Christopher Bekins

Tranquility

2018

Oil on Canvas

Depicts the terminal view from LAX. Sparsely populated though replete with objects and evidence of the built environment, Gay Summer Rick creates iconic urban and coastal land and cityscape paintings that evoke emotion and a sense of place. She creates scenes that are at once dreamlike and familiar. You may have been there; you are there. Revealing an unexpected beauty in commonplace elements within the urban landscape, Gay Summer’s style is a melding of impressionism and color-field painting describing the quiet vibration of life where cities meet the sea. Applying oil paint to canvas using only palette knives, Gay Summer Rick creates images through a series of interacting, melded layers. The paint is treated architectonically; it is engineered, built into layers, carved, scraped, accumulated, and almost sculpted, but never removed, never discarded. In part to avoid material waste and the use of toxic solvents for reasons of environmentalism, she finds this almost mnemonic accrual of paint a reflection of her experiences in the places she depicts. Growing up in New York surrounded by artists, Gay Summer Rick began her arts education early in life. She went on to formally study art and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in New York at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, where she drew, painted and sculpted images on clay forms and vessels. After receiving a Masters degree in Business Administration, she continued her art training in Los Angeles in painting, which became the primary focus of her art practice. A resident of Southern California for over 25 years, the artist maintains her studio in Malibu. Gay Summer Rick regularly exhibits in California and Hawaii, and has shown in New York, Europe, and Japan. Her paintings have been featured in solo gallery exhibitions and museum group exhibitions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Rental & Sales Gallery; and in international and national group exhibitions where she has received numerous awards and honors. She is a member of Oil Painters of America, California Art Club, Malibu Art...

Oil on canvas.

Oil on canvas.

Oil on canvas.

Oil on canvas

Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-1873), Don Quichote und Sancho Pansa. Oil on canvas with a very nice frame: 45,5 x 57 cm.

Artist: Bernhard Buter (1883-1959) German Title: Rhinish Landscape Medium: Oil on Canvas Dimensions: Framed 19” x 21” , Unframed 11 x 13” Bernhard Buter paints agrarian landscapes i...

Rene Genis (French 1922-2004) “Les Falaise Normande” / The Cliffs of Normand. A sea scape with high cliffs, the beach, and two fishermen. The cliffs are in browns, tans and olives a...

Rene Genis (French 1922-2004) Monument Valley. 1967. Beautiful oranges, browns, greens against a turquoise blue sky. Oil on canvas, laid on mat. Si...

The Great Fire of London in September 1666 was one of the greatest disasters in the city’s history. The City, with its wooden houses crowded together in narrow streets, was a natural fire risk, and predictions that London would burn down became a shocking reality. The fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane, an area near the Thames teeming with warehouses and shops full of flammable materials, such as timber, oil, coal, pitch and turpentine. Inevitably the fire spread rapidly from this area into the City. Our painting depicts the impact of the fire on those who were caught in it and creates a very dramatic impression of what the fire was like. Closer inspection reveals a scene of chaos and panic with people running out of the gates. It shows Cripplegate in the north of the City, with St Giles without Cripplegate to its left, in flames (on the site of the present day Barbican). The painting probably represents the fire on the night of Tuesday 4 September, when four-fifths of the City was burning at once, including St Paul's Cathedral. Old St Paul’s can be seen to the right of the canvas, the medieval church with its thick stone walls, was considered a place of safety, but the building was covered in wooden scaffolding as it was in the midst of being restored by the then little known architect, Christopher Wren and caught fire. Our painting seems to depict a specific moment on the Tuesday night when the lead on St Paul’s caught fire and, as the diarist John Evelyn described: ‘the stones of Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream and the very pavements glowing with the firey redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’ Although the loss of life was minimal, some accounts record only sixteen perished, the magnitude of the property loss was shocking – some four hundred and thirty acres, about eighty per cent of the City proper was destroyed, including over thirteen thousand houses, eighty-nine churches, and fifty-two Guild Halls. Thousands were homeless and financially ruined. The Great Fire, and the subsequent fire of 1676, which destroyed over six hundred houses south of the Thames, changed the appearance of London forever. The one constructive outcome of the Great Fire was that the plague, which had devastated the population of London since 1665, diminished greatly, due to the mass death of the plague-carrying rats in the blaze. The fire was widely reported in eyewitness accounts, newspapers, letters and diaries. Samuel Pepys recorded climbing the steeple of Barking Church from which he viewed the destroyed City: ‘the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw.’ There was an official enquiry into the causes of the fire, petitions to the King and Lord Mayor to rebuild, new legislation and building Acts. Naturally, the fire became a dramatic and extremely popular subject for painters and engravers. A group of works relatively closely related to the present picture have been traditionally ascribed to Jan Griffier...

Zygmund Jankowski (1925–2009) painted traditional subjects with exuberant irreverence for traditional rules of color, composition, and perspective. He disparaged imitation and deligh...