Burlap Paintings

Seated woman in a pink suit strong yet warm color consistent with the artist's palette. It is painted on jute a coarse type of burlap mounted on a cradled wood board . Framing recomm...

Original Post-War Oil Painting of Mournes from Dundrum Ireland by 20th Century Modern Artist, Denis Thornton (1937-1999) Art measures 30 x 20 inches Frame measures 36 x 26 inches (...

Original Post-War Vintage Oil Painting of Clew Bay County Galway Ireland by 20th Century Modern Artist, Denis Thornton (1937-1999) Art measures 36 x 18 inche...

Original Post-War Oil Painting of Tollymore Forest in Northern Ireland by 20th Century Modern Artist, Denis Thornton (1937-1999) Art measures 30 x 20...

Wonderful mid century Mexico street scene by Hector Lara Orozco (Mexican, 1892 - 1958), 19a65. Orozco is a Mexican postwar & contemporary artist. Unfra...

Art Naif. Painting from 1960s. Wine festival. Dimensions: cm 81 x 59 The painting represents a cheerful popular scene with a musical band, people dancing, a man pouring wine from w...

Oil painting on burlap by Edward Marecak (1919-1993) titled "Winter Witches in an Upside World Interfering with Each Other" from 1990. Titled and dated by the artist on verso. Painted in shades of black, gray, red, purple, and green. Presented in the original artist frame, outer dimensions measure 44 ⅛ x 44 ⅛ x 1 ⅜ inches. Image size is 43 x 43 inches. About the artist: Edward Marecak Born Ohio 1919 Died Colorado 1993 Born to immigrant parents from the Carpathian region in Slovakia, Marecak grew up with his family in the farming community of Bennett’s Corners, now part of the town of Brunswick, near Cleveland, Ohio. When he turned twelve, his family moved to a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenians in Cleveland. His childhood household cherished the customs and Slavic folk tales from the Old Country that later strongly influenced his work as a professional artist. During junior high he painted scenery for puppet shows of “Peter and the Wolf,” awakening his interest in art. In his senior year in high school he did Cézanne-inspired watercolors of Ohio barns at seventy-five cents apiece for the National Youth Administration. They earned him a full scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art (1938-1942) where he studied with Henry George Keller whose work was included in the 1913 New York Armory Show. In 1940 Marecak also taught at the Museum School of the Cleveland Institute. Before being drafted into the military in 1942, he briefly attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, one of the nation’s leading graduate schools of art, architecture, and design. A center of innovative work in architecture, art and design with an educational approach built on a mentorship model, it has been home to some of the world’s most renowned designers and artists, including Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Daniel Libeskind and Harry Bertoia. Marecak’s studies at Cranbrook with painter Zoltan Sepeshy and sculptor Carl Milles were interrupted by U.S. army service in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. Following his military discharge, Marecak studied on the G.I. Bill at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 1946 to 1950, having previously met its director, Boardman Robinson, conducting a seminar in mural painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Although he did not work with Robinson at the Fine Arts Center, who had become quite ill - retiring in 1947 - he studied Robinson’s specialty of mural painting before leaving to briefly attend the Cranbrook Academy in 1947. That same year he returned to the Fine Arts Center, studying painting with Jean Charlot and Mary Chenoweth, and lithography with Lawrence Barrett with whom he produced some 132 images during 1948-49. At the Fine Arts Center he met his future wife, Donna Fortin, whom he married in 1947. Also a Midwesterner, she had taken night art courses at Hull House in Chicago, later studying at the Art Institute of Chicago with the encouragement of artist Edgar Britton. After World War II she studied with him from 1946 to 1949 at the Fine Arts Center. (He had moved to Colorado Springs to treat his tuberculosis.) Ed Marecak also became good friends with Britton, later collaborating with him on the design of large stained glass windows for a local church. In 1950-51 Marecak returned to the Cleveland Institute of Art to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. A year later he was invited to conduct a summer class at the University of Colorado in Boulder, confirming his interest in the teaching profession. In 1955 he received his teaching certificate from the University of Denver. Vance Kirkland, the head of its art department, helped him get a teaching job with the Denver Public Schools so that he and his family could remain in the Mile High City. For the next twenty-five years he taught art at Skinner, Grove, East, George Washington and Morey Junior High Schools. Prior to coming to Colorado, Marecak did watercolors resembling those of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Charles Burchfield. However, once in Colorado Springs he decided to destroy much of his earlier oeuvre, embarking on a totally new direction unlike anything he had previously done. Initially, in the 1940s, he was influenced by surrealist imagery and Paul Klee and in the West by Indian petroglyphs and Kachinas. His first one-person show at the Garrett Gallery in Colorado Springs in 1949 featured paintings and lithographs rendered in the style of Magic Realism and referential abstraction. The pieces, including an oil Witch with Pink Dish, foreshadowed the output of his entire Colorado-based career, distinguished by a dramatic use of color, intricacy of execution and attention to detail contributing to their visual impact. He once observed, “Each time I start a new painting I always fool myself by saying this time keep it simple and not get entangled with such complex patterns, color and design; but I always find myself getting more involved with richness, color and subject matter.” An idiosyncratic artist proficient in oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, and casein, he did not draw upon Colorado subject matter for his work, unlike many of his fellow painters in the state. Instead he used Midwest landscape imagery, bringing to life in it witches and spirits adapted from the Slovakian folk tales he heard growing up in Ohio. A number of his paintings depict winter witches derived from the Slovak custom in the Tatra Mountains of burning an effigy of the winter witch in the early spring to banish the memory of a hard winter. The folk tale element imparts a dream-like quality to many of his paintings. A devote of Greek mythology, he placed the figures of Circe, Persephone, Sybil, Hera and others in modern settings. The goddess in Persephone Brings a Pumpkin to her Mother, attired as a Midwestern farmer’s daughter, heralds the advent of fall with the pumpkin before departing to spend the winter season in the underworld. Train to Olympus, the meeting place of the gods in ancient Greece, juxtaposes ancient mythology with modernity creating a combination of whimsy and thought-provoking consideration for the viewer. Voyage to Troy #1 alludes to the ancient city that was the site of the Trojan Wars, but has a contemporary, autobiographical component referencing the harbor of the Aleutian Islands recaptured from the Japanese during World War II. In the 1980s Marecak used the goddess Hera in his painting, Hera Contemplates Aspects of the Art Nouveau, to comment on art movements in the latter half of the twentieth century Marecak’s love of classical music and opera, which he shared with his wife and to which he often listened while painting in his Denver basement studio, is reflected in Homage of Offenbach, an abstract work translating the composer’s musical colors into colorful palette. Pace, Pace, Mio Dio, the title of his earliest surrealist painting, is a soprano aria from Verdi’s opera...

20th Century Post-War Painting of Mountain River Scene in the Mournes in Ireland, by Modern Artist, Denis Thornton (1937-1999) Art measures 30 x 16 inc...

Original Post-War Oil Painting of Mulroy Bay Donegal Ireland by Irish Artist Denis Thornton (1937-1999) Art measures 22 x 16 inches Frame measures 27 x...

Winter's Snowy Tatra Mountains with Pines and Stream Beautiful post-war winter snowy scene with mountains and pine by Laszlo Neogrady (Hungarian, 1896-1962), circa 1940. Lovely textu...

Signed lower left, dimensions listed include the frame. Joseph Wolins was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1915. He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1935 to 1941 un...

Agusti Ferre Pino (1884-1960) - Children - Oil on burlap Oil measurements 100x97 cm. Frame measurements 107x104 cm. Painter trained at the La Lonja School of Fine Arts. He became kn...