Gary Hernandez

View from the Hotel Campiello, Venice, Italy, Realism, Watercolor, 10 x 7,

2021

Irises by Texas artist Julie England is an Ink and Watercolor, Oil on Yupo paper. The size of Irises is Image 26” x 40” Framed 31 ¼” x 45 ¼” Art is...

Tractor, Central Texas Ranchland (near Fayetteville), 16x20, oil on panel The artist is a regional landscape painter working in oils and pastels whose subject matter varies from the mountains and desert of west Texas to the wetlands along the Texas coast, with a strong focus on Texas forests and trees. and to the Rocky Mountains The artist is in corporate and private collections around the world. Garrett Middaugh is a regional landscape painter working in oils and pastels whose subject matter varies from the mountains and desert of west Texas to the wetlands along the Texas coast, with a strong focus on Texas forests and trees. His palette is muted, stark, embracing the neutral colors of everyday experience. Avoiding the romantic, his landscapes are often painted at high noon or in the dead of winter. He paints in a fluid hyper realist style and feels most influenced by other landscape artists such as Neil Welliver and Rackstraw Downes. He sees landscape painting as a form of meditation, projecting outward, while solving equations and mapping the scene, realizing accuracy of objects and relationships, of light, color, textures, distances. "Landscape painting is for me a means of projecting outward, of meditating, examining the here and now of place. The process often feels similar to the satisfaction of solving math equations, intuitively realizing accuracy of objects and relationships, of light, color, textures, distances. For the most part I paint Texas. For several years I devoted a significant amount of time to painting its forests -- the complexity of forest alleviated my sense and the nearness and density of growth was comforting. I have also ventured into west Texas and Big Bend, and occasionally have attempted to capture the mesmerizing serenity of central Texas farm and ranchland." Garrett Middaugh Also shown is a new Texas tractor painting...

Born in San Pedro, California in 1969, Francis DiFronzo has been painting and exhibiting his artwork in the United States for more than thirty years. "I discovered at a young age that art had the ability to transport me out of my world and into the lives of artists I admired. When I looked at paintings by Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper, I felt as though I was momentarily living in the worlds they created. I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted my work to have that power." After receiving his B.F.A in 1994 from California State University, Fullerton, DiFronzo moved to Philadelphia, PA where he continued his studies in drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There he worked and learned under the guidance of artists Murray Dessner, Jan Baltzell, Sidney Goodman, Vincent Desiderio and Irving Petlin...

This watercolor is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Circus Wagons, 1927, watercolor on paper, signed and dated lower left, 10 x19 ¾ inches (sight), provenance includes Stary-Sheets Art Gallery (Gualala, CA); J. Ralph & Louis Stone Foundation; presented in a newer metal frame behind glazing About the Painting Millard Sheets was only twenty years old and in his third year of studies at the Chouinard Art Institute when he painted Circus Wagons. Despite his youth, Sheets was already an accomplished artist who had publicly exhibited his work and won prestigious prizes. Within several years, he would have his first solo exhibition at one of Los Angeles’ premiere galleries and become a painting instructor at his alma mater. In Circus Wagons we already see Sheets deft handling of the watercolor medium and his interest in the California Scene. In this case, Sheets captures a back lot view of a traveling circus, a subject he sometimes returned to, including in a color screen print in the collection of the National Gallery. Sheets made a career by painting what he knew and observed firsthand. This approach allowed Sheets to capture with authenticity the details of each narrative. Even with a narrowly limited palette and an economy of brushstrokes, Sheets effectively depicts the southern California scene with its strong and mysterious shadows, as well as the workers and circus animals. Seen through the hindsight of his six-decade long career, Circus Wagons offers a fascinating insight into the early development of California Scene painting which would by the mid-1930s become the best recognized style on the West Coast. About the Artist Millard Sheets was the dean of California watercolorists. His list of accomplishments is so extensive that his entry in Who was Who in American Art is over forty lines. Born in Pomona, California, Sheets became a painter at an early age, winning a prize at the Los Angeles County Fair in 1918. By the mid to late-1920s, Sheets became a regular at art exhibitions in the western part of the United States, winning several additional prizes before he reached the age of twenty-five. Sheets studied at the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute from 1925 through 1929 with Frank Tolles Chamberlin and Clarence Hinkle and had his first solo show with Los Angeles’ Dalzell Hatfield Gallery in 1929. During the 1930s, Sheets was invited to exhibit at almost every major American Museum and in many ways, his work came to represent the California watercolor school...