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  • Design Credit: Samantha Todhunter Design Ltd., Photo Credit: Oliver Clarke. Dimensions: H 30.5 in. x W 28.5 in.
  • Design Credit: Lucy Harris Studio, Photo Credit: Francesco Bertocci. Dimensions: H 30.5 in. x W 28.5 in.
  • Design Credit: Timothy Godbold, Photo Credit: Karl Simone. Dimensions: H 30.5 in. x W 28.5 in.
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Edward Chavez
Abstract Oil Painting with a Bird Motif by Edward Chavez, Black Pink Red Blue

circa 1980

About the Item

Oil on canvas abstract painting with a bird motif signed by artist Edward (Eduardo) Arcenio Chavez (1917-1995) circa 1980. Painted in red, blue, purple, orange, and black. Presented in a vintage frame measuring 30 ½ x 28 ½ inches, image size is 29 ¼ x 27 inches. About the Artist: Born 1917 Died 1995 Born in Wagonmound, New Mexico, Eduardo Chavez was an illustrator, muralist, genre and landscape painter, sculptor, and lithographer. He studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center with Boardman Robinson, Frank Mechau, Arnold Blanch, and Peppino Mangravite. Before serving in the army during WWII, Chavez painted many murals in the west. When he was demobilized from the army after WWII, he went to live in Woodstock, New York with his wife, artist Jenne Magafan. A new artistic climate developed in Woodstock after WWII. There was an influx of artists from the West and Midwest in Woodstock. Some of these artists were Bruce Currie, Fletcher Martin, Edward Millman, Mitchell Siporin, Herman Cherry, Denny Winters, and Jenne Magafan’s sister, Ethel Magafan. In 1947, the Art Students League reestablished a summer school in Woodstock, as it had left in 1922. Chavez once remarked that even if he did not find stimulus for painting in Woodstock, he still liked living there. Chavez was a member of the Woodstock Art Association, the National Academy of Design, and the National Society of Mural Painters. He won a two-thousand dollar Tiffany Grant in 1948, the Fulbright Award in 1951, and the Childe Hassam Award in 1953. He was an instructor of art at the Art Students League from 1954 to 1958, a visiting professor of art at Colorado College from 1959 to 1960, and a professor of art at Syracuse University from 1960 to 1962. Exhibited: WFNY 1939; WMAA; NAD, 1943; PAFA, 1942-60; AIC, 1939-40, 1942-43, 1946; CI, 1942; SFMA, 1940, 1941, 1944, 1945; Los Angeles MA, 1944, 1945; VMFA; PAFA, 1948-60; Corcoran Gal, 1949, 1957; Am. Art Exhibit., MMA; Univ. Illinois, 1952, 1954; Mus. New Mexico, 1955; AFA traveling exhibit., 1955. Works Held: LOC, Print Collection; Watkins Gallery, Wash., DC; MoMA; Detroit (MI) Mus. Art; Butler Inst. Am. Art, Youngstown, OH; Newark Mus.; Roswell Mus. Art; Mus. of New Mexico. WPA Murals: West High School, Denver, CO; USPOs, Center, TX, (1938), Geneva, NE, and Glenwood Springs, CO. Further Reading: Smith, Anita M. Woodstock History and Hearsay. Woodstock Arts: Woodstock, New York, 2006.; Woodstock Artists Association. Woodstock’s Art Heritage: The Permanent Collection of the Woodstock Artists Association. Overlook Press: Woodstock, New York, 1987.; Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America, Vol. I. Peter Hastings Falk, Georgia Kuchen and Veronica Roessler, eds.,Sound View Press, Madison, Connecticut, 1999. 3 Vols. ©David Cook Galleries, LLC
  • Creator:
    Edward Chavez (1917 - 1995)
  • Creation Year:
    circa 1980
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 30.5 in (77.47 cm)Width: 28.5 in (72.39 cm)Depth: 1.5 in (3.81 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Framing:
    Frame Included
    Framing Options Available
  • Condition:
    very good condition.
  • Gallery Location:
    Denver, CO
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: 266091stDibs: LU27311564352

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  • Two Horses, 1960s Framed Semi Abstract Tempera Painting Figural Horses Landscape
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    Two Horses, vintage 1960 semi abstract painting by Colorado/Woodstock, NY woman artist, Ethel Magafan (1916-1993). Midcentury modern era original work painted with tempera on board in colors of green, red orange, golden yellow, orange, black and purple. Signed by the artist lower left, signed and titled verso. Presented in a custom frame, outer dimensions measure 10 ½ x 20 ½ x 1 inches. Image size is 5 ¼ x 13 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition. Expedited and International Shipping is available; please contact us for an estimate. About the Artist: The daughter of a Greek immigrant father and a Polish immigrant mother who met and married in Chicago, Ethel Magafan, her identical twin sister Jenne and their elder sister Sophie grew up in Colorado to which their father relocated the family in 1919. They initially lived in Colorado Springs where he worked as a waiter at the Antlers Hotel before moving to Denver in 1930 to be head waiter at the Albany Hotel. 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Mechau trained her and her sister in the complex process of mural painting while they studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, teaching them the compositional techniques of the European Renaissance masters. This also involved library research for historical accuracy, small scale drawing, and the hand-making of paints and other supplies. Ethel recalled that their teacher "was a lovely man but he was a hard worker. He drove us. There was no fooling around." Her apprenticeship with Mechau prepared her to win four national government competitions, beginning at age twenty-two, for large murals in U.S. post offices: Threshing - Auburn, Nebraska (1938), Cotton Pickers - Wynne, Arkansas (1940), Prairie Fire - Madill, Oklahoma (1940), and The Horse Corral - South Denver, Colorado (1942). In preparation for their commissions Ethel and her sister made trips around the country to pending mural locations, driving their beat-up station wagon, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots with art supplies and dogs in tow. She and Jenne combined their talents in the mural, Mountains in Snow, for the Department of Health and Human Services Building in Washington, DC (1942). A year later Ethel executed her own mural, Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1814, for the Recorder of Deeds Building, also in Washington, DC. Her first mural commission, Indian Dance, done in 1937 under the Treasury Department Art Project for the Senate Chamber in the United States Capitol, has since disappeared. Ethel and her sister lived and worked in Colorado Springs until 1941 when their residence became determined by the wartime military postings of Jenne's husband, Edward Chavez. They moved briefly to Los Angeles (1941-42) and then to Cheyenne, Wyoming, while he was stationed at Fort Warren, and then back to Los Angeles for two years in 1943. While in California, Ethel and Jenne executed a floral mural for the Sun Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel and also painted scenes of the ocean which they exhibited at the Raymond and Raymond Galleries in Beverly Hills. While in Los Angeles they met novelist Irving Stone, author of Lust for Life, who told them about Woodstock, as did artists Arnold Blanch and Doris Lee (both of whom previously taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center school. In summer of 1945 Ethel, her sister and brother-in-law drove their station wagon across the country to Woodstock which became their permanent home. A year later Ethel married artist and musician, Bruce Currie, whom she met in Woodstock. In 1948 with the help of the GI Bill they purchased an old barn there that also housed their individual studios located at opposite ends of the house. The spatial arrangement mirrors the advice she gave her daughter, Jenne, also an artist: "Make sure you end up with a man who respects your work... The worst thing for an artist is to be in competition with her husband." In 1951 Ethel won a Fulbright Scholarship to Greece where she and her husband spent 1951-52. In addition to extensively traveling, sketching and painting the local landscape, she reconnected with her late father's family in the area of Messinia on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece. At the same time, her sister Jenne accompanied Chavez on his Fulbright Scholarship to Italy where they spent a productive year painting and visiting museums. Shortly after returning home, Jenne's career was cut tragically short when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-six. It deeply affected Ethel whose own work took on a somber quality for several years conveyed by a darkish palette, as seen in her tempera painting, Aftermath (circa 1952). In the 1940s Ethel and her sister successfully made the important transition from government patronage to careers as independent artists. Ethel became distinguished for her modernist landscapes. Even though Ethel became a permanent Woodstock resident after World War II, from her childhood in Colorado she retained her love of the Rocky Mountains, her "earliest source of my lifelong passion for mountain landscape." She and her husband began returning to Colorado for annual summer camping trips on which they later were joined by their daughter, Jenne. Ethel did many sketches and drawings of places she found which had special meaning for her. They enabled her to recall their vital qualities which she later painted in her Woodstock studio, conveying her feeling about places remembered. 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Her sketches were exhibited at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and then sent on a national tour by the Smithsonian Institution. Similarly, her previous work as a muralist earned her a final commission at age sixty-three for a 12 by 20 foot Civil War image, Grant in the Wilderness, installed in 1979 in the Chancellorsville Visitors Center at the Fredericksburg National Military Park in Virginia. 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