Untitled (Green Paintings)

Cy Twombly

ca. 1986

Herman Herzog - Fisherman's Bay, South Farallon Island, 1875.

Kat Lyons — Pendulum Sun (oil on canvas, 2022)

Charles Ethan Porter — Peonies in a Vase. details. circa 1885

Edward Hopper, Sunday, 1926. Oil on canvas.

The people Hopper depicted all belong to the white middle class. We search his pictures in vain for other ethnic groups, not to mention signs of racial or social tension, or of the differences between rich and poor. Hopper's people are not involved in protests or strikes, demonstrations or meetings. They appear to accept their fate passively. The world they live in is strangely static, the streets largely empty of passersby, hardly a car or truck on the road. No tourist, no stranger has strayed into this silent world. All the windows are closed, and no movement is detectable behind them. It seems to be perpetually Sunday, the city abandoned (or asleep), and for the old man sitting in his shirtsleeves on the sidewalk in Sunday, 1926, this Sunday emptiness is apparently even harder to bear than the weekday vacuum, even more meaningless, more of a dead end. This is a world without a future. And perhaps the oddest thing of all - it includes no children. Hopper never portrayed a child. His is a world of adults condemned to extinction, and conscious of the fact.

Photo: Art Tribune Text: edwardhopper.net

William MacGregor Paxton, Elsa in the Pink Drress, 1932

~ Sir James Jebusa Shannon, Portrait of Lady Gundrede O'Brien (1892)

via bonhams.com

Study for Nighthawks and Nighthawks, Edward Hopper (1942). Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Art Institute of Chicago respectively.

Paul Cadmus - The Bath.

Susan Catherine Moore Waters (1823-1900)

Hanging Trout and Cat

Oil on canvas

Sotheby’s

Edward Hopper, Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris, 1906

Sydney Mortimer Laurence - Alaska and the Northern Light in nocturnal paintings.

Michiko Itatani — Cosmic Wanderlust (from Cosmic Theater) oil on canvas, 2010.

Zoey Frank

Zoey Frank (b. 1987, Boulder, CO) received her MFA in painting from Laguna College of Art and Design after studying for four years with Juliette Aristides at Gage Academy of Art. She has received numerous honors and awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields grants, the Avigdor Arikha Memorial International Residency Scholarship, the Artist’s Magazine All Media Competition Grand Prize, the Hudson River Fellowship, and scholarships from the Albert K. Murray Foundation, the Stacey Foundation, and the Art Renewal Center. Her work has been featured in publications such as Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Collector, International Artist Magazine, Artist’s Magazine, and Southwest Art. Frank has exhibited in galleries across the United States, England, and The Netherlands. 

Statement

Over the last several years, time has been a central element in my paintings. I’ve painted from motifs that compose themselves differently over time—a lemon tree as it grows and its fruit matures, a cluttered living room, or a kitchen countertop that changes each day through use. Remnants of earlier states remain on the surface of the finished paintings.

Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly interested in pictorial space as well. I start from the premise that no one system used to create the illusion of space––from the Greco-Romans to the High Renaissance to the Abstract Expressionists––is more natural or accurate than the others, but each represents a distinct way of perceiving the world. In my recent work, I’ve become more deliberate about my approach to pictorial space, pulling out ideas from each historical period that I find compelling and repurposing them toward my own ends.

This focus on questions of time and pictorial space has led to the introduction of some abstract elements into my work. As compositional problems present themselves, I’ve started using arbitrary planes of color rather than objects to resolve them. This has freed me up to make intuitive, spontaneous changes while I’m painting. As I make these changes to balance the composition, the space of the painting becomes fragmented in a way that interests me.

I’ve been working on a larger scale in my multi-figure compositions, filling the canvas with closely packed, life-sized figures. All of these paintings draw from art history. Some even use a specific painting as the underlying armature of the composition. Wedding, for example, is based on Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. I am interested in the relationships from one figure to the next—how one body presses up against the other, how the tilt or gesture of one figure can be repeated by the one behind. As I work, I find unexpected visual pathways that move the eye through the painting. The complexity of juggling so many elements at once is exciting. It is paintings like this that made me want to be a painter in the first place. (danesecorey.com)

https://zoeyfrank.com/

"Lucifer" (1902) by Alice Pyke Barney (1857-1931), American painter.

Visit Pittoresko! pittoresko.etsy.com