February 19, 2010  Tags: demo, kafa, student  Posted in: Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art, Learning Opportunities  No Comments

Door County Artist Soirsce Kastner

Press Release

January 19, 2010

For immediate Release

Door County artist Soirsce Kastner is featured in the current issue of BlueCanvas Magazine, a quarterly arts publication that is carried nationally at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Book World and many independent booksellers. Soirsce participated as a full-time student in the formal studio art program at the Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art from 2005-2008 under the direction of Craig Blietz, then spent a year living and painting in Shanghai, China.

Soirsce has now moved her studio to Sister Bay, WI, where she lives with her husband Wu Zheng Ping. Together, they own and operate Ping Studios, offering web design, graphic design and photography services. Find Soirsce’s work online at www.Soirsce.com, and Ping Studios at www.Ping-Studios.com, and visit the Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art at www.KewauneeAcademy.com.

Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art

109 Duvall Street

Kewaunee, WI 54216

info@kewauneeacademy.com

January 20, 2010  Tags: student  Posted in: Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art  No Comments

Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art Students Past and Present

The Wild Apple Glass Studio & Gallery, 210 Main St. Menasha, WI, will be featuring an exhibition of Jeff Hargreaves’s new works starting Tuesday, January 5, 2010. His works will be on view until February 20, 2010. Jeff is a resident of Appleton and a former student of the Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art. More information about Jeff and his work can be found at http://www.jeffhargreaves.com/.

Jeff Hargreaves, “Days End”, oil on canvas, 18″ x 21″.

The harsh winter has not stopped David Kapszukiewicz, a resident of Appleton, from coming out on top in a local art competition. In America National Bank Fox Cities “Art to Give” Holiday Show, which had been rescheduled due to weather, David took away a first place award for his work “Sentinel”. David is a current student of the Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art. David and his work can be found online at http://kapsfineart.com/HOME.html.

January 20, 2010  Tags: student  Posted in: Kewaunee Academy of Fine Art  No Comments

Sorolla’s Paintings: The Embodiment of Love

Reprint of 2005 Editions of Joaquin Sorolla by Blanca, Pons-Sorolla, arriving this week.

Order book here!

Running Along the Beach

Joaquin Sorolla’s paintings are the embodiment of love.  He saw love in all his Spanish people, in the land, the sea, the families, the children, and the blinding, sparkling sun of his birthplace, Valencia. Not only did he see it, he captured it on huge canvases, plein aire, and alla prima most often with large brushes with 3-4 foot handles. The oils were applied with huge strokes, rapidly–just in the right spot—while wearing a spotless shirt, tie, dress suit, spats, dress hat, often a cigar all with total focus and complete humility.

He identified his two greatest loves as his art and his wife.  He travelled with specially prepared images of her and wrote often.  He wrote in 1907, after 20 years of marriage, “You are my flesh, my life, my reason.  You fill the void of my life as a man who knew not the affection of a father or mother before I met you.  You are my perpetual ideal.  Without you nothing matters.”  His art expresses the same love, empowering it.

Three Studies of a Man’s Head

Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923) was one of the greatest natural painters of all time.  Born in Valencia, this Spanish painter was active mainly in his native town and in Madrid.  He was a prolific and popular artist, working on a wide range of subjects – genre, portraits and landscapes – and his bravura style marked by luminous colouring and vigorous brushwork earned him a considerable reputation throughout Europe and America.  He was also a highly sought after portraitist.

Early in his career Sorolla mainly portrayed history and social scenes before developing his own plein-air painting from the 1900’s onwards, painting townscapes, garden scenes, nature studies, seascapes and beach scenes with an extraordinary ability of capturing light.  From 1901 to 1905 he created 500 works adhering to his ideal of ‘natural painting’.  From these paintings came the body of work shown in a series of shows in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Saint Louis and Chicago.  Sorolla was then commissioned to create a multi-panelled work entitled Visions of Spain for the Hispanic Society in New York.  He laboured on this from 1912-19 after which time he painted very little.  He died in 1923.

This new, extensively illustrated monograph, written by the artist’s great granddaughter, provides a comprehensive overview of his work including a fully illustrated chronology.

Fisherwoman With Her Child

CLARIFICATION:  There are five books on Sorolla that were written by Blanca Pons-Sorolla, or partially written, by her.  The first book-Vida y Obra- (Life and Work) was written in Spanish in 2000. This 750 page hard cover book, of the highest quality  – blue cloth cover and blue cloth slip cover—is out of print and is available for $650-750 by a limited number of book sellers. We presently have 2 copies available for $650.  They have never been out of their slip covers.

In 2005/6  Ms. Pons-Sorolla produced two smaller books –342 pages in hard cover and in soft cover.  The hard cover has an upper torso image of Maria in a grey green top.  The soft cover has Maria in a long white dress.

The reprint we are offering is identical in content to both of these books and has the little boy in the water with a white fishing boat on the cover.

Transporting Grapes

One additional book, Visions of Spain, was published in 2007 for the Hispanic Society of New York.  This book features the Murals he painted for the Society. It has 14 pull out  posters of the Murals and is spectacular. I have sold several hundred copies.

In 2009, in conjunction with the Exhibition in Madrid for Sorolla, the Catalog was produced and is now out of print and is selling for $350 in the after market..  I sold over 300 of these for $129.  I managed to find the last 25 books at a much higher cost in the US and have 8 left at $199.

So if you already have the 2005 first editions you have no need to buy the reprint unless it would be a gift.  I have the first reprints in the US, as I did the Catalog, and I think they will be available for about 6 months because only a very limited number were printed in English. But, if you don’t have the Catalog of the Prado show, buy it FIRST.  There is less than 15% duplication of images between the two books.  Then buy the reprint.  If you are a collector, buy the Visions of Spain—featuring the murals—then the original book, la Vida y Obra, in Spanish.  If I have totally confused you—call me at 920 388 4391.  Dick

Order book here!

December 16, 2009  Tags: Joaquin Sorolla, Sorolla  Posted in: Books, Learning Opportunities  No Comments

VIDEO: In-depth looks at key works in the exhibition J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite

In this series of online films, art historian and Waterhouse biographer Peter Trippi takes an in-depth looks at key works in the exhibition J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite.
Please click on the links below to view the films.

After the Dance
Consulting the Oracle
St Eulalia
Mariamne Leaving the Judgement Seat of Herod
The Lady of Shalott
Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses
Hylas And The Nymphs
Nymphs Finding The Head Of Orpheus
Listening to My Sweet Pipings

Full Article at the Royal Academy of Arts

November 30, 2009  Tags: Raphaelite  Posted in: Exhibitions, Learning Opportunities  One Comment

Sorolla Museum Opens Exhibition Exploring the Dialogues Between Sorolla & Velázquez

The exhibition includes eleven paintings made by Sorolla, Menipo by Velázquez plus three other reproductions Sorolla made in 1882 from paintings by Velázquez. In this image appears “Mary Dressed in White” (left) and a “Self Portrait” (right) by Sorolla. Photo: EFE/Emilio Naranjo.

MADRID.- The Ministry of Culture and the Sorolla Museum Foundation have organized the exhibition “Dialogues: Sorolla & Velázquez, which can be seen until January 24, 2010 at the Sorolla Museum in Madrid.

Dialogues is an exhibition project that was born with the intent of reviewing the relationship between Sorolla with his great influence, Diego Velázquez. The Dialogue between the two painters develops following three thematic views, Realism. Portraits and Landscapes.

Realism.- Sorolla ties himself to the rich Spanish naturalist tradition when he represents daily life generating a work that is characterized by its nationalism very similar to Velázquez’.

Landscape.- Plein air painting was a necessity and a vital philosophy for Sorolla. It is an essential genre from which the renovation of painting started off in the last decades of the 19th century.

The exhibition includes eleven paintings made by Sorolla, Menipo by Velázquez plus three other reproductions Sorolla made in 1882 from paintings by Velázquez.

Joaquín Sorolla was the eldest child born to a tradesman, also named Joaquín, and his wife, Concepción Bastida. His sister, Concha, was born a year later. In August 1865 both children were orphaned when their parents died, possibly from cholera. They were thereafter cared for by their maternal aunt and uncle.

He received his initial art education, at the age of fourteen, in his native town, and then under a succession of teachers including Cayetano Capuz, Salustiano Asenjo. At the age of eighteen he traveled to Madrid, vigorously studying master paintings in the Museo del Prado. After completing his military service, at twenty-two Sorolla obtained a grant which enabled a four year term to study painting in Rome, Italy, where he was welcomed by and found stability in the example of F. Pradilla, the director of the Spanish Academy in Rome. A long sojourn to Paris in 1885 provided his first exposure to modern painting; of special influence were exhibitions of Jules Bastien-Lepage and Adolf von Menzel. Back in Rome he studied with José Benlliure, Emilio Sala, and José Villegas.

In 1888 Sorolla returned to Valencia to marry Clotilde García del Castillo, whom he had first met in 1879, while working in her father’s studio. By 1895 they would have three children together: Maria, born in 1890, Joaquín, born in 1892, and Elena, born in 1895. In 1890 they moved to Madrid, and for the next decade Sorolla’s efforts as an artist were focussed mainly on the production of large canvases of orientalist, mythological, historical, and social subjects, for display in salons and international exhibitions in Madrid, Paris, Venice, Munich, Berlin, and Chicago.

His first striking success was achieved with “Another Marguerite” (1892), which was awarded a gold medal at the National Exhibition in Madrid, then first prize at the Chicago International Exhibition, where it was acquired and subsequently donated to the Washington University Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. He soon rose to general fame and became the acknowledged head of the modern Spanish school of painting. His picture “The Return from Fishing” (1894) was much admired at the Paris Salon and was acquired by the state for the Musée du Luxembourg. It indicated the direction of his mature output.

An even greater turning point in Sorolla’s career was marked by the painting and exhibition of “Sad Inheritance” (1899), an extremely large canvas, highly finished for public consideration. The subject was a depiction of crippled children bathing at the sea in Valencia, under the supervision of a monk. The painting earned Sorolla his greatest official recognition, the Grand Prix and a medal of honour at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, and the medal of honor at the National Exhibition in Madrid in 1901.

With this painting Sorolla ceased his career as a salon artist, and never returned to a theme of such overt social consciousness. At the same time, a series of preparatory oil sketches for “Sad Inheritance” were painted with the greatest luminosity and bravura, and foretold an increasing interest in shimmering light and of a medium deftly handled. Sorolla thought well enough of these sketches that he presented two of them as gifts to American artists; one to John Singer Sargent, the other to William Merritt Chase.

The exhibit at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 won him a medal of honor and his nomination as Knight of the Legion of Honor; within the next few years Sorolla was honored as a member of the Fine Art Academies of Paris, Lisbon, and Valencia, and as a Favorite Son of Valencia.

A special exhibition of his works–figure subjects, landscapes and portraits–at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris in 1906 eclipsed all his earlier successes and led to his appointment as Officer of the Legion of Honour. The show included nearly 500 works, early paintings as well as recent sun-drenched beach scenes, landscapes, and portraits, a productivity which amazed critics and was a financial triumph. Though subsequent large-scale exhibitions in Germany and London were greeted with more restraint, while in England in 1908 Sorolla met Archer Milton Huntington, who made him a member of The Hispanic Society of America in New York City, and invited him to exhibit there in 1909. The exhibition was comprised of 356 paintings, 195 of which sold. Sorolla spent five months in America and painted more than twenty portraits.

Although formal portraiture was not Sorolla’s genre of preference, because it tended to restrict his creative appetites and could reflect his lack of interest in his subjects, the acceptance of portrait commissions proved profitable, and the portrayal of his family was irresistible. Sometimes the influence of Velázquez was uppermost, as in “My Family” (1901), a reference to “Las Meninas” which grouped his wife and children in the foreground, the painter reflected, at work, in a distant mirror. At other times the desire to compete with his friend John Singer Sargent was evident, as in Portrait of “Mrs. Ira Nelson Morris and Her Children”, (1911). A series of portraits produced in the United States in 1909, commissioned through the Hispanic Society of America, was capped by the “Portrait of Mr.Taft”, President of the United States, painted at the White House, and suggestive of convivial sessions between painter and president.

The appearance of sunlight could be counted on to rouse his interest, and it was outdoors where he found his ideal portrait settings. Thus, not only did his daughter pose standing in a sun-dappled landscape for “María at La Granja” (1907), but so did Spanish royalty, for the “Portrait of King Alfonso XIII in a Hussar’s Uniform” (1907). For Portrait of “Mr. Louis Comfort Tiffany” (1911), the American artist posed seated at his easel in his Long Island garden, surrounded by extravagant flowers. The conceit reaches its high point in “My Wife and Daughters in the Garden” (1910), in which the idea of traditional portraiture gives way to the sheer fluid delight of a painting constructed with thick passages of color, Sorolla’s love of family and sunlight merged.

Early in 1911 Sorolla visited the United States for a second time, and exhibited 161 new paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later that year Sorolla met Archer M. Huntington in Paris and signed a contract to paint a series of oils on life in Spain. The canvases, to be installed in the Hispanic Society of America, would range from 12 to 14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length. There would be fourteen large panels in all. The major commission of his career, it would dominate the later years of Sorolla’s life.

Huntington had envisioned the work depicting a history of Spain, but the painter preferred the less specific ‘Vision of Spain’, eventually opting for a representation of the regions of the Iberian Peninsula, and calling it The Provinces of Spain. Despite the immensity of the canvases, Sorolla painted all but one en plein air, and travelled to specific locales to paint them: Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Elche, Seville, Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia, Guipuzcoa, Castile, Leon, and Ayamonte, at each site painting models posed in local costume. Each painting celebrated the landscape and culture of its region, panoramas composed of throngs of laborers and locals. By 1917 he was, by his own admission, exhausted. He completed the final panel by the middle of 1919.

Sorolla suffered a stroke in 1920, while painting a portrait in his garden in Madrid. Paralyzed for over three years, he died in 1923. The room housing the Provinces at the Hispanic Society of America opened to the public in 1926.

After his death, Sorolla’s widow left many of his paintings to the Spanish public. The paintings eventually formed the collection that is now known as the Museo Sorolla, which was the artist’s house in Madrid. The museum opened in 1932.

Sorolla’s work is represented in museums throughout Spain, Europe, and America, and in many private collections in Europe and America. In 1933, J. Paul Getty purchased ten Impressionist beach scenes done by Sorolla, several of which are now housed in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

In 2007, many of his works were exhibited at the Petit Palais in Paris, France, alongside those of John Singer Sargent, a contemporary who painted in a similar style. In 2009 there is a special exhibition of his works at the Prado in Madrid, Spain.

Article from ArtDaily.org

Books about Sorolla in our online book store:

Joaquin Sorolla y Batista Exhibition Catalog

SOROLLA: La Vision de Espana

Joaquin Sorolla

November 3, 2009  Tags: Joaquin Sorolla, painting, Sorolla  Posted in: Books, Learning Opportunities  No Comments

Antonio Mancini – Painting Style and Career

“The sun sets. The man dies. It is right. But what a pity not to be able to paint any more.”
-Antonio Mancini to a friend.

Self-Portrait

Some artists just love to paint. You can sense it in the way the paint lies on the canvas—not some carefully thought-out every stroke just so, like a finicky housepainter painting a doorframe, but slapped on with such apparent abandon that you always think it’s a lie when you read that the artist actually thought everything out quite carefully. So here we have a painter who apparently went mad as a young man (perhaps from using paints with mercury pigments in them), who lays on his pigments with as much brio, yet who seems to have been as careful as Vermeer in using a string-grid device of his own invention to get his proportions just right. He’s always broke and will knock off a work of art just to get pasta money—sometimes even painting on one of the restaurant’s serving plates. Don’t you just have to love such an unregenerate artist?

Mancini is, to a degree, a “literary” painter in that a strong anecdotal quality runs throughout his work—but his subjects seem mostly to come from the everyday life of late-19th Century Italy. Mancini could, and did, render the occasional John the Baptist or a provocative harem scene, but he seemed just as happy doing sentimental studies of street urchins and commissioned portraits. But his urchins are rarely just lounging around being urchins; instead they all got up as carnival performers, standard-bearers and even as proper young lads solemnly regarding the bloodied shirt and fallen rapier of a father recently killed in a duel.

Some admit having never heard of Mancini prior to the Philadelphia Museum Exhibition in 2007. But his work was frequently exhibited in the United States during his lifetime and was collected by museums and discriminating private collectors, such as the painter William Merrit Chase. He seems to have gotten lost in the passage of time, and while I wouldn’t call that fate a tremendous injustice, it’s nonetheless unfortunate.

Mancini and his fellow minors—were they minor painters?- Jules Bastien LePage, Adolph Menzel, minor poets, minor composers—defined an age, and added richness and flavor to that age. We are worse off without them, so it’s always a pleasure to welcome one of them back.

Purchase Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master from our online book store.

Poor Schoolboy

His painting, The Poor Schoolboy, exhibited in the Salon of 1876, is in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Its realist subject matter and dark palette are typical of his early work. Paintings by Mancini also may be seen in major Italian museum collections, including Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and Museo Civico-Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin. The Philadelphia Art Museum holds fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini that were a gift of New York art dealer Vance N. Jordan.

Purchase Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master from our online book store.

‘Will paint for food’:

Let us now praise minor artists.

Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) Italian painter.

Biography

Mancini was born in Rome and showed precocious ability as an artist. At the age of twelve, he was admitted to the Institute of Fine Arts in Naples, where he studied under Domenico Morelli (1823–1901), a painter of historical scenes who favored dramatic chiaroscuro and vigorous brushwork, and Filippo Palizzi (1818–1899), a landscape painter. Mancini developed quickly under their guidance, and in 1872, he exhibited two paintings at the Paris Salon.

Mancini worked at the forefront of Verismo movement, an indigenous Italian response to 19th-century Realist aesthetics. His usual subjects included children of the poor, juvenile circus performers, and musicians he observed in the streets of Naples. His portrait of a young acrobat in “Saltimbanco” (1877-78) exquisitely captures the fragility of the boy whose impoverished childhood is spent entertaining pedestrian crowds.

While in Paris in the 1870s, Mancini met Impressionists Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet. He became friends with John Singer Sargent, who famously pronounced him to be the greatest living painter. His mature works show a brightened palette with a striking impasto technique on canvas and a bold command of pastels on paper.

In 1881, Mancini suffered a disabling mental illness. He settled in Rome in 1883 for twenty years, then moved to Frascati where he lived until 1918. During this period of Mancini’s life, he was often destitute and relied on the help of friends and art buyers to survive. After the First World War, his living situation stabilized and he achieved a new level of serenity in his work. Mancini died in Rome in 1930 and buried in the Basilica Santi Bonifacio e Alessio on the Aventine Hill.

His painting,The Poor Schoolboy, exhibited in the Salon of 1876, is in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Its realist subject matter and dark palette are typical of his early work. Paintings by Mancini also may be seen in major Italian museum collections, including Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and Museo Civico-Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin. The Philadelphia Art Museum holds fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini that were a gift of New York art dealer Vance N. Jordan.

Purchase Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master from our online book store.

October 30, 2009  Tags: Antonio Mancini  Posted in: Books, Learning Opportunities  No Comments

Antonio Mancini – Resting

Click image to view larger version.

A portrait painter who worked primarily in Rome after 1883, Antonio Mancini developed an interest in the rich palettes and dark, tonal contrasts of Italian Baroque painting. Over the course of several trips to Paris, he also acquired a taste for contemporary stylistic developments, and met Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas during one such visit in 1875. Two years later, after being introduced to early Impressionist paintings by his Parisian dealer, Alphonse Goupil, Mancini revealed the depth of his interest in the French avant-garde by pursuing the group’s concern with the materiality of the canvas. Applying his oils with reckless and ecstatic abandon, he went so far as to incorporate bits of colored glass and foil into the surfaces he built up.

With its dramatic impasto, particularly in the bed sheets that surround the ruddy-cheeked, soporific young woman, Resting demonstrates the bold, almost sculptural quality of Mancini’s work from this period. The array of reflective decanters near the subject’s bed suggests that she is a convalescent, perhaps recovering from an illness, given her flushed complexion. Nevertheless, her sensuous appearance conveys as much erotic allure as it does innocent vulnerability. She looks wistfully off to the side, refusing to meet the viewer’s gaze, her barely parted lips and slightly tilted head contributing to her dreamy demeanor. The lyrical atmosphere of this intimate—and intimately scaled—image seems intensified by the curve of the model’s abundant, black hair flowing across the length of the large, white pillow behind her; the red roses she clutches in her hand; and the manner in which she coyly pulls down the sheet to reveal her breast and shoulder.

Purchase Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master from our online book store.

Click HERE to view a slideshow of Mancini’s work presented by the New York Times.

Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) Italian painter.
Biography

Mancini was born in Rome and showed precocious ability as an artist. At the age of twelve, he was admitted to the Institute of Fine Arts in Naples, where he studied under Domenico Morelli (1823–1901), a painter of historical scenes who favored dramatic chiaroscuro and vigorous brushwork, and Filippo Palizzi (1818–1899), a landscape painter. Mancini developed quickly under their guidance, and in 1872, he exhibited two paintings at the Paris Salon.

Mancini worked at the forefront of Verismo movement, an indigenous Italian response to 19th-century Realist aesthetics. His usual subjects included children of the poor, juvenile circus performers, and musicians he observed in the streets of Naples. His portrait of a young acrobat in “Saltimbanco” (1877-78) exquisitely captures the fragility of the boy whose impoverished childhood is spent entertaining pedestrian crowds.

While in Paris in the 1870s, Mancini met Impressionists Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet. He became friends with John Singer Sargent, who famously pronounced him to be the greatest living painter. His mature works show a brightened palette with a striking impasto technique on canvas and a bold command of pastels on paper.

In 1881, Mancini suffered a disabling mental illness. He settled in Rome in 1883 for twenty years, then moved to Frascati where he lived until 1918. During this period of Mancini’s life, he was often destitute and relied on the help of friends and art buyers to survive. After the First World War, his living situation stabilized and he achieved a new level of serenity in his work. Mancini died in Rome in 1930 and buried in the Basilica Santi Bonifacio e Alessio on the Aventine Hill.

His painting,The Poor Schoolboy, exhibited in the Salon of 1876, is in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Its realist subject matter and dark palette are typical of his early work. Paintings by Mancini also may be seen in major Italian museum collections, including Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and Museo Civico-Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin. The Philadelphia Art Museum holds fifteen oil paintings and three pastels by Mancini that were a gift of New York art dealer Vance N. Jordan.

Purchase Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master from our online book store.

October 30, 2009  Tags: Antonio Mancini  Posted in: Books, Learning Opportunities  No Comments

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