Carl Barth

German Modernist Oil Painting LOWER RHINE

Joellyn T Duesberry Wall on Wharf Street, #513, New Orleans, LA 1976. Oil on linen Dimensions: (Frame) H 50.5" x W 66.5". sight size 50 x 66" Joellyn Toler Duesberry (1944 – 2016) was a plein air landscape artist who worked in oils. She said that her paintings echo the work of John Marin and Milton Avery. Of her art, Duesberry said, "I am not interested in a realist painting, I am not interested in an abstract painting. I am interested in the tension." Joellyn Duesberry was born on June 30, 1944 in Richmond, Virginia. Growing up in rural Virginia instilled in her a love for the land. She said, "All my life I think I've unconsciously tried to recreate the place where bliss or terror first came to me. Both emotions seemed so strong that I had to locate them outside of myself, in the land. This goes back to a childhood habit of living in rural Virginia and seeking woods and creeks and lakes for solitary refuge; places where I could sketch and paint." She decided to start painting at age ten after being given a pair of red tennis shoes and walking on the beach, inspired by the colorful juxtaposition of sand, shadow, and shoe. Soon thereafter she decided that "Women artists existed and she needed to be among them." She received a BA with Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, in art history and painting, from Smith College in 1966. In that year she was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. While at Smith, she "honed her skills by making countless copies of masterworks." She took her master's degree at New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Despite her degrees, she is considered to be a self-taught artist. Joellyn Duesberry was a plein air painter, who began "her canvases outdoors on an easel and finished] them in the studio, frequently making monotypes in between." She moved to Denver in 1985, and embraced the Colorado landscape in her art. In that year she received an Individual Painting Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to work with Richard Diebenkorn. In 1997, Duesberry won the Benjamin Altman Landscape Prize from the National Academy of Design. While she had a World Views residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) from 1998-1999, Duesberry painted city studies in studio space in some vacant offices of the World Trade Center's North Tower. She says that, because of her connection to the World Trade Center, the tone of her painting saddened after 9/11. In 2005, a PBS documentary was made of Joellyn Duesberry's life, work, and creative process titled Joellyn Duesberry: Dialogue with the Artist. Her works are held by institutions such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smith College Museum of Art. Publications 1998: A Covenant of Seasons: Monotypes by Joellyn T. Duesberry, Poetry by Pattiann Rogers, 2011: Elevated Perspective: The Paintings of Joellyn Duesberry, SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS Elevated Perspective: The Paintings of Joellyn Duesberry, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center Joellyn Duesberry: A Passion for the Land, Leslie Levy Fine Art, Inc., Scottsdale, AZ Joellyn Duesberry: A Passion for Western Land, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO Joellyn Duesberry Monotypes: Hidden Treasures, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO Joellyn Duesberry: Solace on Safari, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Tremaine Gallery, The Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, CT. Recent Monotypes, James Graham & Sons, Madison Avenue, New York, NY Joellyn Duesberry: Monotypes, Lizan-Tops Gallery, Easthampton, NY The Garden Paintings, Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO Joellyn Duesberry: Paintings, Tavelli Gallery, Aspen, CO Joellyn Duesberry, Graham Modern, Madison Avenue, New York, NY Joellyn Duesberry: Paintings and Monotypes, Carol Siple Gallery, Denver, CO Joellyn Duesberry, Tatistcheff Gallery, New York, NY SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS Significant Women Artists, Curtis Arts & Humanities Center, Greenwood Village, CO Finding Abstraction, Gallery 1261, Denver, CO Rocks on Paper, Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York, NY Summer Landscape Show, Greenhut Gallery, Portland, ME Defining the West: 200 Years of American Imagery, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Roots, Landing Gallery, Rockland, ME Annual Professional Painters’ Exhibition, The Century Association, New York, NY Glory of Landscapes, Pelham Art Centre, New York, NY Salon du Musee, Featured Artist, Salon d Arts at Gallery 1261, Denver, CO Small Works, Gallery 1261, Denver, CO The Urban Myth, Vision of the City, Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA The Art of Printmaking, paying homage to Open Press,Archer Concept Group,Denver,CO Twenty Years: Paintings: Joellyn Duesberry, Bunny Harvey...

Large gilt framed abstract modernist landscape of Jerusalem. Framed it measures 33.25 X 41.25 inches. Canvas measures 28 x 36 inches. Bold Blue sky. Avraham Binder was born in 1906 in Vilnius (or Vilna), now part of Lithuania. He began painting at an early age and completed the prescribed studies in painting at the academy of arts in his native city. Upon graduation, at the commencement exhibition of works submitted by the graduates, he was awarded a prize in recognition of his talents. Artistic talent had deep roots in the Binder family. Avraham's father and grandfather were both artistically inclined, as was his sister Zila Binder and daughter Yael. In fact, he came from a long line of master artistic bookbinders, hence the family surname. The Binder family emigrated to Palestine in 1920. There, his father established a bookbinding workshop in Tel-Aviv while Avraham pursued painting. Binder has not identified with any particular modern school nor narrow artistic doctrine. He struggles to verbally explain his personal conception. Instead, he derives inspiration from emotions, resulting in a great variety of artistic treatments. Particularly memorable are his urban landscapes with their predominance of blues and aquamarines, composed of a profusion of squares and rectangles, crowding one another and covering nearly the entire canvas. The angular shapes are interspersed with radiant dots of red, gold and yellow, like the lights of the big city. Those squares and rectangles reflect, perhaps, impressions of a childhood spent among books which were scattered about the home and workshop of his father, the bookbinder. These shapes, no doubt, had their influence upon the artist whose first youthful impressions were – books. Traces of these shapes are discernible in Binder’s work to this day, in the angularity of splashes of color which, no longer crowded together, are now well separated to create an airy spaciousness. Not only the splashes of color – the inventing space, too – creates figurative effects in the artist’s treatment. Avraham Binder is not a “cerebral” painter. Neither identified with any particular modern school, nor preaching any narrow artistic doctrine, he is an emotional artist: his inspiration, derived from the heart, leads him on to the most varied range of treatments in his artistic work. In vain might one try to persuade him to define his personal conception of painting. He is not one to indulge in verbal explanation. But his sheer artistic skill, his virtuosity with the paint brush, did impel him to experiment widely with the artistic techniques of the modern age. And his exceptional talent stood him in good stead in all this experimentation. Binders large-scale urban landscapes are not mere constructs to represent our present-day architecture with its pervasive angularity. Made up as they are of color, Binder’s unique color composition qualifies these canvases to be ranked among the foremost artistic works in Israeli painting. They are uniquely Binder, very different from what we see in the work of his contemporaries. Here and there, Binder also introduces the human element into these paintings. He lives and breathes the atmosphere of his surroundings, deeply experiencing the sea and the shore of Tel-Aviv that confront him day after day, and which he has transferred to his canvases, as metaphors in paint, throughout the life. More recently, he has created a new series of shore-and-seascapes, in tones ranging from brown to blue. ochre, violet and pale yellow – marvelous views of the sea and of figures enlivening its shore. In yet another series, featuring nearly the same range of hues, he lets us view, through his eyes, the Carmel Market in Tel-Aviv, or the city’s coffee houses with their crowds of people, heads bunched together as if in search of human closeness, with the windows looking in upon them. He has also done large paintings of Jerusalem – not the Jerusalem of gloom and holiness, but a Jerusalem in contrast to the flat topography of Tel-Aviv; it is this different topography which here provides the challenge for him as a painter. And the colors – the colors are bright, full of light, an inner illumination which seems to emanate from the artist himself, rather than from the sun beating down from above. So many great artists have built their life’s work upon watercolors. Binder’s watercolors are in no way inferior in their artistic worth to many of those, what with their spontaneity, their translucent quality, their color combinations, and the artist’s ability to say so much with an economy of brush strokes. We have here a painter who, until the end of his life, was still in his full creative powers, and who continued to add to his impressive storehouse of artistic works. Hundreds of his paintings grace the homes of collectors in Israel and throughout the world, or hang in his private collection; they include Israel landscapes and, most importantly, cityscapes; an exquisite series of wild flowers; many portrait paintings; experimental wood sculptures; murals painted on wood panels; reliefs…, etc. All these are testimony to an artist who refuses to rest on his laurels, who forever reaches out to try his hand at new challenges, strikes out in novel directions, discovers innovative techniques, and experiments in all the dimensions of the plastic arts. On the Israel Museum website they have listed an exhibition of his Artists in Israel for the Defense, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, Tel Aviv 1967 Artists: Avraham Binder, Motke Blum, (Mordechai) Samuel Bak, Yosl Bergner, Nahum Gilboa, Jean David, Marcel Janco, Lea Nikel, Jacob Pins, Esther Peretz Arad, Dani Karavan, Reuven Rubin, Zvi Raphaely, Yossi Stern...

My interest is to convey elements of the classical arcadian landscape paintings of the 17th and 18th century, inviting the viewer to reflect again at the sublime landscape of the pas...

My interest is to convey elements of the classical arcadian landscape paintings of the 17th and 18th century, inviting the viewer to reflec...