Edward MarecakGoddess of Fertility, 1960s Semi Abstract, Nudes, Flowers, Red Blue Yellow Green1966
1966
About the Item
- Creator:Edward Marecak (1919 - 1993)
- Creation Year:1966
- Dimensions:Height: 34 in (86.36 cm)Width: 42 in (106.68 cm)Depth: 0.75 in (1.91 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Framing:Framing Options Available
- Condition:very good vintage condition.
- Gallery Location:Denver, CO
- Reference Number:
Edward Marecak
Edward Marecak was an American painter who was born in 1919. Growing up in the farming community of Brunswick, Ohio, he showed early artistic promise, hired by the National Youth Administration to document historic barns. In 1946, Marecak came to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center for a year and after a semester interlude at Cranbrook returned to study lithography with Lawrence Barrett. There he also met his future wife and sometime collaborator, ceramicist Theresa Madonna Fortin. Given the opportunity to teach a summer course at the University of Colorado, he decided to obtain a teaching certificate at the University of Denver and subsequently embarked on his 25-year career in the Denver Public School system. Rather than pursue fame, Edward Marecak directed his zeal toward fostering younger generations in the principles of art as well as his simple philosophies. Moreover, his teaching salary allowed him to ply his prodigious talent at whatever he pleased, instead of bending to the dictates of trends and sales. Having inherited his faith in education from his Slovakian immigrant parents, Marecak could add the shaping of lives to his mastery of art forms, including lithographs, monoprints, drawings, hooked rugs, ceramics, paintings, wood sculptures, stained-glass windows and jewelry. While exhibiting in his lifetime, he was, in his wife’s words, “his own greatest collector”, but shows and his popularity at the Kirkland Museum have positioned Marecak posthumously among Colorado’s pre-eminent modernists. As a child, Marecak was enthralled by the Carpathian tales of magic and supernatural beings told by his grandmother. As with other artists with roots in Eastern Europe, his artistic turn to folk tradition would free him from learned practices of perspective and modeling in favor of flat patterns within patterns and brilliant, throbbing color. While others ventured further into abstraction, Marecak stylized figurative elements into crowded compositions that appeared like a mosaic or stained glass. As he matured, he could declare, “I am still very much a Byzantine designer and my joy with what color can do grows all the time”. The traceries of strong outlines and bold shapes provide compartments for vibrant colors, contrasts and rough textures that can scarcely be contained. The Kirkland Museum staged a retrospective of Edward and Donna Marecak in 2007.
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- Diana and the Three Fates, Vintage 1970s Semi Abstract Figural Oil PaintingBy Edward MarecakLocated in Denver, CODiana and the Three Fates, vintage 1970s semi abstract oil painting on board by 20th century Denver artist, Edward Marecak (1919-1993). Female nude figure of the the Roman virgin goddess, Diana, the protector of childbirth reclining with vases of flowers and the Three Fates looking on. Semi abstract, cubist style painting in bright colors of pink, fuchsia, green, yellow, orange, blue, brown, purple and red. Unframed, custom framing is available. In situ photos are frame mocks ups, the piece is currently unframed. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Edward Marecak Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: Born to immigrant parents from the Carpathian region in Slovakia, Marecak grew up with his family in the farming community of Bennett’s Corners, now part of the town of Brunswick, near Cleveland, Ohio. When he turned twelve, his family moved to a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Slovenians in Cleveland. His childhood household cherished the customs and Slavic folk tales from the Old Country that later strongly influenced his work as a professional artist. During junior high he painted scenery for puppet shows of "Peter and the Wolf," awakening his interest in art. In his senior year in high school he did Cézanne-inspired watercolors of Ohio barns at seventy-five cents apiece for the National Youth Administration. They earned him a full scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art (1938-1942) where he studied with Henry George Keller whose work was included in the 1913 New York Armory Show. In 1940 Marecak also taught at the Museum School of the Cleveland Institute. Before being drafted into the military in 1942, he briefly attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, one of the nation’s leading graduate schools of art, architecture, and design. A center of innovative work in architecture, art and design with an educational approach built on a mentorship model, it has been home to some of the world’s most renowned designers and artists, including Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Daniel Libeskind and Harry Bertoia. Marecak’s studies at Cranbrook with painter Zoltan Sepeshy and sculptor Carl Milles were interrupted by U.S. army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. Following his military discharge, Marecak studied on the G.I. Bill at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1946 to 1950, having previously met its director, Boardman Robinson, conducting a seminar in mural painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Although he did not work with Robinson at the Fine Arts Center, who had become quite ill - retiring in 1947 - he studied Robinson’s specialty of mural painting before leaving to briefly attend the Cranbrook Academy in 1947. That same year he returned to the Fine Arts Center, studying painting with Jean Charlot and Mary Chenoweth, and lithography with Lawrence Barrett with whom he produced some 132 images during 1948-49. At the Fine Arts Center he met his future wife, Donna Fortin, whom he married in 1947. Also a Midwesterner, she had taken night art courses at Hull House in Chicago, later studying at the Art Institute of Chicago with the encouragement of artist Edgar Britton. After World War II she studied with him from 1946 to 1949 at the Fine Arts Center. (He had moved to Colorado Springs to treat his tuberculosis.) Ed Marecak also became good friends with Britton, later collaborating with him on the design of large stained glass windows for a local church. In 1950-51 Marecak returned to the Cleveland Institute of Art to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. A year later he was invited to conduct a summer class at the University of Colorado in Boulder, confirming his interest in the teaching profession. In 1955 he received his teaching certificate from the University of Denver. Vance Kirkland, the head of its art department, helped him get a teaching job with the Denver Public Schools so that he and his family could remain in the Mile High City. For the next twenty-five years he taught art at Skinner, Grove, East, George Washington and Morey Junior High Schools. Prior to coming to Colorado, Marecak did watercolors resembling those of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Charles Burchfield. However, once in Colorado Springs he decided to destroy much of his earlier ouevre, embarking on a totally new direction unlike anything he had previously done. Initially, in the 1940s he was influenced by surrealist imagery and Paul Klee, and in the West by Indian petroglyphs and Kachinas. His first one-person show at the Garrett Gallery in Colorado Springs in 1949 featured paintings and lithographs rendered in the style of Magic Realism and referential abstraction. The pieces, including an oil Witch with Pink Dish...Category
1970s Abstract Abstract Paintings
MaterialsOil, Board
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- Dawn of the Tigris, Mid Century Modern Abstract Oil Painting, Blue Red WhiteLocated in Denver, CO"Dawn of the Tigris" is an oil on canvas abstract painting by Gwendolyn Dufill Meux (1893-1973). Image measures 48 x 36 inches, presented in a custom frame measuring 49 ½ x 37 ½ inches. Provenance: Estate of the Artist, Gwendolyn Meux Painting is in good condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. About the Artist: Born 1893 Died 1973 The daughter of Arthur Mews, Deputy Secretary of Newfoundland from 1898 to 1935, and Mabel Mews, she attended the Mount Ladies’ College, now Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, on a four-year Canadian government scholarship. While an instructor at the college from 1920 to 1922 she showed in the Spring Exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal in 1920 and the following year in its Thirty-Eighth Annual Exhibition. In the United States, she studied with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and with Kimon Nicholaides (author of The Natural Way to Draw) at the Art Students League in New York. In 1922-1925 Meux was an assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Oklahoma at Norman during which time she studied with Santa Fe artists Józef Bakoś and Frank Applegate in the summer of 1923. The following year she attended the University Camp summer painting workshop in Boulder, Colorado, where she met A. Gayle Waldrop, then an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Colorado (CU). In 1925 they were married in an outdoor wedding at the University Camp to which guests received invitations on aspen bark which she had beautifully lettered. Thereafter the university hired her as an art instructor, and she spent the balance of her life in Boulder. Meux quickly became involved in the Boulder art scene. She was a charter member and later one-time president of the Boulder Artists Guild. Established in 1926 by the Art Association of Boulder, the CU Art Department and local artists, the Guild was limited to active artists. It included most of the city’s professional artists before disbanding half a century later. The Art Association of Boulder was founded in 1923 by Jean Sherwood who relocated from Chicago to teach at the Boulder Chautauqua and helped convince Dean Fred B.R. Hellems at CU to set up the first art gallery on campus in the 1920s. The Association, lasting until 1939 and reconstituted in 1958, was open to individuals interested in promoting the arts through lecture programs, art classes, and exhibits. In 1931 Meux joined fellow CU Fine Arts faculty members Muriel Sibell Wolle, Frances Hoar (Trucksess), Frederick Clement Trucksess and Virginia True in The Prospectors, a Regionalist art collaborative stressing a strong sense of place and community. They formed the group in connection with a traveling exhibition of their work assembled for display at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, University of Kansas and the John Herron Institute (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art). Regional modernists influenced by the Western landscape, The Prospectors’ manifesto "claimed inspiration from the natural beauty of the mountains and plains of Boulder, as well as the ghosts of Indians, mountain men, and pioneers." Attempting to gain critical recognition for themselves and for Boulder, The Prospectors aggressively promoted their work through 1942, exhibiting at universities, museums, and galleries in twenty-four states and participating in various shows throughout the country such as the Prairie Watercolor Painters annuals in Kansas. In addition to The Prospectors, Meux was a long-time member of the Fortnightly Club of Boulder. The oldest women’s literary club in Colorado, the group was organized in 1884 by Mary Rippon, a "founding mother" of CU and its first female professor. Meeting to share information on a variety of topics, the Fortnightly Club limits its membership to thirty-five and is a mixture of "town and gown" – community members and women associated with CU. Meux was also active for many years in the University Faculty Women’s Club, serving as its president in 1941. She likewise belonged to the then-local chapter of the Artists Equity Association in Boulder. Its president in 1969, she became an honorary member in 1973. Inspired by the Colorado landscape, she worked in a variety of media: oil painting, watercolor, ink, crayon, lithography, and dry brush. An oil from the 1940s, White Church, Ward, depicts the central hillside portion of the former mining settlement founded eighty years earlier during the nineteenth-century Colorado Gold Rush. 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