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Nell Blaine Art

American, 1922-1996
Nell Blaine, painter of still lifes and landscapes in brilliant colors, created abstract work that gives the appearance of being done in a carefree, totally lighthearted manner but in fact is the result of years of disciplined study. It is also an effect achieved after rehabilitation from polio, which nearly took her life. Suffering a paralyzed right hand, she taught herself to paint with her left hand, and she devoted much time to applying colors, some times as many as fifty varieties. She attributed her fascination with color with its discovery when she was two years old and corrective eye surgery allowed her to see color for the first time. Blaine was raised in the Richmond, Virginia, where she grew to hate the prevalent racial discrimination and left home at an early age. In high school, she was skilled enough to begin selling her artwork, which was mostly posters and portraits. She attended the Richmond School of Art, now Virginia Commonwealth University, between 1939 and 1942 but left its classical realist curriculum when one of the instructors introduced her to modern art. She used money she had earned from commercial art and went to New York and studied with Hans Hofmann, teacher of Abstract Expressionism. Shortly after, she married a jazz musician and immersed herself in the world of jazz, beating drums and improvising expressive dances, and associating with Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, and Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac. Her paintings of that time reflect her strong developing sense of relationship between jazz and abstract art. In 1944 at age twenty two, she became the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists and exhibited hard-edged geometric paintings, mostly black and white with accents of bright colors. She joined a cooperative of abstract artists and worked so hard at organizing shows that some referred to it as the Blaine Street Gallery. She was a strong personality who had special influence on Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher and appeared to thrive in the New York art scene of the 1940s. However, she decided that her lifestyle was unhealthy, and she left the city, had a period of seclusion, and then went to France where she admired the work of Gustave Courbet, Jean Antoine Watteau, Eugene Delacroix, and Nicholas Poussin and took up figurative art in an abstract style. She became known as a "painterly realist," and added landscapes and interiors to her subject matter. She earned fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and began spending at least half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She also traveled in Mexico. In 1959 on the island of Mykonos, Greece, she had polio. Her New York art friends in an exhibition of seventy-one artists raised money for extensive treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital. After recovery, she settled in a studio on Riverside Drive, spent her summers in Gloucester, and painted from her wheelchair. She died in 1996.
(Biography provided by Lincoln Glenn)
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Artist: Nell Blaine
Beach at Malcesine
By Nell Blaine
Located in Los Angeles, CA
Provenance: Corporate Art Collection Nell Blaine, painter of still lifes and landscapes in brilliant colors, created abstract work that gives the appearance of being done in a caref...
Category

1980s Abstract Nell Blaine Art

Materials

Pastel, Watercolor

The Harbor From Banner Hill
By Nell Blaine
Located in Los Angeles, CA
Nell Blaine (1922-1996) American Original India Ink and Wash titled "The Harbor from Banner Hill" The sight size is 17 x 27 inches. Signed and dated 1986 lower right and again verso...
Category

1980s Abstract Impressionist Nell Blaine Art

Materials

India Ink, Watercolor

Beach at Malcesine
By Nell Blaine
Located in Los Angeles, CA
Nell Blaine, painter of still lifes and landscapes in brilliant colors, created abstract work that gives the appearance of being done in a carefree, totally lighthearted manner but i...
Category

1980s American Modern Nell Blaine Art

Materials

Pastel, Watercolor

Daureen, II
By Nell Blaine
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Daureen, II Etching, 1969 Signed in pencil lower right Edition: 28 (17/28) Condition: Excellent Two hinges from previous matting Blaine studied etching at Atelier 17 in New York and considered one of their distinguished alums. "Blaine was foremost an abstract painter, first a student of Theresa Pollak...
Category

1960s Impressionist Nell Blaine Art

Materials

Etching

Touch of Fall watercolor and pastel painting by Nell Blaine
By Nell Blaine
Located in Hudson, NY
Signed "Nell Blaine" upper left in pencil. Signed, titled, dated verso on sheet. Signed, titled, dated verso on backing panel. The artist. Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Purchased by private collectors c.1994. By descent. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). From her November 15, 1996 NYT obituary: Nell Blaine, a widely respected New York landscape painter and watercolorist, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 74 and had homes in Manhattan and Gloucester, Mass. Ms. Blaine, who had been hospitalized since July, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1959, when she contracted polio. Ms. Blaine was born in Richmond, Va., in 1922, and first studied at the Richmond School of Art, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. She moved to New York in 1942 to study painting with Hans Hofmann and later studied etching and engraving at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. During her first years in New York, her work, which had previously been tightly realist, turned abstract, inspired by Mondrian, Leger and Jean Helion. At one time she was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists. She was also a founding member of the Jane Street Gallery, one of Manhattan's earliest artists' cooperatives, and had her first solo show there in 1945. Just as Ms. Blaine was becoming known as a promising abstract painter, and gaining the admiration of such critics as Clement Greenberg, she started to shift back to representation. Inspired in part by a trip with Larry Rivers in 1950 to Paris, where she was especially impressed by the work of Vuillard and Bonnard, she immersed herself in the tradition of 19th-century European painting. From the mid-1950's, she cultivated an increasingly painterly and colorful style, usually working directly from nature, or still life, with particular emphasis on the forms and hues of flowers. Her work retained a sense of all-over structure and pulsating energy that she nonetheless credited to abstract art. ''It all goes back to Mondrian,'' she would say. In the 1950's, Ms. Blaine was prominent among a circle of New York artists and poets that included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr. and Rudy Burckhardt. She had her first solo show of representational work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and was represented by the Poindexter Gallery until it closed in 1978, and, in recent years, by the Fischbach Gallery. During the 1950's she supported herself as a commercial artist, designing brochures for art galleries. In 1955, she designed the original logo, column heads and layout for The Village Voice. In 1957, Ms. Blaine was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female artists in America. In 1959, after several months of traveling and painting in Greece, she contracted severe bulbar polio on the island of Mykonos. ''To Nell Blaine,'' an exhibition organized at Poindexter to raise money for her hospital bills, included the work of 79 artists, including Saul Steinberg, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mr. Rivers, Ms. Freilicher and Robert Rauschenberg. After eight months in a New York hospital, including five months in an iron lung...
Category

1990s Abstract Impressionist Nell Blaine Art

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Pastel

Free Lancer
By Nell Blaine
Located in Carmel-by-the-sea, CA
Beautiful watercolor by Nell Blaine, in perfect condition. Framing options available. More photos available upon request. Nell Blaine was an American artist best known for her brightly colored oils and watercolors. Painted in a loosely brushed style, her depictions of still lifes and landscapes have a casual yet poignant quality, similar to the works of Fairfield Porter, Louisa Matthíasdóttir...
Category

1950s Nell Blaine Art

Materials

Watercolor

Nell Blair Walden Blaine "Standing Figure" Pastel Drawing, circa 1967
By Nell Blaine
Located in San Francisco, CA
Nell Blair Walden Blaine (1922-1996) "Standing Figure" pastel drawing circa 1967 A Fine original pastel portrait of a standing nude figure by listed artist Nell Blaine. Dimensions ...
Category

Mid-20th Century Impressionist Nell Blaine Art

Materials

Pastel

Summer, Quaker Hill oil painting by Nell Blaine
By Nell Blaine
Located in Hudson, NY
This work by Nell Blaine was exhibited at the Poindexter Gallery, as well as the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, both in New York City. It is signed lower left, and signed, titled, and dated ...
Category

1960s American Impressionist Nell Blaine Art

Materials

Oil, Board

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Llangorse Lake, Brecon Beacons, Wales, circa 1964. Welsh Landscape. Abstract.
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Roger Cecil. Welsh ( b.1942 - d.2015 ). Llangorse, Brecon Beacons Watercolor and pastel on paper. Signed. Image size 19.5 inches x 29.5 inches ( 49.5cm x 75cm ). Frame size 24.6 inches x 34.6 inches ( 62.5cm x 88cm ). Available for sale; this original painting is by the Welsh artist Roger Cecil and dates from around 1964. The watercolor and pastel work is presented and supplied in a sympathetic contemporary frame (our stock frame, which is shown in these photographs), mounted using conservation materials and behind glass. The original backboard has been reused but the artwork has been isolated from it using conservation barrier materials. This vintage artwork is in good condition, commensurate with its age. Previous cockling (rippling) of the paper has been eliminated by stretching and the use of a new mounting. Previous foxing and age marks have been mechanically removed and the coarse fiber of the paper has been made good in these areas. The painting is now ready to hang and display. The watercolor is signed lower left. Provenance: Previously with the Howard Roberts Gallery, Imperial Buildings, 69/74 St Mary Street, Cardiff. Roger Cecil was a reclusive painter, draughtsman and teacher who was born in Abertillery, Monmouthshire in 1942. He lived and worked in Wales for the last four decades of his life, much of it in the house where he was born and brought up. Cecil produced abstract work rich in imagery, poetry and color, which were drawn from his environment, the industrial valley towns and mountains. Prolific and obsessive, he was always a solitary artist, with no affiliations to any group or artistic movement. He worked for more than forty years, with an ever evolving and prolific creative output. His pictures capture the geology and the history of the places he knew so intimately, and the impact of man of that environment. Cecil studied Fine Art at Newport College of Art from 1959 to 1963, where his teachers included John Wright and Thomas Rathmell; in 1963 he gained the College’s highest award in the national diploma in design and a place at the Royal College London. In 1964 he won the David Murray Landscape Award from the RA. He took up his place at the Royal College of Art, but after just a few weeks he was unsatisfied and instead took up manual work in opencast mines and building sites. Cecil later spent some time teaching at Ebbw Vale. From 1995 to 1998 he did his MA, which he gained with distinction in communication design at St. Martin’s College of Art. The BBC made a television documentary on Cecil's work called The Gentle Rebel. For a long time Cecil did not exhibit, through choice, and it was friends who helped to promote him. He then had a series of exhibitions at Business Art Galleries from 1987, and in 1995 the Hill Court Gallery, Abergavenny, held a retrospective of his work. In 1998 Gordon Hepworth and Y Tabernacl both showed Cecil's pictures. Cecil’s works were also shown at the Oriel Myrddin Gallery in 2006 and 20011. The small book which takes the name of the earlier exhibition ”Cariad”; has an introduction by gallery manager Meg Anthony which states; “The magic of Roger Cecil’s work is in part down to the man, for he is enigmatic and surprising, diffident and proud. He has deliberately avoided the art establishment, remaining shy of its protocol and systems of exposure and recognition. He has consciously created the space to pursue his art, away from the pressures of publicity and celebrity...... paint is Roger’s passion.” Cecil’s methods were complex; he worked with a mixture of materials, including oil pastels, sandpaper, primer and plaster. He built up layers and then he rubbed and scratched them away. His work is textured and nuanced, and the color reverberates as if it has a life of its own. The paintings are abstract, but there are echoes of monumental shapes and undulations of the female form, the Valleys - the dark hills embracing the bowls of space and the rich, gritty textures of the industrial and post-industrial landscape, highlighted by intricate, personal marks. Sarah Bradford states: “Scale is an important feature of Roger Cecil’s work; he constantly shifts from near and the far off. He also moves his viewpoint from looking at, to looking down on to. This looking down, as though a bird, onto the world of the painting, comes from exploration of his surroundings and from the ordinance survey maps he takes with him when he walks. He has often said how he is inspired by the language of symbols and lines that are used in maps to delineate the landscape. It is easy to see the connection when looking at the networks of invented footpaths, waterways, and other pinpoint features that can be found in his work.” … Mary Lloyd...
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Dance at Gopsmor /// Impressionist Swedish Anders Zorn Etching Party Antique
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Previously Available Items
1994 Nell Blaine 'Jestina's Reds' Contemporary USA Lithograph
By Nell Blaine
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper Size: 30.75 x 29 inches ( 78.105 x 73.66 cm ) Image Size: 24 x 23 inches ( 60.96 x 58.42 cm ) Framed: No Condition: B-: Good Condition, Signs of Handling and Age Addition...
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1990s Nell Blaine Art

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Jestina's Reds
By Nell Blaine
Located in Long Island City, NY
Nell Blaine was inspired by the flower arrangements of her longtime aide, Jestina Forrester for this lithograph. Nell suffered from polio which required her to have full-time help, a...
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1990s Impressionist Nell Blaine Art

Materials

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"Anemones and Star of Bethlehem" Impressionist Still Life Painting
By Nell Blaine
Located in Houston, TX
A beautiful still life of flowers titled "Anemones and Star of Bethlehem" by renowned artist Nell Blaine. Oil on canvas circa 1970. Dimensions with...
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1970s American Impressionist Nell Blaine Art

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Oil

Nell Blaine art for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Nell Blaine art available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Nell Blaine in crayon, paint, pastel and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the Impressionist style. Not every interior allows for large Nell Blaine art, so small editions measuring 10 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of James March Phillips, Constantin Alajalov, and Walter Tittle. Nell Blaine art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $100 and tops out at $9,250, while the average work can sell for $2,400.

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