Margot Glass

Lady's Thumb, contemporary realist gold point botanical still life drawing, 2020

2020

Margot Glass reimagines color and tone, using luminescent gold flecks to translate vivid shades into bursts of white-gold. Ever-interested in fragility and ephemerality, Glass linger...

David Morrison was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1956. He received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. A visiting lecturer and guest artist at numerous universities, he is very involved in the world of printmaking, specifically stone lithography, and he is the Professor Emeritus at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. Morrison has exhibited widely, and his work is included in numerous public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New-York Historical Society, The National Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Figge Art Museum, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, the Portland Museum of Art, Collection of Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, to name a few. 'David Morrison’s drawings are in the Old Master tradition of still-life and natura morte, whose surface beauty with its signs of decay warn viewers about the transitory nature of all life. In many ways the artist’s refined drawings can be connected to the works of John James Audubon in the N-YHS collection, which, along with their birds, showcase fruit, leaves, and flowers whose signs of decay allude to the cycle of nature and the temporal nature of life. Audubon also tended to isolate his birds and settings against empty white backgrounds. Morrison’s portrayals of leaves also tie into the poetic celebration of nature and landscape found in the works of the Hudson River School. Most profoundly they relate to Asher B. Durand’s obsession with trees (see the 2010 Durand catalogue and the essay “‘A Magnificent Obsession’: Durand’s Trees as Spiritual Sentinels of Nature”). Nevertheless, in the case of the over-lifesize measurements and the leaf's and branch's isolation on the page, Morrison's watercolors are contemporary and modern in appearance, yet profoundly evocative of both past and future.' (Roberta Olson, Curator of Drawings The New-York Historical Society). Artist Statement My drawings of tree branches and trunks embrace nature. I love the springtime when there are eruptive explosions of buds with new leaves and berries. I am seduced by the sensual shape and color of the buds protruding from the branches. I love the firecracker explosion of the red and yellow berries of the crabapple. My drawings capture a moment of this existence. I am also fascinated with fallen tree branches with their scarification left by diseases, infestation, decomposition and storm damage. My drawings capture the degeneration cycle of plant materials and how they echo the living conditions of man and nature. I am interested in capturing the reality of their existence, with all the imperfections, echoing their fragile existence in nature, not an idealized beautification of nature like botanical illustrations. The drawings are hyper realistic: they capture minute details of the subjects that I portray, but they are only an illusion of the actual reality. I became obsessed with drawing branches...

In her ballpoint pen and gouache still-life, "Tree #55," Dina Brodsky uses a sketch-like approach to capture the texture of the tree bark, and the delicacy of its branches. Brodsky c...

Margot Glass’s rendering of detail demands close attention. Her play with positive and negative space—the almost imperceptible shade of translucence between leaf veins, or the rich p...

Margot Glass’s rendering of detail demands close attention. Her play with positive and negative space—the almost imperceptible shade of translucence between leaf veins, or the rich p...

Mary Reilly explores the full tonal depth of graphite in her nature drawings and landscapes. She finds all of the soft subtleties of gray as she shifts seamlessly from branch to pebb...

A watercolor on paper executed in bright and saturated red, yellow and blue depicting a box of matches by American artist David Wharton. Signed lower le...

Sean Lyman is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Missouri State University, with an extensive list of international exhibitions and work in public permanent collections including...

Sean Lyman is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Missouri State University, with an extensive list of international exhibitions and work in public permanent collections including...

Sean Lyman is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Missouri State University, with an extensive list of international exhibitions and work in public permanent collections including...

Watercolor of pink begonias by Barbara Gibson (20th Century). A large tuberous begonia is potted in a green pot. There are several large blossoms, and a few ...

Robert Kipniss (American, b. 1931) At Dawn, 1975 Pencil on paper 10 1/2 x 7 1/4 in. Framed: 14 2/3 x 11 1/3 in. Signed upper right: Kipniss '75 Verso bears Hirschl & Adler Galleries Label Robert Kipniss, painter and printmaker, was born in New York City in 1931. He creates essentially monochromatic*, stylized vistas with natural and architectural elements intended to evoke an elegiac, nearly surrealistic mood in haunting, silent landscapes; the melancholy of nostalgia. Trees, in mid and far-distance, form clusters or act as misty individuals containing a haunted, indefinable presence, witnesses to the foreground drama of more specific shape, form and detail, often a close-up tree. Kipniss studied at the Art Students League* in 1947; Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, 1948-50; and the University of Iowa, receiving a BA degree in English literature in 1952, and an MFA in painting and art history in 1954. The artist employs a meticulous technique combining a multiplicity of specific strokes, whether with brush, pencil or print-maker's needle and burin*, to create the essence of his generalized, non-specific forms. Light and darkness are clearly Kipniss' compositionally constructive elements. They also exist as contestants in the emotional drama at the heart of each work of art. The contrast, and sometimes combat, between these two opposites, symbolically represent with blackness -- ideas of threat, fear, trouble, evil; with whiteness safety, redemption, fulfillment and good. In Kipniss' 1995 mezzotint*, Clear Vase and Landscape, with a foreground image of precisely leafy stalks, the vase holding them, nearly invisible in its transparency, suggests an almost Salvador Dali-like surrealist device. This central image dominates but seems to invite association with, and commentary from, the surrounding clumps and individual round-topped, yet cedar-like trees. His mezzzotint, For Stella," 1997, depicts a gently twisting, curving, pale and smoothly-barked foreground, leafless tree limb or trunk, like a female human body, suggesting weakness, fatigue, an inability to deal with the staccato background screen of textured bush that seems to uncomfortably impinge upon it. This print is arguably a metaphor for a delicate soul struggling to overcome the prickly difficulties of domineering life. The classic mezzotint process, invented in the middle of the 17th Century, is the reverse of most of the other print-making media, since the artist works from a black ground to increasingly lighter areas. The copper plate is first roughened by a "rocker," creating a burr over the entire surface (the more burr left intact, the more ink it holds, the darker the final finished print). The artist, Robert Kipniss, in this instance, gradually burnishes, smoothes down the burr in varying degrees to produce the gradations of lights and darks of the final design. The deepest darks in the final picture are those areas on the plate that have been little touched after the initial roughening. Mezzotint relies on shade and tone rather than outline for its effect, which fits the Kipniss style of atmospheric* masses of value. A recent oil painting by Robert Kipniss, Hillside Silhouettes, 2001, 40 x 29, is somewhat more complex in composition than many, with four cubically-constructed houses each set in their own zones, seemingly unrelated to one another, with receding hills and similarly isolated, increasingly misty trees beyond. In his career, Robert Kipniss has had over 40 one-man shows since the first in New York in 1951, including an important retrospective exhibition at the Associated American Artist Gallery, New York in 1977. Many of these one-man exhibitions have been mounted by over 50 museums in the United States, South America and Europe, including the Chicago Art Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modem Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of Congress and British Museum in London. Robert Kipniss is represented in the permanent collections of the institutions above, among many others, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Art Institute; Yale University Museum; National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; and the New Orleans Museum of Art. He was elected to the National Academy of Design* in 1980, and to the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London in 1998 Robert Kipniss can be referenced in numerous publications, including Who's Who in American Art from the 1950s to the present, and multiple reviews in periodicals like Art News, Art in America and Art Forum. There are also three important catalogues raisonne published on his work. Robert Kipniss has received many awards: 1965 - Ohio University National Drawing Show, Purchase Prize 1976 - National Academy of Design, New York City, The Ralph Fabri Prize 1978 - The Print Club of Philadelphia, Charles M Lea Prize 1979 - Charlotte Printmakers Society, Purchase Award 1979 - Society of American Graphic Artists, Printmaking Award 1979 - Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH, Honorary Doctorate 1980 - Elected to the National Academy of Design, New York City 1980 - Audubon Artists, New York City, Silver Medal 1980 - National Academy of Design, New York City, The Leo Meissner...