American Realist Paintings

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

"My work is often described as realism, and sometimes photorealism, but I don’t think of it that way. I do use photographs as reference, and the finished paintings have a photographi...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NY & LA -- My latest series opening at the George Billis Gallery, titled “Modern Society,” continues my exploration into midcentury architecture and design found in New York City, but focuses on the cultural centers and glamorous institutions that signaled its strength – and enchantment – in the 1950s and 60s. Covering such bewitching landmarks as Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim, and 5th Avenue stalwart Bergdorf Goodman, this series delves into how high design from this groundbreaking Modern period shaped metropolitan society and reinforced New York as a cultural capital. When viewed individually, each painting showcases an aspect of booming avant garde design, be it the Metropolitan Opera’s Sputnik Chandeliers, the high fashion displayed...

New Landscapes is a series of landscapes painted over the past year. It includes the artist’s observations of oceans, wooded hills, and ponds in different seasons. In these landscap...

Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subj...

“I do think the big problem in a way…is how you deal with ordinary life—that is not extraordinary, that does not involve heroism, that does not involve crises, really. But the way in...

Represented by George Billis', NYC and LA galleries -- When I think about the conventions of painting -- a tradition I respect immensely -- I notice that my concern has always been...

Represented by George Billis', NYC and LA galleries -- When I think about the conventions of painting -- a tradition I respect immensely -- I notice that my concern has always been...

Derek Buckner is represented by George Billis Gallery NYC and LA. During his career the artist has discovered many different themes, but there is one theme in particular that Bucker...

The primary subjects of my paintings are 21st century man's working monuments, which represent our culture's dedication to production and consumption. The essence of our way of life ...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on ...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art...

The pursuit for something new, unique forms and compositions, found in our everyday exterior environments are the subjects that are consistently sought after as the major contributor...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, lif...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NY & LA -- My latest series opening at the George Billis Gallery, titled “Modern Society,” continues my exploration into midcentury architecture and design found in New York City, but focuses on the cultural centers and glamorous institutions that signaled its strength – and enchantment – in the 1950s and 60s. Covering such bewitching landmarks as Lincoln Center, the Guggenheim, and 5th Avenue stalwart Bergdorf Goodman, this series delves into how high design from this groundbreaking Modern period shaped metropolitan society and reinforced New York as a cultural capital. When viewed individually, each painting showcases an aspect of booming avant garde design, be it the Metropolitan Opera’s Sputnik Chandeliers, the high fashion displayed...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Having worked from a studio in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn for two decades, Elizabeth O'Reilly is at home in the abandoned precincts...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Having worked from a studio in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn for two decades, Elizabeth O'Reilly is at home in the abandoned precincts...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Having worked from a studio in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn for two decades, Elizabeth O'Reilly is at home in the abandoned precincts...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

I have been burning images into wood and paper as a means of drawing for over two decades. During that time I have continued to refine and at the same time experiment with the process. Using propane torches I burn, scorch, re-burn, sand and scratch the surface of paper or wood to create my drawings. My earlier work, the Nocturne Series was inspired by walking at night in the light filled streets of American cities; those drawings were often mistaken for soft focus sepia toned photographs. My present work is a considerable departure in regard to content, execution and appearance - from those dark, abstracted cityscapes, my current drawings are light filled, clearly rendered landscapes. The burning process I use to make my drawings evolved differently for each series. Experimentation (in both bodies of work) is always important to me and always informs the resulting image. In the case of the Nocturnes the image arose from intermixing water with the flame from a large industrial torch. With these new works, I’ve tried to create a visually stimulating accumulation of (often minuscule) marks on the wood surface using the tiny flame from a jeweler’s torch...

Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to t...

I have been burning images into wood and paper as a means of drawing for over two decades. During that time I have continued to refine and at the same time experiment with the process. Using propane torches I burn, scorch, re-burn, sand and scratch the surface of paper or wood to create my drawings. My earlier work, the Nocturne Series was inspired by walking at night in the light filled streets of American cities; those drawings were often mistaken for soft focus sepia toned photographs. My present work is a considerable departure in regard to content, execution and appearance - from those dark, abstracted cityscapes, my current drawings are light filled, clearly rendered landscapes. The burning process I use to make my drawings evolved differently for each series. Experimentation (in both bodies of work) is always important to me and always informs the resulting image. In the case of the Nocturnes the image arose from intermixing water with the flame from a large industrial torch. With these new works, I’ve tried to create a visually stimulating accumulation of (often minuscule) marks on the wood surface using the tiny flame from a jeweler’s torch...

I have been burning images into wood and paper as a means of drawing for over two decades. During that time I have continued to refine and at the same time experiment with the proces...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

I have been burning images into wood and paper as a means of drawing for over two decades. During that time I have continued to refine and at the same time experiment with the proces...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subject is modernism’s footprint on the outposts of Americana—places typified by harsh artificial light and hard shadows on concrete. The show makes clear that for Young, despite the contemporary art world’s preferences for irony, disjunction, and tongue-in-cheek intellectual gamesmanship, painting is at its best when it attempts to offer an unpretentious accounting of where and how we live our day-to-day lives. The celebrations of urban sprawl offered by artists like Ed Ruscha—who famously took no-nonsense aerial photographs of thirty four LA parking lots in 1967, and created sleek, stripped down paintings of Standard Oil stations—are an obvious point of reference in Young’s work. But Young’s choices seem more personal than Ruscha’s, and his technique is certainly more painterly: His images of gas stations are uneasy amalgamations, cobbled together from his own memories of road trips, photographs, and pure invention, and rendered with a sense of atmosphere and drama seemingly at odds with his use of hard lines and simple geometric shapes. Painters today tend to lean on pastiche, on art-historical mashups and code-switching. This typically results in images with no unified style and no concern for pictorial space, illusionistic or otherwise. For many contemporary painters, the picture plane is simply a flat, delimited arena in which different types of visual syntax collide, floating freely. This is a non-strategy in which artists make an end run around some of the thornier problems of composition, perception, and cognition. Young bucks this trend. He activates every square inch of his canvases, blocking in large passages of negative space with skeins of scruffy countervailing strokes. He is not a fussy painter, nor is he out to prove his own mastery to an audience. Like Edward Hopper, Young tends to eschew a lot of paint’s seductive properties, preferring to create hard edges and large, gently undulating planes of subdued color. He draws the viewer into an unpopulated, uncluttered world with a clear horizon line—but one that is also filled with hiccups, discontinuities, and compromises. In Service in the Rear, for example, a shelter for gas pumps in the foreground—closest to the viewer and, therefore, logically a dominant compositional element—is rendered as a hazy silhouette that flagrantly disobeys the rules of linear perspective. This is intentional: The structure is only important to Young in the way that it draws the viewer’s eye below and past it, to the glowing, low-slung building dominating the lefthand side of the picture. Thus Young shows his talent for creating visual tension and drama—and for sidestepping the viewer’s expectations. Young understands that some might regard his brand of painting as obsolete. He also understands the troubled legacy of modernism, and what the triumph of universal technology has meant for cultures around the globe. Still, for Young, the cold comfort offered by outposts of convenience—gas stations, airports, cheap hotel rooms—is not so easily dismissed. Young shares the strange buoyant optimism of his hero, Jonathan Richman, who, in his early ‘70s proto-punk single, Roadrunner, exults in the simple act of driving past the Stop’n’Shop with the radio on...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- My latest series opening at the George Billis Gallery, “Birth of the Cool,” celebrates the midcentu...

From the artist statement, "When asked about my work, my mantra used to be, “The subject matter of my work is not as important as how I paint it. Whether it be people, places, or thi...

Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subj...

Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subj...

Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to t...

Marla Korr attended Brooklyn College, earning both a B.A. and a M.F.A. There she studied with Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson and Jimmy Ernst. She has also studied at Stevenson...

I think of my work as being like a visual journal- observations and interpretations of people, places and things I experience day to day. Translating that experience into two dimensi...

Alex Roulette’s paintings depict false realities. The artist constructs landscapes from numerous source photographs, which he uses as references to create his finely-tuned oil painti...

Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road, and 1960s West Coast art. His main subj...

“I do think the big problem in a way…is how you deal with ordinary life—that is not extraordinary, that does not involve heroism, that does not involve crises, really. But the way in...

Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to t...

“I do think the big problem in a way…is how you deal with ordinary life—that is not extraordinary, that does not involve heroism, that does not involve crises, really. But the way in...

American, b. 1949 In his more than three decades as an artist, Nicholas Berger (b. 1949) has created an outstanding body of work that continues to evolve and excite viewers. Best kn...

My paintings begin with a serious sense of play, both in the staging and the creating of the compositions. It is at this beginning stage that I operate under the Dadaist dictate that...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Much of Bennett Vadnais’ subject matter comes from his surroundings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. With a strong background in plein ...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, lif...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, lif...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- Harrison paints urban scenes of Los Angeles, working strictly on location. Over the course of the year and half on average he spend...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA -- Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, lif...

Self portrait of the artist as a monk. American, b. 1927 Artist Michael Aviano has been drawing since childhood. His first oil paintings were done when he was in junior high school. In the 1940’s Michael applied to the Art Students League, NYC, where the school director, Steward Klonis, was so impressed by his talent that he immediately enrolled him in Frank J. Reilly’s painting class. This was an honor, as it often took up to two years to gain entrance into Reilly’s classes. Frank J. Reilly studied with the famous League teacher, Frank Vincent Dumond (American 1865-1951), who in turn studied under Benjamin Constant (1845-1902), Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911) and Gustave Boulanger (1824-1888), important painters of the French Academic Tradition. During his years at the Art Students League, Michael received annual scholarships and awards for his excellence in painting. Michael Aviano began exhibiting his work in New York in the 1960’s and built a reputation as an outstanding portrait and still life painter. The 1970’s brought Michael to Grand Central Art Galleries, NYC , the country’s premier gallery of American Realism. There his work was shown alongside such masters as Emil Carlsen, John Singer Sargent, George Innes, William Merritt Chase and such contemporaries as David Leffel, Richard Schmid, Charles Pfahl, and Priscilla Roberts...

This work is meticulously and brilliantly rendered to capture not only the likeness of the sitter but spirit as well. The image is pushed to the forefront of the composition and s...

Mabel Rollins Harris was among other things an illustrator who specialized Children's art. Looking at her work today her pictures take on an almost surreal quality. She posed ...

Hector Garrido is an American book cover illustrator. He illustrated numerous science fiction, horror and adventure book covers, including all the covers for the Baroness series of pulp novels, and covers for the Destroyer series. He also illustrated romance and gothic novels, and Nancy Drew and Hardy...

Signed lower left American, b. 1950 Marla Korr attended Brooklyn College, earning both a B.A. and a M.F.A. There she studied with Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson...

Baby caring a horse shoe on his shoulders reminiscent of the famous J. C. Leyendecker Baby covers for the Saturday Evening Post. This is a cover illustration/ painting for Collie...

Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork. Signed lower left. Complemented by a hand carved and gilt frame. Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1948) Peter Sculthorpe was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1948. His talent was evident even as a child and developed rapidly in high school, where he was awarded an art scholarship in his senior year. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Hussian School of Fine Art under William Palmer Lear. He is a recipient of the Daisy Jamison Art Scholarship. Sculthorpe's work is represented in private and corporate collections including General Electric, AT&T, DuPont, and Nabisco. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Delaware Art...

Signed lower left & dated 1920 The Francis Scott Key Bridge, also known as the Key Bridge, is a concrete arch bridge traffic across the Potomac River be...

Harry Lemon Parkhurst American, 1876–1962 was a pulp illustrator for crime and detective stories. The works depicts an art thief caught at a pe...

Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork. Signed lower right. Complemented by a hand carved and gilt frame. Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1948) Peter Sculthorpe was born in...

Thomas Satterwhite Noble, who studied in France with Thomas Couture for three years, adapted his master’s genre style to American subjects. Born on his parents’ plantation in Kentucky in 1835, Noble was the son of a wealthy rope manufacturer. His early upbringing in Lexington, the center of that state’s slave trade in the antebellum South...

American, b. 1950 Marla Korr attended Brooklyn College, earning both a B.A. and a M.F.A. There she studied with Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson and Jimmy Ernst. She has also s...