Chris Lujan

"Touch", Large Mixed Medium, India Ink and Coffee Grounds on Deckle BFK Paper

2000s

This large mixed medium painting in india ink and coffee grounds on heavyweight deckle BFK print paper, "Beauty", depicts an nude woman standing. With impressionistic strokes the observer can only glimpse her outline in browns, leaving the finer details to the imagination, giving the work a ghostly air of a faded memory. Signed by artist lower right. "Capturing movement is everything to me in my work. It exists in the way the brush moves and the hand bends bringing action and life to the surface it is connecting to. The work itself can then exist as a history, and bring forth evidence of time as the essential force within the artwork. In today’s contemporary world, there are many ways to define art. That is why it is impotent that you, the viewer, understand why I create and what art means to me. For me, art is so much more than an image of an object, an advertisement or a statement. Art is in its nature the undeniable evidence of our own humanity and existence. It connects us, to each other and to our past. Speaking to the parts of us we never will fully understand, our emotions, are spirituality and are mortality. As an artist; I need to speak to these feelings and questions. Using mark-making and gestures as a guide, I search, letting go of control as the moment breathes life into the creation of my work. Through the boundary of line, I give shape to the image. Conveying an overall balance between the moment of creation and the structure of the figure. Though this practice, I strive to provoke a universal connection to the work. One that speaks to humanity's emotional understanding of empathy, curiosity, sorrow and joy." - Chris Lujan...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY “Untitled” painted in India Ink of two heads was done during what has been call Lester Johnson’s Dark Paintings of the 1960s. In 2013 John Yau wrote with much insight about that period of Johnson’s work - “Lester Johnson (1919-2010) was an innovative figurative painter who has never quite fit into any of the accepted narratives of postwar American art, and that alone makes his work worthy of a longer look. The 1960s was an explosively turbulent era marked by assassinations, race riots, space flights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ first American tours, and the rapidly escalating Vietnam War. Everyone was wary and on edge. Meanwhile, in the New York art world, all eyes were fixated on the rise and triumph of Pop Art, Minimalism and Color Field painting. Johnson was one of the few artists that attuned to the dismay that everyone was feeling during the violent and schizophrenic time, the sense that it could all come crashing down. However, his work was never overtly political or didactic. While his dark, brooding, monochromatic paintings of anonymous men gained a small and loyal following, they also became part of that largely invisible history of a time when New York was a tough scary and exciting place to be. More than fifty years after they were made, Johnson’s Dark Paintings continue to retain a coarseness that we associate with gestural Abstract Expressionism and Jean Dubuffet’s anti-psychological, anti-personal portraits incorporating sand and gravel. One sees in them the antecedents of Joyce Pensato’s gestural exaggerations of Groucho Marx, Homer Simpson and Minnie Mouse. While Pensato brings an infectious humor to her work, Johnson was more somber. I cannot help but think that both these artists chose their bedraggled subjects out of empathy and a trace of identification.” Lester Johnson, was born in 1919 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended Minneapolis School of Art, where he studied under Alexander Masley who was a former student of Hans Hofmann. Johnson continued his artistic career in New York City where he opened his first studio on 6th and Avenue A. His neighbor there was fellow painter Wolf Kahn. During his time there he would share a loft with Larry Rivers and married the art historian Josephine Valenti. In 1961 he briefly taught at Ohio State University before returning to New York City to share a studio with Philip Pearlstein. Jack Tworkov would invite Johnson to teach at Yale, an offer that Lester Johnson would accept and spend the rest of his life in Connecticut. Johnson passed away in 2010. Johnson's work has been exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Walker Art Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This work has been framed inside of a custom frame with museum glass...

This large mixed medium painting in india ink and wine on heavyweight deckle BFK print paper depicts a yellow horse in motion, awash in a rainbow of vibrant colors. In keeping with the artist's themes of connecting the body with its animal nature, Chris Lujan...

This large mixed medium painting in india ink and wine on heavyweight deckle BFK print paper depicts a yellow horse in motion, awash in a rainbow of vibrant colors. In keeping with the artist's themes of connecting the body with its animal nature, Chris Lujan...

This mixed media on paper from the seminal artist Artis Lane is a surreal study based off the model paintings from her long and illustrious career. The subj...

This mixed media on paper from the seminal artist Artis Lane is one of the many model pictures from her long and illustrious career. The subject i...

Joseph Glasco (American, 1925-1996) Standing Man, 1955 India ink and gouache on textured paper 10 x 8 inches 16.75 x 13.5 inches, framed Joseph Glasco was born in Paul’s Valley, Okl...

Gorgeous acrylic and pencil abstracted self portrait by California artist Erika Whiteway (American, b. 1954). Signed and dated lower right "Whiteway, 5/90". Unframed. Size: 22"H x 28"W. Erika Whiteway (b. February 26, 1954, San Jose, California) is a California writer, artist, musician, and thoroughbred breeder/trainer. She lived slightly off the grid and off the computer entirely for nearly ten years, until returning to the Bay Area, where she once more resides, making art, writing, playing music and taking care of horses. She was an early member of The Well, dubbed by "Wired Magazine as "the world's most influential online community", where she met Tiffany Lee Brown...

Acrylic monoprint painted with ink, it comes framed in a white passe-partout

Watercolor ink and charcoal on paper, it comes framed in a white passe-partout.

Watercolor and ink on paper, it comes framed in a white passe-partout.

Garden Splendor and wonder abstract and visual Stimulation Abstract Garden Splendor by New York and California artist Ross Martin Fink (American, B-1935). An in depth abstract and Ga...