Clifford Ellis

Clifford Ellis, 'Sketch for Sailing Boats I' drawing Modern British Art

Mid 20th Century

Kenneth Rowntree Abstract Australian Landscape Watercolour 27.5 x 33cm Signed (top left) and dated ‘Kenneth Rowntree ’85’ Provenance: Anderson & Garland Studio sale of Kenneth Rowntree lot 263 Tuesday 8 September 2009 For biographical details and other works by Rowntree click here. Rowntree visited Australia in 1984/85. In this painting he picks up various vignettes from the Australian landscape in six separate blocks. Two relate to the sky, with almost-unbroken blue skies stretching from horizon to horizon, three relate to desert areas, with a whole array of different textures, and one is a luscious green. In one of the desert scenes he has picked out two road signs, in typical Rowntree fashion, reducing them to their simplest form. In her essay Kenneth Rowntree: A Strange Simplicity (published in Kenneth Rowntree A Centenary Exhibition Published by Moore-Gwyn Fine Art and Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, on behalf of the artist’s estate, on the occasion of the centenary of Kenneth Rowntree’s birth) Alexandra Harris makes reference to this painting noting: "Later, in 1986, just when the young David Hockney was collaging the signs and road-markings of Route 138 in Pearblossom Highway, Rowntree was in Australia painting yellow diamond-shaped road-signs as bright icons in open country. Wherever he went, Rowntree captured both the unfamiliarity of places and their relationship to things he knew. Heading into the Australian outback, he painted a road-sign as he would paint a rail signal at Clare in Suffolk or nautical markers at Swansea." Hockney’s 1986 Pearblossom Highway may be seen in the Getty and it is worth noting that Rowntree was in fact painting the yellow sign in 1985, so a year before Hockney. Kenneth Rowntree (1915-1997) Rowntree was born in Scarborough and educated in York where his father managed the local department store. Young Kenneth’s work was displayed there and his first major commission arose from an advertisement at the store. After the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford he studied at the Slade School, meeting Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden and then moving to north Essex to work with them as members of the group of Great Bardfield Artists. Between 1940 and 1943 he was one of the team of over 60 artists engaged by the War Artists Advisory Committee for the ‘Recording Britain’ project, to record the face of England and Wales before wartime action – or development – changed it for ever. Rowntree’s keen sense of design, and fascination with the quirky and the vernacular made him an ideal candidate to interpret our built heritage’s more unusual aspects. In 1951 he painted murals in the Lion and Unicorn pavilion for the Festival of Britain, he decorated the route of the Queen’s Coronation procession (some of the works being acquired by Her Majesty). During a teaching job at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford he was driven, perhaps by his experiences recording Britain, to record the decorated barges that belonged to the Oxford Colleges. These wooden Victorian ceremonial barges had belonged to the London livery companies, but were acquired in their later life by the Colleges to be used as changing rooms and clubhouses for the College boat clubs – depending on the size of the barge rowing eights were stored on board too. Part way through painting one of them Rowntree thought his drawing incorrect until he realised that it was the boat that was moving. It was in fact sinking. These days the Colleges have modern (but unromantic) boat houses; a handful of the barges remain – restored – in private hands. In 1959 he was appointed Professor of Fine Art at King’s College, Newcastle (latterly part of the University), which as British art schools went was one of the most progressive. The Master of Painting was the abstract constructionist Victor Passmore...

From a series of paintings and drawings by Clifford Ellis and his wife Rosemary. To see them or our other Modern British Art, scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it clic...

To view our other Modern British Art and our views of London scroll down to 'view all from this seller' and search. Horace Mann Livens (1862-1936) Hanover Square London (1920) Gouac...

John Piper (1903-1992) Bullslaughter Bay Watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper 27.5 x 35.5cm John Piper CH was an English painter, printmaker, and designer of stained-glass windo...

We acquired a series of paintings from Clifford and Rosemary Ellis's studio. To find more scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this seller." C...

We acquired a series of paintings from Clifford and Rosemary Ellis's studio. To find more scroll down to "More from this Seller" and below it click on "See all from this seller." C...

Original abstract painting depicting the sounds of a bird flock. Nigel Bird has wonderful artworks for sale online and in our art gallery. Nigel Bird Studied Fine Art (Sculpture and ...

Purple Haze (Glyph), 2012 ink, watercolor, colored pencil, marker ink and fluid ink on synthetic paper 25 x 38 inches / 635 x 965 mm Christina McPhee’s expansive abstract paintings, drawings, photographs, and videos test or query how can we know, and who is we? Moving from within a matrix of measurement, observation and contingent effects, her work resists characterization as product, and continually accesses fields outside itself. For her, process equals trial. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, from a perspective of the non-self– a world beyond identity. McPhee’s dynamic, performative, physical engagement with materials, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphic gestures and mark-making. The tactics of living are in subterfuge, like the ‘dazzle ships...

Sandy Litchfield found peace and inspiration in regular solitary walks through nature throughout the pandemic. Her most recent body of work diaristically documents her constitutional...

Executed in 1950 during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and non-representational art, Feininger reduces a landscape to the bare minimums of lines and wash. Moeller Fine Art

BLUE JAY WAY, 2012 ink and graphite on Arches cold press paper 44.5 x 75 inches / 1130 x 1905 mm  unframed Christina McPhee’s expansive abstract paintings, drawings, photographs, and videos test or query how can we know, and who is we? Moving from within a matrix of measurement, observation and contingent effects, her work resists characterization as product, and continually accesses fields outside itself. For her, process equals trial. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, from a perspective of the non-self– a world beyond identity. McPhee’s dynamic, performative, physical engagement with materials, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphic gestures and mark-making. The tactics of living are in subterfuge, like the ‘dazzle ships...

Lower right "N.Brahma", inscribed verso "Nada Brahma" and titled "Refracted Sunset". A large watercolor seascape showing an abstracted view of jade and cobalt waves beneath a scarle...