Richard Orient

Tree Striation #2

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- I think of my work as being like a visual journal- observations and interpretations of people, places and things I experience day t...

A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the validity of the canon, paintings of the old masters on the walls of museums like the Met, the Louvre, Rijks museum still have a certain cache. They're revered not just for their technique but because they enshrine our collective past experience. Of course, it's a selected past that gets validated. Conspicuously absent to me as a gay man...

Gail Chase Bien paints thinly layered oil on linen over extended periods (from months to years) to complete a single work of art. Taking cues from nature’s extraordinary visual offer...

Victor Mikhail Arnautoff (1896 - 1979) Motion (Mile Rocks Lighthouse), San Francisco, 1939 Oil and tempera on board 60 x 40 inches Signed lower left Provenance: The artist California School of Fine Arts (CFSA) John & Lynne Bolen Fine Arts, Huntington Beach, California Exhibited: New York, World's Fair, Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, 1939. San Francisco Museum of Art, 1962. Literature: American Art from the New York World's Fair 1939, Poughkeepsie, 1987, no. 11, p. 41, illustrated. Robert W. Cherny, Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art, Urbana, Illinois, 2017. The lighthouse in the distance is the Mile Rocks Lighthouse in San Francisco Bay, built in 1906 after many shipwrecks made the lighthouse necessary. In 1962 the lighthouse was reduced in size to make room for a helipad. Arnautoff was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. He showed a talent for art from an early age and hoped to study art after graduating from the gymnasium in Mariupol. With the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled in the Yelizavetgrad Cavalry School. He went on to hold military leadership positions in the army of Nicholas II and the White Siberian army. With the defeat of the Whites in Siberia, he crossed into northeastern China and surrendered his weapons. Arnautoff remained in China for five years. He again tried to pursue art, but was impoverished and took a position training the cavalry of the warlord Zhang Zuolin. He met and married Lydia Blonsky and they had two sons, Michael and Vasily. In November 1925 Arnautoff went to San Francisco on a student visa to study at the California School of Fine Arts. There he studied sculpture with Edgar Walter and painting with several instructors. His wife and children joined him, and they all continued to Mexico in 1929, where, on Ralph Stackpole...