Eat, Spit and Be Happy

View Similar Items

David Harrison - Roll with Four Objects, Oil Painting, Realism, 24 x 24 , Free Shipping , Realist

Rachel Personett - "Norwegian Sunset" contemporary tonalist painting - sun sets beyond green trees

Unknown - An American Still Life of an Apple, Pear and Grapes circa 1880s

John T. Axton - "Still Life with Red Wine"

Maryann Lucas - Spring Rain

Maryann Lucas - Farm to Table

Maryann Lucas - Blushing Bouquet

Mimi Jensen - Party Time

Mimi Jensen - Pepper Party / oil on canvas - still life with food

Maryann Lucas - Zinnias, Snapdragons and Fruit

Rachel Stewart Chhabra - "Mexican Hat Flower" Realistic Painting of a Wildflower Botanical Plant Nature

Linda Griggs - "Anniversary Pool" Contemporary Oil Painting

1 of 4

Bradford J. Salamon
Eat, Spit and Be Happy
2018

Name: Eat, Spit and Be Happy
Brand: Bradford J. Salamon
Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

About the Item

Eat, Spit and Be Happy, 2018, 20" x 20", oil on canvas (framed) ABOUT BRADFORD J. SALAMON: By Peter Frank PAINT WHAT YOU KNOW, HOW YOU KNOW IT Artists, traditionally, are known by their style(s). The manner in which an artist works, regarded effectively as a plethora of earmarks and automatic decisions, supposedly supports the artist’s “message” – although often enough by now, the manner is the message. In contemporary artistic practice, style and substance have not only converged, they have become contiguous. An artist like Bradford Salamon, however, resists – and certainly subverts – this notion of stylistic “branding.” Salamon utilizes his mastery of several approaches to representational painting, however closely those approaches might be related, to add depth and nuance to his images. But in exercising multiple manners – different strokes, you might say, for different folks – Salamon submits his skills to the task of interpretation, favoring the portrayal of his subjects, human and otherwise, over the assertion of his own artistic identity. Salamon does maintain an identity in this way, but it is an identity based on looking and feeling rather than deducing, oriented towards conveying his responses to things, not primarily on characteristics of artistic practice. In other words, in painting what he sees, Salamon paints according – that is, in direct response -- to what he sees. This is hardly to suggest that Salamon “has no style,” nor even that no consistent sensibility underlies his painting. Salamon’s touch, his feel for the application of paint, invariably betrays him. Whatever he is painting, and however he is painting it, Salamon renders his subjects with a rich brush and relatively muted palette. One can depend on a Salamon canvas to seem rich and yeasty, so effulgent and yet so matter of fact in its painterliness that it almost makes the mouth water. There is also a characteristic consistency to the way Salamon pictures his subjects, concentrating on single figures or objects (which in the more complex pictures serve as visual anchors) and molding them with great care. They seem not simply depicted but described. Further, Salamon’s subject matter is almost invariably mundane – and almost invariably dramatized by his treatment so that its most emotional elements emerge. Portraits, even when full-faced and flattened to a monochrome surface, capture the vivacity of the sitter, the essence of his or her appearance; objects, rendered larger than life, bloom with intimacy and nostalgia; indoor and outdoor spaces remain picturesque and inviting. Meanwhile, each kind of subject matter is subjected to a markedly different handling, the focus of Salamon’s multi-stylistic virtuosity. Those spaces, normally populated with individuals, families, or other affinity groups paused while enacting some sort of (inter)personal drama, are painted with a localized (if still muted) palette and an oddly direct, flat-footed, almost naïf manner that recalls postwar New York School figurative painters such as Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher, impressionist intimists who responded equally to natural light and the pathos of ordinary human life. Like theirs, Salamon’s naturalism relies as much on abstraction as it does on realism, yoking an energetic brushstroke to the things the eye sees. Even as they pull us further into the house – into the kitchen, into the bathroom, into the tool closet, into the toy closet – Salamon’s “still lifes” take on a luminescence that his broader domestic scenes do not feature. It is a glow that seems almost to be the result of backlighting – or, perhaps more to the point, of the perceptual backlighting that memory lends to objects. These are emphatically unextraordinary things, but many are vintage and all seem touched by use. They’re not cracked and marred so much as smoothed and clouded, inflected with a post-modern sabe no wabe that regards nostalgia as sensate to the point of palpable. Carefully drawing them in paint, Salamon catalogs his devices with an eye to detail: edges, labels, the particular translucence of a kind of glass become conditions in themselves, as immaterial as tastes and odors, as substantive as the pigments used to paint them. On one level, this is how Salamon approaches the human visage as well. But, sensitive as he may be to appearances, he is too much a humanist to preoccupy himself with superficial looks. In his portraits Salamon finds prominent factors in the sitter’s face to emphasize, not through caricature but through position and illumination. Even the most diffuse rendition of a face becomes a map of a unique terrain, notably distinct from anyone else’s. The “inner soul” great portrait painters are famed for finding, Salamon finds in the the particulars of a person’s features: he not only realizes, but demonstrates, that the soul is in the details. For the majority of his portraits, facial and full-figure, Salamon employs his most extravagantly painterly approach. Paint seems to rain down the canvas, and these human beings seem to emerge from the cascade, almost one with the froth. It is clear that Salamon’s touchstone here is Rembrandt; but his portraiture, constituting some of his understandably best known work, reflects on the entire history of portrait painting, from Velazquez to Hockney. Bradford Salamon’s work demonstrates that the “real world” continues to present itself as a provocative subject. Indeed, it demonstrates how the observed world stays eternally fresh as an artistic concern. The artists who rely on it as a subject – or, more accurately, limitless source of subject – do so not because it is familiar but because it provides endless variation on what we think of as familiar, and challenges them to sample that variation. The domestic environment, brimming with objects and people, prompts the serious artist to find visual experience and contextual drama in it. And the serious artist rises to the occasion. Salamon rises to this occasion through a canny admixture of openness and calculation, a knowing manipulation of his natural gifts tempered by his natural response to his subjects. Just as Salamon’s embrace of painting is sensual and spiritual at once, his embrace of his subject matter is both spiritual and corporeal. His regard for the world is Whitmanesque in its breadth and its constant joy, and he subjects his considerable artistic skills to the vastness and diversity of that regard. Salamon employs several styles not simply because his subject matter requires it, but because his heart requires it. Los Angeles May 2018

Creator:
Bradford J. Salamon (American)
Creation Year:
2018
Dimensions:
Height: 20 in (50.8 cm)Width: 20 in (50.8 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
American Realist
Period:
21st Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Laguna Beach, CA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU70137046012

2010s American Realist Still-life Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

David Harrison
Roll with Four Objects, Oil Painting, Realism, 24 x 24 , Free Shipping , Realist, 2018

$5,000

"Norwegian Sunset" contemporary tonalist painting - sun sets beyond green trees

By Rachel Personett

Located in Sag Harbor, NY

An oil painting of a glowing sunset beyond a verdant patch of trees, painted en plein air, in Norway, while Personett was apprenticing at Odd Nerdrum's stu...

Category

21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil, Panel

Rachel Personett
"Norwegian Sunset" contemporary tonalist painting - sun sets beyond green trees, 2017

$4,200

An American Still Life of an Apple, Pear and Grapes circa 1880s

Located in SANTA FE, NM

An American Still Life of an Apple, Pear and Grapes Oil on canvas on board Signed illegibly circa late 1800s 9 3/4 x 5 7/8 (16 x 12 3/4 frame) inches This is an example of late 19...

Category

Late 19th Century American Realist Still-life Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil, Board

An American Still Life of an Apple, Pear and Grapes circa 1880s, Circa 1880s

$4,560 Sale Price

20% Off

"Still Life with Red Wine"

By John T. Axton

Located in Southampton, NY

Wonderful small still life painting by John T. Axton III done circa 1980. Oil on canvas and signed with the artist's monogram lower left. Unframed. Axton was born in Fort Leavenwo...

Category

1970s American Realist Still-life Paintings

Materials

Oil, Canvas

John T. Axton
"Still Life with Red Wine", Circa 1980

$950

Spring Rain

By Maryann Lucas

Located in Sag Harbor, NY

An oil painting of daffodils in a silver vessell. Situated upon a table, before a window. Maryann Lucas lives and works in Sag Harbor. She is primarily self-taught but has also rec...

Category

2010s American Realist Still-life Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Maryann Lucas
Spring Rain, 2018

$2,500

Farm to Table

By Maryann Lucas

Located in Sag Harbor, NY

An oil painting of farm-fresh goods laid on a table with a plaid picnic-print tablecloth. Maryann Lucas lives and works in Sag Harbor. She is primarily self-taught but has also received instruction and support from wonderful and generous members of the East End artistic community. Working exclusively in oils, Lucas sets out almost daily to create plein aire landscapes and seascapes. In her studio, she works directly from life and captures the beauty of natural light as it transforms ordinary objects into visual delights. Lucas wants her work to celebrate all that is well with this world and brilliant in this life, despite its pockets of darkness. For me, she says, I know I am in the Presence of something beautiful, when it steals my breath, silences my mind, pushes out everything else and draws me in. I trust That. I use That to guide my hands as I arrange a still life or scan a landscape to determine where to set down my easel. Ultimately, That is what drives me to paint. Becoming evermore skilled as an oil painter is another of Lucas goals. To that end she remains teachable, finding it refreshing and vital for her own growth to paint with others. She has studied with favorite artists including Michael Klein...

Category