might travel and what we might experience if we left our safety zones behind.
 
Whorf may have harbored such thoughts due to his own physical limitations. A result of a childhood injury, one of his legs was shorter than the other, and he was partially incapacitated. His works often evoke a yearning for travel and adventure, perhaps of a kind that were not within his own reach. Geese in Flight (pictured right, top) is another work, where the freedom of the geese taking flight into a shimming sky is contrasted with a strip of land stretching horizontally across the foreground, where we stand. Whorf’s use of watercolor to contrast the translucency of this sort of sky with shapes that are firmly and solidly positioned, such as boats and landforms, is notable. In Winter Landscape with Horse and Sled (right, bottom), Whorf used the white paper for the snow on the ground, while his ability to apply his brush with the certitude for which he was often praised is revealed in the succinct strokes he used to portray the ruts left by the wheels and horses of the carriage ahead of us on the road. The composition radiates from this tiny form, drawing our gaze to the curving lines of bare purple trees across the hills.

It was no doubt the robustness of Whorf’s handling that brought him the admiration of John Singer Sargent. Brought by his sister to Whorf’s first Boston exhibition, held in 1923, Sargent bought one of the young artist’s watercolors. We don’t know which one Sargent purchased, but maybe Sargent not only felt an affinity with his own watercolors in Whorf’s method, but also saw the way that like him, John Whorf was able to quickly seize and express the truth of a certain moment in time.

Posted in About the Artist. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

Dodge Macknight’s Watercolors

October 2, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
During the early twentieth century, Boston was an important center for watercolor painting in the United States. And when we think about the watercolor tradition there, names such as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Frank Benson immediately come to mind. All were masters of this difficult and challenging medium, which was especially popular among artists who loved to work outdoors. This was certainly the case with Dodge Macknight (1860-1950), who is considered by many––including myself––to be the most avant-garde of the Boston watercolorists because of his use of a daring palette. Indeed, of all the Boston watercolorists I’ve done research on at Spanierman Gallery, Macknight has proven to be one of the most interesting to write about, because of the diversity of their subject matter and most importantly, because they are truly dazzling in their coloration. I’m certainly not the only admirer of his work: during his day, Macknight’s aquarelles were acquired by such discerning collectors as Isabella Stewart Gardner (who created a special “Macknight Room” at Fenway Court) and Sarah Choate Sears. Their patronage no doubt inspired other art aficionados to collect his paintings as well––to the extent that by the early 1920s, sales from Macknight’s watercolor shows never dropped below the $10,000 mark!
Macknight began his career as a theatrical and sign painter, after which he studied with the academic painter Fernand Cormon in Paris during the mid-1880s. However, his formal training appears to have had little effect on his art. Instead, his sojourn in the French capital brought him into contact with Vincent van Gogh, a fellow student who shared his interest in modern strategies of color and light. In fact, Macknight’s aesthetic outlook was so like his own that at one point Van Gogh invited him to join him and Paul Gauguin at Arles, declaring that his American friend “paints better than most Yankees do.”

A peripatetic artist, Macknight created watercolors inspired by his travels throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Grand Canyon and his native New England. In the current exhibition, Five American Watercolorists, Macknight’s fluent technique is readily apparent but it’s his use of color that really makes him stand out, especially the way he manipulated it to create light. Take, for example, Jamaica Landscape: Tropical Island (above), with its deep electric purple––one of Macknight’s favorite colors and one that prompted Boston’s conservative critics (who were more attuned to the harmonious chromatic combinations of the impressionists) to dub his works “Macknightamares.” Macknight’s signature purple can also be seen in Haying in the Salt Marshes (shown at right), from 1924, but the dominant tones––the ones that evoke the moist, heat-laden atmosphere, are vivid oranges and yellows. In walking around the exhibit today, I was reminded of a review I found in the February 1, 1930, issue of Art Digest, in which a New York critic is quoted as proclaiming “If [Macknight] has ever seen anything drab and dismal in Morocco, Spain, Cape Cod, Jamaica or New Hampshire . . . he has not set anything of the kind on paper.”

Carol Lowrey

Posted in About the Artist. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

Annie Gooding Sykes

September 30, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC

Walking through Five American Watercolorists, I was reminded that watercolor is a surprisingly demanding medium, despite its seemingly effortless—when done well—results.

Although all five artists included in the show handle the medium adeptly, Annie Gooding Sykes is perhaps my favorite. In viewing her striking body of work it becomes apparent she had an exceptional ability to handle the intricacies of the medium.

She was also a remarkable woman.

Even by contemporary standards, she had it all: an extensive education, successful career, supportive husband, and two daughters. She traveled widely (in North America and Europe), was revered by her peers, successfully sold her work, and was a supporter of numerous organizations, many of which promoted the recognition of woman artists. Impressive all the more, Sykes was born in 1855.

Mending Nets (pictured here) is my favorite work in the exhibition. Our research suggests it was painted in Nonquitt, Massachusetts, where the artist’s family had a summer home. The picture shows two groups of figures, yet the composition is dominated far more by the presence of color—or absence there of—than by figural elements. I can’t help but wonder if the muted colors hint at another side to Sykes, one drawn more to soft blues and grays than the heartening reds, yellows and greens so often found in her work.

To my eye, with such a vague foreground, the artist’s position in the scene seems in question—is she on the docks? On a boat? Looking on from a building’s porch? Like the color, the artist seems both present and absent, simultaneously. As a viewer, I find myself feeling similarly—taken in by the scene but aware the moment has come to pass.

As a woman myself, I feel a sort of collective pride when viewing these pictures for Sykes was extremely successful during a period which was incredibly trying for women artists.

It’s been nearly eight decades since her death, yet in Five American Watercolorists Annie Gooding Sykes once again holds her own; she is the only woman represented.

Katherine Bogden 

Posted in About the Artist. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments »

Hayley Lever as a Watercolorist

September 28, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC


Hayley Lever (1876-1958)
Fishing Wharf, Marblehead, MA, ca. 1924
Watercolor on paper, 17 1/2 x 22 in. Monday, September 28th, marks the birthday of Hayley Lever (1876-1958), an Australian-American artist I had the pleasure of writing about, on behalf of Spanierman Gallery, in 2003. Born in Bowden Tannery, a suburb of Adelaide, he was christened Richard, but as a professional artist he preferred to use his second and last names only. I had conducted research on this talented painter on numerous occasions in the past, but the opportunity to do a book-length publication allowed me to examine all facets of Lever’s oeuvre––from the marines and urban scenes he produced in England and France during the early 1900s to the portrayals of New York City, New Jersey, upstate New York and coastal Massachusetts created after his move to the United States in 1912. His paintings are very personal, reflecting his belief that “art is the re-creation of mood in line, form and color,” but they were informed by styles such as impressionism and post-impressionism, including the bold aesthetic of Vincent van Gogh. In fact, it was Lever’s deft combination of realism, modernism and his own subjective vision that contributed to his popularity with collectors such as Duncan Phillips.


Hayley Lever (1876-1958)
St. Ives, Cornwall
Watercolor on paper
9 1/2 x 13 1/2 in. Lever was a skilled easel painter who could wield his brush with verve and gusto and he was equally comfortable with pen, ink and graphite. In studying his work, I was especially impressed by his facility with watercolor, a medium he used with regularity throughout his career. His one-man shows at museum venues such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art typically included watercolors, which tells me that he considered them just as important as his oils. Lever was drawn to watercolor’s transparent, light-reflecting quality and its portability––the latter being particularly relevant for an artist who typically spent his summers painting by the sea. Most importantly, though, Lever found watercolor an ideal means of creating a spontaneous work of art; in his words, watercolor was “inspirational, immediate, [and] impressionistic.” His penchant for simplified shapes and the way he would use color to create volume and mass attracted the attention of many contemporary commentators, among them Henry Tyrell, who linked him with a new generation of watercolorists that included progressive painters such as John Marin and Charles Demuth; as Tyrell put it in 1921, Lever was an “eager innovator . . . [whose] aquarelle no less than his oil paintings gains in stirring vitality with each successive season.”


Hayley Lever (1876-1958)
Still Life with Apples on a Chinese Plate, 1930
Watercolor on paper, 14 x 19-1/4The “vitality” that Tyrell referred to can be seen in the selection of Lever watercolors on display at Spanierman Gallery as part of the exhibition Five American Watercolorists, which runs through October 31st. In addition to depictions of the boats, wharves and coastlines that played such as prominent role in Lever’s art, he is also represented by a Vermont landscape, some early and very evocative views of St. Ives (see above right) and a very sumptuous still life (above left).

Carol Lowrey

For a comprehensive study of Hayley Lever’s life and art, see Carol Lowrey, Hayley Lever (1876-1958), preface by Marte Previti, (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2003).

Posted in About the Artist. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.