John Baker

"An Evening at Chess", contemporary, red, orange, acrylic, collage, mixed media

2017

John Baker’s “At the Easel” is a 36 x 30 inch acrylic on canvas with collage in midnight blue, lobster red and flesh tones. Calculated ambiguities and imp...

John Baker’s “A Meeting in Rome I”, an acrylic painting on canvas with collage 36 x 26 inches, in Cardinal red, pink and greens, is from the artist’s “divided self” series. A figure,...

John Baker’s “A Meeting in Rome II, an acrylic painting on canvas with collage, 29 x 27 inches, in cardinal red, lavenders, yellows and green, is part of the artist’s “divided self” ...

John Baker’s “New Year’s Eve”, a 60 x 30 inch acrylic painting with collage on canvas, is painted in ruby reds, aquamarine blue-greens, and deep Prussian blues. Two women (or perhaps three) have allowed a small boy to stay up with them until midnight; he joins the raucous celebration by blowing on a yellow noise maker...

Abstract painting on plexi. Vibrant red with black and yellow and charcoal hues. No frame needed. King theme. About the Artist: Michael has been working as a painter and designer for over 20 years. His work has been exhibited in various galleries and museums throughout the country including The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Austin Museum of Digital Art, The Westmoreland Museum of Art, UICA/Michigan, and The Mattress Factory. His paintings have been featured in Atlantic Homes and Lifestyles, Beaux Arts, Table Magazine, Perlora Contemporary Home Magazine, The Wall Street International Magazine and the cover of Housetrends. His work will also be featured in Design Within Reach’s 2019 Catalog. His clients have included The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Nintendo, IBM, Sony Pictures and Panasonic. His work has been published widely in various publications including TIME, The Wall Street Journal, How Magazine, Graphis, London’s Computer Arts, BIg Magazine, The Book of Probes by Marshall Mcluhan (designed by David Carson), Big Magazine and Speak. His collaboration with José Muniain on the short film installation “Navarro”, which documented his painting process, was a finalist in the D.C. Independent Film Festival. Some recent projects include the main lobby interior collections for Bakery Living and Bakery Living Blue, The Hardy House at Nemacolin Woodlands, large scale works for The PPG Paints Arena and commissioned work for The New York Pro Surf Competition and The Quiksilver Pro France. His work has also featured prominently on the sets of several feature films and television series, including Trouble With The Curve, The Last Witch Hunter...

Jean Maurice Lasnier (French, 1922 – 2006) VILLE SOLAIRE, OCTOBER 1971 Signed ‘LASNIER’ (lower middle) Oil on canvas 62.1/2 x 31.1/2 in. (158....

This is a large hand signed mixed media paiting on Arches French paper. A chess game encounter. Figurative Abstract Expressionist painting. Zwy Milshtein (Zvi Tzvi Milstein) BIOGRA...

Richard Andres (American, 1927-2013) Interior, 1976 acrylic on canvas signed lower right, signed and titled verso 50 x 59.5 inches Richard Andres was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1950, he was immediately drafted and served for two years in the army as a mural painter. He received his Master of Arts from Kent State in 1961. A frequent exhibitor at galleries and museums and winner of multiple May Show prizes, Andres taught art in the Cleveland Public Schools for 28 years, as well as teaching the University of Buffalo, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Western Reserve University. Very little in Richard Andres’ childhood would have predicted his love of classical music, mid-century-modern architecture and certainly not his lifelong passion for art and in particular abstract art. Richard’s father, Raymond, had no more than a third-grade education, and his mother, Clara, was one of thirteen children – only three of whom lived into adulthood and none of whom attended high school. They lived, when Richard was a boy, in a dingy area of Buffalo, NY in a walk-up apartment situated above a tavern. Raymond and Clara supplemented the income from their factory jobs in the bar downstairs with Raymond playing ragtime on the piano and Clara serving drinks. This often left Richard and his two older brothers at home alone to fend for themselves. The two older boys, Raymond and Russell, were - unlike Richard- rather rough and tumble and entertained themselves with stickball, boxing and the like. Richard, on the other hand, from a very young age liked to draw, or better yet even, to paint with the small set of watercolors he received for Christmas one year. Paper, however, at the height of the depression, was hard to come by. Luckily, Clara used paper doilies as decoration for the apartment and Richard would contentedly paint and then cut up doilies, gluing the pieces together to create collages. At eight-years-old, he discovered the Albright-Knox Museum (then known as the Albright Art Gallery) and spent several hours a week there studying the paintings. He was particularly fond of Charles Burchfield‘s landscapes, enamored with their ‘messiness’ and thinking that they somehow captured more ‘feeling’ than works he was previously familiar with. For his tenth Christmas, he asked for and received a ‘how-to’ paint book by Elliot O’Hare. Through this self-teaching, he assembled the portfolio needed for acceptance to Buffalo Technical High School where he studied Advertising Arts. In his Junior year, he was encouraged to enter a watercolor painting, “Two Barns,” in the national 1944-45 Ingersoll Art Award Contest and was one of twelve grand prize winners – each one winning one hundred dollars. More importantly the painting was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute Galleries, which resulted in his winning a national scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (The Cleveland Art Institute). He flourished at the art school under the tutelage of faculty members such as Carl Gaertner, as well as that of visiting artists such as William Sommer and Henry George Keller. He would say in later years that Gaertner, in particular, influenced his attitude toward life as well as art. “Gaertner,” Andres said, “believed that there was no need to be a ‘tortured artist’, that an artist should rather enjoy beauty, family, and life in general.” Free to spend his days as he chose, he wandered the Cleveland Art Museum for most of the hours he was not attending classes or painting; the remaining time was spent drinking coffee at a local hangout with art school friends – which is where he met fellow Henry Keller scholarship winner, Avis Johnson. Richard was immediately smitten with Avis, but being rather shy, it took him the entire summer of 1948 to build up his courage to ask her out. Over that summer he ‘thought about Avis’ and worked in a diner to save money. He also used the hundred-dollar prize money won in High School to visit the first Max Beckmann retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in St. Louis. Over a half century later he spoke of that exhibit with a reverence usually reserved for spiritual matters, “I walked in and it was like nothing I had ever seen before... the color...It just glowed.” Returning to campus in the Fall, the first thing he did was go to the coffee shop in hopes of finding Avis. He did, and she, upon seeing him, realized that she was also smitten with him. They quickly became known as ‘the couple’ on campus, and a year later, with Richard being drafted for the Korean war, they were quickly married by a Justice of the Peace, celebrating after with family at Avis’s Cleveland home. As a gift, faculty member John Paul Miller...