David Leonard

Idols e Flags

2019

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to trap the exceptional. Whether I am outside on site, or in the studio working from memory, painting is a personal, idiosyncratic process founded in obsession, and wonder. "My subjects are genuine locations. They all have names, and many have familiar and private associations. But my attraction to a particular street or building often comes, in part, from a suspicion that it is also, in a sense, nameless. I nurture enduring relationships with a terrain. But for me, a particular motif resonates when it seems eligible for a larger catalog of spatial forms. My paintings are less portraits of Brooklyn than pages in an expansive, borderless inventory of space and light. Their index-like titles and typically symmetrical or balanced compositions intend to hint at something of the monumental, appropriate to a classifying program. It is neither the landscape's planning nor its architecture which conjures the shapes I paint. Rather, it is its observation; it is how a place appears that forms a distinct typology. At street level, tight, box-like canyons of space offer motifs best captured in a square format, while aerial, panoramic views from a rooftop invite me to explode them in a wider canvas. When looking around to frame a wider view, the optical distortions of curvilinear perspective weave parallel lines into trajectories mirroring the dome of the sky. And on a clear day, the path of the sun traces analogous curves across it. Only turning achieves a panoramic view, and sky and street are themselves revealed as events. At times, glare, fog, rain and snow are also deliberately organizing factors in my choice of standpoint. I wait for and design with all of them. Land maps posit an objective viewpoint. But star maps...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

Having spent many years as a photographer, Matt Condron is trained to recognize the importance of a moment or the preciousness of a fleeting opportunity. He is captivated by the ide...

Victor Mikhail Arnautoff (1896 - 1979) Motion (Mile Rocks Lighthouse), San Francisco, 1939 Oil and tempera on board 60 x 40 inches Signed lower left Provenance: The artist California School of Fine Arts (CFSA) John & Lynne Bolen Fine Arts, Huntington Beach, California Exhibited: New York, World's Fair, Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, 1939. San Francisco Museum of Art, 1962. Literature: American Art from the New York World's Fair 1939, Poughkeepsie, 1987, no. 11, p. 41, illustrated. Robert W. Cherny, Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art, Urbana, Illinois, 2017. The lighthouse in the distance is the Mile Rocks Lighthouse in San Francisco Bay, built in 1906 after many shipwrecks made the lighthouse necessary. In 1962 the lighthouse was reduced in size to make room for a helipad. Arnautoff was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. He showed a talent for art from an early age and hoped to study art after graduating from the gymnasium in Mariupol. With the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled in the Yelizavetgrad Cavalry School. He went on to hold military leadership positions in the army of Nicholas II and the White Siberian army. With the defeat of the Whites in Siberia, he crossed into northeastern China and surrendered his weapons. Arnautoff remained in China for five years. He again tried to pursue art, but was impoverished and took a position training the cavalry of the warlord Zhang Zuolin. He met and married Lydia Blonsky and they had two sons, Michael and Vasily. In November 1925 Arnautoff went to San Francisco on a student visa to study at the California School of Fine Arts. There he studied sculpture with Edgar Walter and painting with several instructors. His wife and children joined him, and they all continued to Mexico in 1929, where, on Ralph Stackpole...

William Sharp (1900 - 1961) Factory on the River Oil on canvas 17 1/2 x 23 1/4 inches Initialed lower right: WS Provenance: Estate of the artist Private Collection, New York Swann Auction Galleries, American Art, June 13, 2019, Lot 178 William Sharp was born on June 13, 1900, in Lemberg, Austria, where he attended college and the Academy for Arts and Industry. He later studied in Kraków, Poland, and in Berlin and Munich, Germany. Sharp began his career as a designer of stained-glass windows and as a painter of murals. He served in the German army during World War I. After the war he became a newspaper artist in Berlin and a well-known etcher. Sharp drew political cartoons that were bitterly critical of the growing Nazi movement. As the influence of National Socialism intensified, he began to contribute drawings, under a pseudonym, to publications that were hostile to Hitler. After Hitler assumed power, Sharp was confronted with these drawings and told that he would be sent to a concentration camp. However, in 1934, he escaped to the United States. His first newspaper assignment in America was making courtroom sketches for The New York Mirror...

William Sharp (1900 - 1961) Factory on the River Oil on canvas 20 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Initialed lower left: WS Provenance: Estate of the artist Private Collection, New York Swann Auction Galleries, American Art, June 13, 2019, Lot 178 Private Collection, New York Colonial Sand and Stone Co., founded by Generoso Pope, was once the country’s largest sand and gravel business, providing the concrete for much of New York City’s skyline, including the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, airports and subways. William Sharp was born on June 13, 1900, in Lemberg, Austria, where he attended college and the Academy for Arts and Industry. He later studied in Kraków, Poland, and in Berlin and Munich, Germany. Sharp began his career as a designer of stained-glass windows and as a painter of murals. He served in the German army during World War I. After the war he became a newspaper artist in Berlin and a well-known etcher. Sharp drew political cartoons that were bitterly critical of the growing Nazi movement. As the influence of National Socialism intensified, he began to contribute drawings, under a pseudonym, to publications that were hostile to Hitler. After Hitler assumed power, Sharp was confronted with these drawings and told that he would be sent to a concentration camp. However, in 1934, he escaped to the United States. His first newspaper assignment in America was making courtroom sketches for The New York Mirror...

Steeped in the Bay Area figurative movement, Mary Robertson's oeuvre focuses on Northern California's Russian River, and its beaches, umbrellas, floats and figures. Her western lands...