La Vora Norman

Mid Century Vintage Cloudcroft New Mexico Painting, Exhibited 1953; Texas Artist

1953

Born in 1916 in Lima, Ohio to a Mennonite family, John Landis Lehman was educated locally. He moved to Chicago in 1942 and enrolled at the Art Institute. By 1954 he had moved to Penn...

Mario Larrinaga was born in Baja California in 1895 and moved with his brother to Los Angeles in 1909. He had no formal training in art, but had natural talent that was noticed by local movie studios. He was hired by Universal Studios as a designer, art director and creator of background scenes. He produced some of the background effects for King Kong in 1933. After a career in set design and illustration he focused on painting for pleasure in California, Mexico and Hawaii. He belonged to local art clubs and exhibited his works often. This stylized modernist work was likely created around 1960. It is oil on wood panel and of a horizontal format, 18” x 36”. It portrays a procession of seemingly Hawaiian natives...

This colorful late spring scene is most likely around Erie, Pennsylvania. Artist and teacher Joseph M. Plavcan generally painted around the area in which he lived for over 50 years. Joseph Michael Plavcan was born near Pittsburg, in Braddock. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy in 1926, studying with renowned New Hope artist Daniel Garber. Through a scholarship, he went to Europe to study. He returned to Erie in 1932 and became an art instructor, teaching for the next 38 years. Plavcan went far beyond teaching trade school requirements and instilled a true sense of sophisticated artistry in his students. During his artistic career, he exhibited often in Philadelphia, Washington, New York and Chicago. This painting, oil on canvas, demonstrates Plavcan’s style, utilizing figurative abstraction with a modernist color palette. The paint is not over applied and areas are treated with smooth broad brush strokes. The hint of late blooming leaves are dashes of paint applied in a fast yet confident manner. Plavcan’s sense of light, demonstrated in the distant church tower is spot on. While not signed, there are two official estate stamps on the reverse that attest to the authenticity of Plavcan’s work. The piece measures 16” x 20” and appears to be canvas applied to a back board. This was likely done by the former retailer, Hudson House Galleries in Hagerstown, Maryland. That shop was a fine regional art gallery and antiques shop for decades until its closure about five years ago. The painting is nicely framed in a modernist gold wood frame with a subtle pink liner. The overall framed dimensions are about 20” x 24”. The painting is in very good condition, bright and crisp. There is a very minor vertical crease above the peak of the house that is truly barely noticeable from any distance. Other than that, all is fine with the work and its frame. This strong, colorful work by Joseph Plavcan...

This large painting is a ca. 1960 copy of a famous Rockwell Kent painting that was executed in Vermont in 1921. The work is oil on canvas and well represents the original image, tho...

This work is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1940s Untitled (Farm in Winter), 1940s, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 26 x 30 inches, presented in an original frame Julius Delbos...

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...

This painting is part of our exhibition Charles Goeller: A Wistful Loneliness. Oil on canvas, 20 x 15 inches, Signed lower right Exhibited: 1) Portrai...

This painting is part of our exhibition America Coast to Coast: Artists of the 1930s Jefferson Market Library (Courthouse), c. 1930s, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches, signed lower right; presented in a newer silver painted frame About the Painting Writing about an exhibition of Charles W. Adams’ work at the Eighth Street Art Gallery in the mid-1930s, Emily Grenauer observed in The World-Telegram that the artist’s paintings were “distinguished for their solid form, well organized design and sumptuous color” and the art critic for The Herald Tribune found Adam’s work “a strong, formal realization of his subject . . . he paints with vital emphasis on structure and composition.” Although we do not know which works these critics referenced, it is likely they were writing about paintings like Jefferson Market Library (Courthouse). With its carefully designed reality, strong angles, solid forms, and well-disciplined puffs of smoke in the background, Adams presents a highly structured version of the Greenwich Village landmark, the Jefferson Market Library, which was a courthouse at the time Adams completed this work. The Jefferson Market Library was a prized subject for downtown painters, including the Ashcan School painter, John Sloan, the modernist, Stuart Davis, and the precisionist, Francis Criss...