Ahem, hello again…
Charles Weed is an American painter who studied in Minneapolis and Florence. He’s married to Louse Camille Fenne, who is also a gifted painter. I’m personally more drawn to his landscapes, but his figurative work is very strong too. He’s managed to carve out a distinctive look to his work without, it seems to me, forcing a style for the sake of it. A feathery shimmering light unifies his figurative and landscape work.
Donald Jurney’s landscapes show a very clear reverence for the work of the Barbizon and Hudson River Schools. Some of his compositions are much like Daubigny’s, with solid design drawing one’s eye between feathery trees, gently rippling water and skies heavy with atmosphere.
His wonderfully muted colours have a brilliant but subtle vibration that keeps his work from ever looking dull as many low-chroma landscapes do. Instead one feels the thickness of the air and the trickling flow of light.
There’s a great sense of focus in his work too. Often it is a tiny detail, a small area of strongly contrasting colour or value, that rings out clear like the triangle in an orchestra, bringing a touch of poetry to the broader areas.
Landscape painters often talk of ‘capturing the light’, yet few do that so well as David Curtis.
He also does more delicate watercolours.
Landscapes time. This time it’s the watercolours of Joseph Zbukvic. I’ve no idea how to pronounce his name, but I know i love his work. I hold in high regard any painter who can show the over-painted subject of Venice in a way that makes me look at the city afresh. He’s not limited to Venice though, with work covering both urban and rural environments.
A sense of atmosphere is combined with visually absorbing compositions, which have a brilliant sense of focus that keeps you looking around the image, stopping here and there to admire the variations between a broad and tight focus.
A low chroma keeps his colours harmonious and avoids the common pitfall of the brightly coloured touristy images of Venice. Like Whistler’s etchings of the place, one gets a sense of the artist’s fascination with the light around him, rather than a postcard-type image that is peddled to the millions of tourists.
Fred Cuming’s landscapes are predominately seascapes. He seems to delight in the way the eye is dazzled by bright light coming from both the sun and a thousand bright reflections in the sea. His broken brushwork and brilliant use of eliminating unnecassary information gives the impression of the eye being slightly overwhelmed, blinded and disorientated.
His work has something of the great Romatic landscape painters, such as Caspar David Friedrich, in the way there is almost always a solitary figure or two within the landscape. They are part of this great nature, and they also observe it and contemplate it, becoming a representation of the viewer of the painting, suggesting a response.
Combine all this with a wonderful sensitivity for colour, and you have a painter whose landscapes go beyond a simple “image of a beach”. There is a strong sense of an artistic vision, a creative translation of the perceived world, but one in which nature is still held as the great sublime genius.
* Google him for more, as there are countless galleries who stock his work *
I realise I tend to post artists whose work has a figurative emphasis, and have perhaps left slightly neglected the rich area of landscape painting. There are a number of landscape painters whose work I find inspirational, and make me want to get out there with my little easel. David Sawyer is one of these.
I tend to have an inherent distrust of painters whose subject matter is likely to appeal to the tourist eye, since you can sell any old rubbish to tourists wanting some kind of souvenir. The beauty of many tourist destinations means that a huge number of painters simply rely on the great subject matter to give their work interest. Sawyer is not like this however. His eye for evocative compositions and fantastic colour give his images of familar subjects a different angle.
Most of his paintings are of Venice, though he also appears to have worked in Istanbul and London a great deal. The appeal of venice is understandable, following in the footsteps of Canaletto (who, let us not forget, painted almost exclusively for British tourists), Whistler (whose etchings gave a new direction of depictions of Venice, with an emphasis on the rather special light of the Queen of the Adriatic), Sargent and countless others.
The Hidden Place 