Claude Glass (Black Mirror)

Claude Glass

Claude Glass

William Gilpin

 Claude Lorrain

Seems like a gimmick -- but I still want one...

A "Claude glass" (or black mirror) is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark color. Bound up like a pocket-book or in a carrying case, Claude glasses were used by artists, travelers, and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting. 

Claude glasses have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in them from its surroundings, reducing, and simplifying the color and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a "painterly" quality.

They were famously used by picturesque artists in England in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries as a frame for drawing sketches of picturesque landscapes. The user would turn their back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror -- in a sort of pre-photographic lens -- which added the picturesque aesthetic of a subtle gradation of tones.

The Claude glass is named for Claude Lorrain, a 17th-Century landscape painter, whose name in the late 18th Century became synonymous with the picturesque aesthetic, although there is no indication he used or knew of it or anything similar. The Claude glass was supposed to help artists produce works of art similar to those of Lorrain. William Gilpin, the inventor of the picturesque ideal, advocated the use of a Claude glass saying, "they give the object of nature a soft, mellow tinge like the colouring of that Master." Gilpin mounted a mirror in his carriage, from where he could take in "a succession of high-colored pictures -- continually gliding before the eye."

Art School Memory: "The Danny Williams Story"

Danny Williams

The Danny Williams story -- 

As an undergraduate at SMU, I took Roger Winter's "Advanced Drawing" at least 6 or 7 semesters in a row. All the best artists at SMU were in it, so you had to re-up. 

At some point, each semester, Roger would stage a "show and tell" of masterworks that he had saved back from his "stand-out students" of years past. These were showcased, as teaching aids, as shining examples of the heights we, the current crop, should aspire to.

One of the finest of drawings was a suburban landscape by Danny Williams. It was sort of in the realm of an Edward Hopper, or perhaps a more recognizable Richard Diebenkorn "Ocean Park" landscape. Roger would wax on and on about Danny's keen eye and unparalleled light touch with drawing tools. I hadn't met Danny yet so he was more of a  "legend" than an actual person at this point. 

In short, these drawings were built up as near-unobtainable works of graphic brilliance and were gifted with rare universal praise from Roger. As a competitive young artist -- after about my third semester -- I began to jealously begrudge the DW's inevitable reappearance as a reminder of my graphic shortcomings even as I racked up the experience -- 

On occasion, Roger used to walk to his classroom from his house in University Park. Near my last semester, while carrying the small DW drawing under his arm, it seems Roger was savagely attacked by a crazed Mockingbird -- which dive-bombed and viciously pecked at him -- again and again. Roger had no choice but to smite the bird using only the framed DW drawing as a club. Whap. Whap. Whap. Thud.

When he finally straggled into class, the DW drawing had tragically slipped from its mat and was now clearly roughed-up and askew-- its once perfectly-aligned geometry now totally whopperjawed -- a literal paradigm shift caused by the bird attack had occurred. Myth-busted -- the "perfect drawing" had fallen from grace. 

Now, at last, I was free to enjoy Danny's work on a more casual basis. Now a fellow mortal, he remains a fine artist indeed.

Jules B. Dahlager Painting: A Golden Summer Day in Beautiful Behm Canal

Jules B. Dahlager

Jules B. Dahlager

Jules B. Dahlager

Jules B. Dahlager

Here's one that got away -- a small 6" x 8" oil painting on masonite board by renowned Alaskan artist Jules Bernard Dahlager of Behm Canal near Ketchikan, Alaska. The painting is signed and dated in the lower left "Jules '45" in red oil paint, and bears the printed artist label on reverse with Dahlager's ink signature, reading: "A GOLDEN SUMMER DAY/ In Beautiful Behm Canal Near/ Ketchikan, Alaska/   Painting by/ Jules B. Dahlager [artist signature]." The painting is housed in its original gold gilt Arts and Crafts-style carved frame, likely by Seattle-based framemaker Lloyd Jensen.  

Marvin D. Mangus:"Derelict -- Seward"

Marvin Mangus

Marvin Mangus

Marvin Mangus

I was pleased to discover a color reproduction of an acrylic painting by the Magnificent Marvin in one of the seven vintage "Alaska Journals" that came in the mail today.

Charles Burchfield: American Master of Watercolor Paintings

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Charles Birchfield

Although he lived next door to Niagara Falls, artist Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) chose to focus his nature-based art on the ground beneath his feet. Acclaimed by critics and known to a broad public audience during his lifetime, Burchfield is curiously under-appreciated today. 

Working almost exclusively in watercolor, Burchfield’s primary subject was landscape, often focusing on his immediate surroundings -- his garden, the views from his windows, snow turning to slush, the sounds of insects and bells and vibrating telephone lines, deep ravines, sudden atmospheric changes, the experience of entering a forest at dusk, to name but a few. He often imbued these subjects with highly expressionistic light, creating at times a clear-eyed depiction of the world and, at other times, a unique mystical and visionary experience of nature.

Leo F. Dorne: Woodblock Prints

Leo F. Dorn

Leo F. Dorn

Leo F. Dorn

Leo F. Dorn

Leo F. Dorn

Leo F. Dorn (1879-1964) was born in Kentucky but is today most closely associated with the Silvermine Art Colony of Southwestern Connecticut, where he was a member of the so-called "Knockers" group of artists and craftsmen. Woodblock prints of New England, by artists such as Francis Gearheart, Blanche Lazzell, and others, are currently highly sought-after by the art market.

Family Friends: Alaskan Painters Harvey and Ellen Goodale

Harvey Goodale (1900-1980) painted Alaska and its people for thirty-seven years. From his home in Upper Fire Lake in the Chugiak area, he, along with his artist wife, Ellen Henne, traveled all over Alaska photographing and sketching people and scenes that were later to become paintings. 

He first started a studio in Anchorage combining painting and framing and painting signs. Selling out he and his wife moved to Valdez for a while but soon returned to Anchorage.

One of his more important commissions was from Bob Reeve to paint 44 of Alaska's more well-known and celebrated bush pilots. These paintings for the most part were destroyed in the 1964 earthquake and two subsequent fires. It is estimated that Harvey Goodale has painted in excess of 5000 oils during his career as an Alaskan.

Place of birth: Danvers, Massachusetts.

Art Training: Boston Museum of Fine Arts; The Art Student League of New York; Rhode Island School of Design. The paintings of Harvey Goodale and his wife are in numerous museum and private collections.

Ellen Henne Goodale (1915-1991) was born in Seattle, Washington.  She studied art at the Pittsburgh Art Institue, the Butler Institute (Ohio) and with artists Eliot O’Hara and Hana Meyercastle. She returned to Seattle where she met her husband artist, Harvey Goodale.  In 1943, they moved to Alaska and eventually settled near Anchorage.  She showed her work at the famous Nugget Shop Gallery in Juneau.  Ellen usually signed her work, “Henne."

        

Edmond J. FitzGerald Art

Rex Brandt Watercolor Seascape Paintings

Rex Brandt gained national renown for his watercolor paintings during the period from the mid 1930s to the 1990s. As a dedicated teacher of the watercolor medium, he conducted painting workshops both at his home in Corona del Mar, his summer home in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington, and at several international locations. Brandt published more than ten books on watercolor painting, including The Winning Ways of Watercolor. Although he painted with other media (including oil, to which he developed an allergy), he preferred watercolor, which he considered to be the most expressive and the perfect vehicle to paint “light and air.”

Sunshine was the essential theme of his long career. He wrote: “Whether we are conscious of it or not, everything in the perceived world is in motion. Sunshine is the mediator, a pervasive quality in which things are lost and found, emerge and recede…”

Rexford Elson Brandt was born in San Diego in 1914. He grew up in Riverside and attended Riverside Junior College and the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his degree in 1936. The art department at Berkeley was decidedly modernist, in part a legacy of the German abstract artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, who taught there in the summers of 1930 and 1931. Brandt’s teachers at Berkeley included John Haley and Margaret Peterson, both of whom had studied with Hofmann. Brandt also studied Byzantine and Chinese art, both of which influenced his painting style and his teaching.

After returning to Southern California, Brandt joined the California Water Color Society and became an active participant with artists of the American scene including Millard Sheets and Phil Dike. He was a champion of the so-called California school and organized one of the first group exhibitions of their work, in 1937. In the post-War era, Brandt eschewed literal representation except in his teaching and instead focused on complex, semi-abstract studio works in which he explored the effects of sunlight.