Ann West

Channel

2018

Harry Leith-Ross (American, 1886 - 1973) Red House (Hoffman House) Oil on canvas, weathered wood 20th century frame 35” x 30” Signed lower right, ‘Leith-Ross’ Exhibition sticker v...

Six O-Clock, c. 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, signed and titled several times verso of frame and stretcher (perhaps by another hand), marked “Rehn” several times on frame (for the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City, who represented Craig at the time); Exhibited: 1) 18th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings from March 21 to May 2, 1943 at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. #87, original price $450 (per catalog) (exhibition label verso), 2) Craig’s one-man show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York City, from October 26 to November 14, 1942, #10 (original price listed as $350); and 3) Exhibition of thirty paintings sponsored by the Harrisburg Art Association at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg in March, 1944 (concerning this exhibit, Penelope Redd of The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) wrote: “Other paintings that have overtones of superrealism inherent in the subjects include Tom Craig’s California nocturne, ‘Six O’Clock,’ two figures moving through the twilight . . . .” March 6, 1944, p. 13); another label verso from The Museum of Art of Toledo (Ohio): original frame: Provenance includes George Stern Gallery, Los Angeles, CA About the Painting Long before Chris Burden’s iconic installation outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Urban Light, another artist, Tom Craig, made Southern California streetlights the subject of one of his early 1940s paintings. Consisting of dozens of recycled streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s forming a classical colonnade at the museum’s entrance, Burden’s Urban Light has become a symbol of Los Angeles. For Burden, the streetlights represent what constitutes an advanced society, something “safe after dark and beautiful to behold.” It seems that Craig is playing on the same theme in Six O-Clock. Although we see two hunched figures trudging along the sidewalk at the end of a long day, the real stars of this painting are the streetlights which brighten the twilight and silhouette another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, the palm trees in the distance. Mountains in the background and the distant view of a suburban neighborhood join the streetlights and palm trees as classic subject matter for a California Scene painting, but Craig gives us a twist by depicting the scene not as a sun-drenched natural expanse. Rather, Craig uses thin layers of oil paint, mimicking the watercolor technique for which he is most famous, to show us the twinkling beauty of manmade light and the safety it affords. Although Southern California is a land of natural wonders, the interventions of humanity are already everywhere in Los Angeles and as one critic noted, the resulting painting has an air of “superrealism.” About the Artist Thomas Theodore Craig was a well-known fixture in the Southern California art scene. He was born in Upland California. Craig graduated with a degree in botany from Pomona College and studied painting at Pamona and the Chouinard Art School with Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Barse Miller among others. He became close friends with fellow artist Milford Zornes...

Trees at Bloom, 1939, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches, signed lower right About the Painting Trees at Bloom was painted when Clarence Holbrook Carter lived in Pittsburgh and served as an instructor in the Department of Painting and Design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), a position he held from 1938 through 1944. It depicts a thick forest at the base of distance hills just outside the city. During his tenure in Pittsburgh, Carter was deeply influenced by not only the industrial might of the steel mills and iron forges of the city, but also the beauty of the surrounding landscape. As Frank Anderson Trapp noted in his book on the artist, for Carter “the terrain itself had its own special vitality, with its craggy, wooded hills threaded with ravine and watercourses . . . . the signs of industrial blight that were unalleviated in some parts of the country were there relieved by the geological variety of the parent landscape, and by the irrepressible presence of its natural growth, which softened the whole.” Trapp continues, “in his scenes of rural situations, Carter had a special gift for rendering those elements convincingly.” With the profusion of flowering trees which diffuse the light and the red cardinals darting from one branch to another, Trees at Bloom portrays the “irrepressible presence of nature” that Trapp describes. About the Artist Together with Charles Burchfield, Clarence Holbrook Carter was Ohio’s premiere American Scene painter and later an innovative magic realist. The son of a no-nonsense public-school administrator, Carter was born in 1904 outside of Portsmouth, Ohio, a small town in the heart of the Ohio River...

Signed (at lower left): WILLIAM S. SCHWARTZ

Saul Schary was born in 1904 in Newark, New Jersey. Painter, Printmaker, Illustrator. He lived and worked in New York City and New Milford, Connecticut. Schary studied at the Art St...

Seagulls (Birds in Flight), 1982 By. Jim Palmer (American, b. 1941) Signed and Dated Lower Right Unframed: 32" x 36" Framed: 37" x 42.5" Born in 1941 in Columbia, South Carolina, Jim Palmer attended the University of South Carolina in 1960 before going on to study at the Atlanta School of Art in 1964. In 1966 he and his wife moved to Hilton Head Island, the second artist to do so during the Island's early years. Since living here, he designed the cover of the Chamber of Commerce' Islander Magazine, has been a contributing artist to the Island Events Magazine, and has painted many Low Country scenes that grace homes and businesses throughout the country. Palmer was the illustrator for two books written by local authors: A Corner of South Carolina and Moonshadows. His work has been included in exhibits at the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga, TN; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Southeastern Artists Exhibition, Atlanta, GA; Greenville County Art Museum, Greenville, SC; Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain, GA; and Bay Hills Club, Orlando, FL. His paintings are part of the private collections of C&S National Banks in Columbia and Hilton Head Island; Banker's Trust Tower, Columbia, SC; Palmetto State Bank, Bluffton, SC, among others. Several paintings are also included in the collections of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Dwight Eisenhower, former South Carolina Governor Robert McNair and singer John Denver.