Paul Rand

Untitled, Cat and Rooster

1944

Work is matted but not framed. Painter, Designer, Illustrator born on July 18, 1903 in Warren Arkansas. Studied at the Chicago Art Institute; Northwestern University; Vienne, Austria; with Eliot O’Hara and Hubert Ropp. Member of the following organizations: Dallas Art Association; Texas Fine Arts Association; National Association of Watercolor Artists; and the Texas watercolor Society. Smith exhibited at: American Watercolor Society in 1945, 1948 and 1952; with National Assn. of Watercolor Artists in 1945, 1946, and 1948; Artists Alliance in Dallas in 1943 (awarded prize), in 1944 (awarded prize), in 1945-46 and 1948-1950, 1952-53 with prizes awarded in 1948 and 1953; the Texas General Exhibition from 1943 through 1946, 1948-49; with the Texas Watercolor Society from 1950-52 with prizes won in 1950 and 1951, 1957; with the Southern States Arts League in 1944 and 1945; Texas Fine Arts Association in 1945 and awarded prize and with the Texas Artist Group consecutively from 1945.Smith’s work is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Her one-man shows were in Austin, Texas in 1948; in San Antonio in 1951 and Dallas in 1951. Smith’s work is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Original pastel and gouache on paper by Robin Artine Smith...

Italian illustrator Gianni Benvenuti depicts a dramatic scene from the epic Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. With unrivaled skill, Benvenuti captures a peak moment of drama when...

Acrylic on masonite. This is a pivotal work in deep and radiant cobalt blue from 1950. It dipicts calligraphic and hieroglyph structures over a grid and pyramidal base by the first generation abstract expressionist. Provenance: Skinner: November 13, 1992 [Lot 00219}, The entry in the Skinner catalog indicates that the painting came directly from the artist to the family of the consignor to Skinner. Kaminsky Auctions. There is an unbroken paper trail that traces the ownership of the painting from the current owner, through two auction houses to the artist. Perfect unbroken provenance. Pousette-Dart was among the most inventive of the Abstract Expressionist generation, His uncanny talent was to expand the nature of abstraction and still make each mark each element very much his own; a reflection of what he called   "the concealed power of the spirit," he said, “not of the brute physical form."   His was not aiming for a singular, realized aesthetic formula but to expand the possibilities of painting; the transcendental in painting. Typical of such invention and exploration is this  painting  Untitled 1950 when the artist was only 34 years old and represented by one of the champions of the new American painting, Betty Parsons.  
A banner year for Pousette-Dart, the Museum of Modern Art acquired their first painting by the Minnesota born artist.  He worked on easel size works such as this painting an oil on masonite. At the same time Pousette-Dart was also working on larger scale works such as Path of the Hero, running over ten feet in length now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Both contain fields of color articulated by a highly sophisticated white hieroglyphic vocabulary. Rather than demonstrate an expressionist sensibility, Pousette-Dart harnesses his more cerebral ideas transforming thick areas of paint into a more refined composition of geometric forms akin to the pattern and forms of say a stained glass window. In a way he is looking back at Fugue, 1940 a black and white composition which makes use of a similar format of painting albeit smaller. Color and form are minimal, but what Pousette-Dart has maximized is the rhythmic and syncopated character of painting casting his ideas into purely symbolic terms that one might link to the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb. Nonetheless, nature is always at the core of Pousette-Dart’s thinking and dreaming. Here he has transformed the local Ramapo Mountains—where he will eventually move with his family to live and work— into a complex series of articulated fragments linked by style, scale and color.  The painting’s imagery built on two large triangles and reduced to just two colors, cobalt blue and white all outlined in black.  Pousette-Dart symbols stacked in horizontal and vertical rows:  blue is ground, white is language, symbolic of light, consciousness and awareness . The painting maintains a mystical character images compounded that formulate a secret code and linked to the series of white paintings Pousette-Dart authored in the first half of the 1950s. Get up close to the picture and you discover images within images a kind of picture puzzle...

Football plays cloaked in oversized Browns jackets are seen from behind running off the field. Always the graphic innovator, legendary illustrator Bob Peak creates a radical composition by leaving the bottom two-thirds of the picture plane empty of detail. To convey a sense of motion, Peak uses broad strokes of paint similar to the action painters Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, who were the dominant force in the fine art world in the 1960s. Clearly, one can see a cross-over influence from Fine Art to commercial illustration as Peak strikes a balance between abstract versus figurative art. This work was done on an assignment for Sports Illustrated...

There are a lot of people in the art world today who dismiss illustrators are being commercial solely because the artists identified as being commercial artists and that the work was done on assignment. Sadly these art world people have limited imagination and a restricted sense of curiosity. This boxing illustration/painting was done for Sports Illustrated...

From the Glynn and Suzanne Crain Collection, unsigned

Large Celestial Mythical Horse Painting by Alex K. Mason "Wardusa", Acrylic Gouache Ink on Canvas, Blue, White, Gold, Yellow This painting is part of a constellation series I did f...

Bold combination of abstract and gestural styles by NYC based designer/artist Fredda Tone Reminiscent of Clifford Stills, Robert Motherwell style

This is an unframed original painting on paper. Rocky Hawkins was born in 1950 in Seattle, Washington and grew up in small towns near the Cascades Mountains. His interest in the myst...

This is an unframed original painting on paper. Rocky Hawkins was born in 1950 in Seattle, Washington and grew up in small towns near the Cascades Mountains. His interest in the myst...

This is an unframed original painting on paper. Rocky Hawkins was born in 1950 in Seattle, Washington and grew up in small towns near the Cascades Mountains. His interest in the myst...

Enthralled with the lore and spirituality of American Indian cultures, his work often depicts these traditional subjects in nontraditional ways. Hawkins captures the raw sense of ele...