Masonite Landscape Paintings

"A Dancer's Fantasy" WPA American Scene Mid 20th Century Social Realism Modern Agnes Mills (1915 – 2008) A Dancer’s Fantasy 48 x 55 inches Tempera on masonite Signed “Aggie Mills’ lower right BIO Painter, printmaker, and sculptor Agnes Eunice Mills was born in New York City on April 2, 1915 to Herman and Celia Karlin. A prolific multi-disciplinary arts, she specialized in dance subjects and imagery pertaining to the arts. She worked in the Long Island/New York City area for most of her career, eventually moving to Florida. Mills was a graduate of Pratt Institute and Cooper Union Art School, and was associated with the Bauhaus, Social Realist, and Abstract movements. She worked for the WPA early in her career, becoming the youngest instructor in the Federal Arts Project along with fellow artist Ruth Gikow. She studied under Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, David Siqueiros, Hans Hoffman, Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York, Krishna Reddy, and many other leading printmakers and painters of the time. For 25 years she served as resident artist for the Alwin Nikolais Dance Company, and several other dance companies hired her to sketch their rehearsals. She was a member of the Artists Union and was Co-Chair for the committee for public use of art. She published the Index of American Design for the Library of Congress. Solo Exhibitions: Lincoln Center Art Gallery, New York City: Drawings & Prints on the Dance; City Center Gallery, NYC: Drawings & Prints on the Dance; Alfredo Valente Gallery, NYC: Sculpture, Drawings & Prints; Carus Gallery, NYC: Oils, Drawings & Prints; Harbor Gallery, Cold Spring Harbor, NY; Graphic Eye Co-op Gallery, Roslyn, NY; North Shore Community Arts Center, Great Neck, NY: Prints & Drawings on the Dance; Unitarian Society, Manhassett, NY: Sculpture, Drawings & Prints; North Truro Art...

A beautiful and bright landscape painting of San Francisco by Illinois artist Richard Florsheim. Eliot Alexander was once quot...

Bill Shields "Biplane" 1975 Oil on masonite Artist's wood frame 24.5"x2"x24.5" Signed and dated in paint lower right Excellent Condition - Minor wear consistent with age and history. CV EDUCATION: Chicago Academy Of Fine Art San Antonio Art Institute MAJOR FIELDS OF PROFESSIONAL ENDEAVOR: Freelance graphic design and illustration Instructor of painting and illustration Landscape, figurative and abstract painting ART RELATED EMPLOYMENT: (Professor of Art) California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA Academy of Art College, San Francisco, CA San Francisco Art Institute San Jose State University AWARDS FOR ILLUSTRATION, Gold Medals: New York Society of Illustrators Los Angeles Society of Illustrators San Francisco Society of Illustrators Dallas-Fort Worth Art Director's Club Houston Artist's Guild BIBLIOGRAPHY: Feature articles in: American Artist, Communication Arts, Print, North Light. Architectural design featured in: Better Homes and Gardens, American Home, Sunset Magazine, Architectural Digest. ILLUSTRATION CLIENTS: Oil Companies: Champlin Oil Company, Mobil Oil Company, Continental Oil Company, Standard Oil Company, Humble Oil and Refining Company. Industrial: Hughes Tool Company, General Electric, United States Steel, Phelps Dodge, Sylvania Television, Texas Gulf Sulphur, Litton Industries, Houston Lighting and Power Company, International Business Machines. Institutional: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, United States Air Force, United States Department of the Interior, American Petroleum Institute, New York Stock Exchange, National Broadcasting Company, American Iron and Steel Institute, CBS Broadcasting Company, Vanguard Recording Company, Diners Club, Stanford Research Institute, Victoria Station, Neiman Marcus, Bank of America, Automobile Club of Southern California, Airlines: TWA, British West Indies Airlines, Pan American Airlines...

Blue-toned abstract geometric landscape painting by Houston, TX artist Herb Mears. This painting depicts a village port along a European city bound by mount...

Red, blue, pink, and black abstract modernist painting by known Houston, TX artist McKie Trotter. This painting depicts various geometric rectangular shapes in red and pink against a black background. Dimensions Without Frame: H 17 in. x W 24 in. Artist Biography: McKie Trotter was born in 1918 in Manchester, Georgia. He pursued his growing interest in art, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg Virginia...

Light tan abstract modernist painting by known Houston, TX artist McKie Trotter. This painting depicts various geometric rectangular shapes in light yellow and pastel green against a...

Signed lower left, 'Daniel L.' (20th century) and dated 1961. A substantial South Seas figural landscape, possibly an idyllic view of Tahiti, showing a group of young women washing ...

End of the Meadow, original vintage 1970s painting by Colorado/Woodstock, NY woman artist, Ethel Magafan (1916-1993), semi Abstract Colorado Mountain Landscape, tempera on masonite in colors of yellow, gold, green, purple, blue, red and orange. Presented in a custom hardwood float frame, outer dimensions measure 30 x 41 ½ x 2 ¼ inches. Image size is 28 ¼ x 40 inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Estate of Ethel Magafan About the Artist: The daughter of a Greek immigrant father and a Polish immigrant mother who met and married in Chicago, Ethel Magafan, her identical twin sister Jenne and their elder sister Sophie grew up in Colorado to which their father relocated the family in 1919. They initially lived in Colorado Springs where he worked as a waiter at the Antlers Hotel before moving to Denver in 1930 to be head waiter at the Albany Hotel. Two years later during the Great Depression Ethel and Jenne experienced at sixteen the tragic loss of their father who had encouraged their artistic aspirations He was proud when Ethel, a student at Morey Junior High School, won top prizes in student poster contests sponsored by the Denver Chamber of Commerce and the Denver Post. At East High School in Denver she and Jenne contributed their art talents to the school's and by their senior year were co-art editors of the Angelus, the 1933 yearbook. At East they studied art with Helen Perry, herself a student of André Lhote in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her decision to abandon an arts career to teach high school students served as an important example to Ethel and Jenne, who early on had decided to become artists. In a city-wide Denver competition for high school art students Ethel won an eighteen-week art course in 1932-33 to study at the Kirkland School of Art which artist Vance Kirkland had recently established in the Mile High City. Perry encouraged the Magafan twins' talent, exposing them to the work of Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne and introducing them to local artists and architects like Frank Mechau and Jacques Benedict whom she invited to speak in her high school art classes. She paid the modest tuition for Ethel and Jenne to study composition, color, mural designing and painting at Mechau's School of Art in downtown Denver in 1933-34. In the summer of 1934 and for a time in 1936 they apprenticed with him at his studio in Redstone, Colorado. When they returned to Denver in 1934 with no family breadwinner to support them, their mother insisted that they have real jobs so they worked as fashion artists in a Denver department store. When Jenne won the Carter Memorial Art Scholarship ($90.00) two years later, she shared it with Ethel so that both of them could enroll in the Broadmoor Art Academy (now the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center) where they studied with Mechau. When the scholarship money ran out after two months, he hired them as his assistants. Along with Edward (Eduardo) Chavez and Polly Duncan, they helped him with his federal government mural commissions. At the Fine Arts Center Ethel also studied with Boardman Robinson and Peppino Mangravite, who hired her and Jenne in 1939 to assist him in his New York studio with two murals commissioned for the post office in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Like their Denver high school art teacher, Robinson also stressed the need to draw from nature in order to "feel" the mountains, which later become the dominant subject matter of Ethel's mature work after World War II. Mechau trained her and her sister in the complex process of mural painting while they studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, teaching them the compositional techniques of the European Renaissance masters. This also involved library research for historical accuracy, small scale drawing, and the hand-making of paints and other supplies. Ethel recalled that their teacher "was a lovely man but he was a hard worker. He drove us. There was no fooling around." Her apprenticeship with Mechau prepared her to win four national government competitions, beginning at age twenty-two, for large murals in U.S. post offices: Threshing - Auburn, Nebraska (1938), Cotton Pickers - Wynne, Arkansas (1940), Prairie Fire - Madill, Oklahoma (1940), and The Horse Corral - South Denver, Colorado (1942). In preparation for their commissions Ethel and her sister made trips around the country to pending mural locations, driving their beat-up station wagon, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots with art supplies and dogs in tow. She and Jenne combined their talents in the mural, Mountains in Snow, for the Department of Health and Human Services Building in Washington, DC (1942). A year later Ethel executed her own mural, Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1814, for the Recorder of Deeds Building, also in Washington, DC. Her first mural commission, Indian Dance, done in 1937 under the Treasury Department Art Project for the Senate Chamber in the United States Capitol, has since disappeared. Ethel and her sister lived and worked in Colorado Springs until 1941 when their residence became determined by the wartime military postings of Jenne's husband, Edward Chavez. They moved briefly to Los Angeles (1941-42) and then to Cheyenne, Wyoming, while he was stationed at Fort Warren, and then back to Los Angeles for two years in 1943. While in California, Ethel and Jenne executed a floral mural for the Sun Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel and also painted scenes of the ocean which they exhibited at the Raymond and Raymond Galleries in Beverly Hills. While in Los Angeles they met novelist Irving Stone, author of Lust for Life, who told them about Woodstock, as did artists Arnold Blanch and Doris Lee (both of whom previously taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center school. In summer of 1945 Ethel, her sister and brother-in-law drove their station wagon across the country to Woodstock which became their permanent home. A year later Ethel married artist and musician, Bruce Currie, whom she met in Woodstock. In 1948 with the help of the GI Bill they purchased an old barn there that also housed their individual studios located at opposite ends of the house. The spatial arrangement mirrors the advice she gave her daughter, Jenne, also an artist: "Make sure you end up with a man who respects your work... The worst thing for an artist is to be in competition with her husband." In 1951 Ethel won a Fulbright Scholarship to Greece where she and her husband spent 1951-52. In addition to extensively traveling, sketching and painting the local landscape, she reconnected with her late father's family in the area of Messinia on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece. At the same time, her sister Jenne accompanied Chavez on his Fulbright Scholarship to Italy where they spent a productive year painting and visiting museums. Shortly after returning home, Jenne's career was cut tragically short when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-six. It deeply affected Ethel whose own work took on a somber quality for several years conveyed by a darkish palette, as seen in her tempera painting, Aftermath (circa 1952). In the 1940s Ethel and her sister successfully made the important transition from government patronage to careers as independent artists. Ethel became distinguished for her modernist landscapes. Even though Ethel became a permanent Woodstock resident after World War II, from her childhood in Colorado she retained her love of the Rocky Mountains, her "earliest source of my lifelong passion for mountain landscape." She and her husband began returning to Colorado for annual summer camping trips on which they later were joined by their daughter, Jenne. Ethel did many sketches and drawings of places she found which had special meaning for her. They enabled her to recall their vital qualities which she later painted in her Woodstock studio, conveying her feeling about places remembered. She also produced a number of watercolors and prints of the Colorado landscape that constituted a departure from the American Scene style of her earlier paintings. Her postwar creative output collectively belongs to the category of landscape abstractionists as described by author Sheldon Cheney, although to a greater or lesser degree her work references Colorado's mountainous terrain. She introduced a palette of stronger pastels in her paintings such as two temperas, Evening Mountains from the 1950s and Springtime in the Mountains from the early 1960s. In 1968 she was elected an Academician by the National Academy of Design in New York. Two years later, based on results of her many summer trips to Colorado, the U.S. Department of the Interior invited her to make on-the-spot sketches of the western United States, helping to document the water resources development and conservation efforts by the Department of the Interior. Her sketches were exhibited at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and then sent on a national tour by the Smithsonian Institution. Similarly, her previous work as a muralist earned her a final commission at age sixty-three for a 12 by 20 foot Civil War image, Grant in the Wilderness, installed in 1979 in the Chancellorsville Visitors Center at the Fredericksburg National Military Park in Virginia. In the 1970s, too, she taught as Artist-in-Residence at Syracuse University and at the University of Georgia in Athens. ©Stan Cuba for David Cook Galleries, LLC Her many awards include, among others, the Stacey Scholarship (1947); Tiffany Fellowship (1949); Fulbright Grant (1951-52, in Greece with her husband); Tiffany Fellowship (1949); Benjamin Altman Landscape Prize, National Academy of Design (1955); Medal of Honor, Audubon, Artists (1962); Henry Ward Granger Fund Purchase Award, National Academy of Design (1964); Childe Hassam Fund Purchase Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1970); Silver Medal, Audubon Artists (1983); Champion International Corporation Award, Silvermine Guild, New Canaan, Connecticut (1984); John Taylor Award, Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, New York (1985); Harrison Cady...

Concrete Mixer - American Modernism Industrial Oil LACMA 1942 Mid-Century WPA. Provenance: Exhibited at LACMA in 1943, label verso. The oil on masonite measure 30 x 21 inches and ...

LUMBERJACKS Hanging Sculpture Painting Ceramic Mid-Century Woodstock Men Working Anton Refregier (1905-1979) "Lumberjacks," Ceramic embedded plaster on masonite. 26 x 9 inches. Sign...

Sylvia Rutkoff (1919-2011) Sr16-1 “Summer Night” Impasto oil paint on Masonite 12x12 thin gold metal frame Signed lower right in paint and on reverse Collection acquired from f...

A modern painting of a Panorama of Israeli by Romanian/Israeli artist, Sami Briss (1930). His paintings evoke the nostalgia of simpler times. This is an original oil painting signe...