James C. Litz

Elephant Parade Contemporary Naive Folk Art Outsider Art Elephant Animal Bright

1988

Rendering traditionally cheerful images and concepts into frightening, yet humorous, tableaus, Michael Mararian often focuses on children as the last bastion of innocence to explore ...

A rare mid 19th Century watercolor depicting Native Americans approaching a fort by Peter Peterson Tofft. This painting depicts a Fort built by Major John Owen in what is now Steve...

An original antique watercolor painting by well listed Austrian artist Franz Weidinger. This work is signed and titled lower left and housed in a be...

Oil on canvas. Framed. Signed lower right.

Val Edwin Lewton (May 23, 1937 – April 24, 2015) was a painter and museum exhibition designer. As an artist, he created Realist acrylic paintings and watercolors of urban and suburban scenes, predominantly in the Washington, D.C., area, where he lived and exhibited. Val Lewton was born May 23, 1937, in Santa Monica, California. His father, also named Val Lewton, produced a string of successful and influential B movies for RKO Pictures, including Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). His mother, Ruth Knapp, was a painter and teacher of autistic children. He graduated in 1959 from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and earned a master's degree in fine arts from Claremont University in 1962. After moving to Washington, D.C., he served on the staff of the Smithsonian American Art Museum for 32 years, simultaneously maintaining a career as a painter in his own right. Lewton died in 2015s oon afterwards, exhibitions of his paintings were planned for the Katzen Arts Center (June 17 – August 13, 2017) and Addison/Ripley Fine Art (June 3 – July 8, 2017). Chiefly known for his landscapes, Lewton generally depicted cities and suburbs with a detached, impersonal sensibility. Writing about his watercolors in Arts magazine in 1980, Harry Rand observed, “Either by implication or statement, personalities are absent from Lewton’s work; there is hardly a sense of the lives that move through those spaces he describes.” The critic compared the artist to Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, and Charles Sheeler. Lewton painted from a young age. On a family trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, he discovered the work of Henri Matisse, an encounter that permanently influenced his artistic vision. In the early 1960s, Lewton lived in southern California and taught art classes at the University of California Riverside. During this period, he was inspired by the paintings of Roger Kuntz...

Female figure, swimmer, bathing, ocean, sunshine, rocks; acrylic ink, flashe and pastel on 300g Arches hot press paper; custom wooden frame, shallow shadow box frame. Deep blue, turq...

This artwork of two women drinking coffee. It is an intriguing piece that captures the complexity of time and its connection to individual experiences. The artwork is split up into ...

This is a hand cut and hand painted artwork by Italian artist Riffblast. It’s signed on the back as an original work of art ready to hang with frame. It’s based on Alice in wonderla...