Manufacturing Paintings

Arnold Friedman worked as a clerk for decades at the Station Y, the branch at 3rd Avenue and East 67th Street in New York City. This present work was done two years after his retirem...

"Paper Making" WPA Industrial Mid-Century American Scene Social Realism Workers Douglas Crockwell (1904-1968) "Paper Making" 19 x 39 inches Oil on board, c. 1936 Signed verso Framed: 28 x 47 Provenance: Estate of the Artist BIO Spencer Douglass Crockwell was born into a comfortable middle class household on April 29, 1904 in Columbus, Ohio. His father, Charles Roland Crockwell, was a mining engineer; his mother, Cora, was the daughter of an Iowa attorney. He became a commercial artist and experimental filmmaker who spent a good part of his career creating illustrations and advertisements for the Saturday Evening Post. In 1907 the Crockwell family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he graduated from high school and then attended from Washington University. Initially he studied engineering, but soon switched to business. While still an undergraduate, Crockwell took courses at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and quickly realized that he wanted to be an artist. After graduating from Washington University in 1926, Crockwell continued to study at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts until 1929. The following year he relocated to Chicago and continued his studies at the American Academy of Art. In 1930 and 1931 he studied in Europe on a Traveling Fellowship. In 1932 Douglass Crockwell moved to Glens Falls, New York, which was to be his home for the remainder of his life. The following year he married Margaret Braman. They had three children, a son Douglass and two daughters, Johanna and Margaret. During the depression he created murals and posters for the Works Progress Administration including Post Office murals in White River junction, Vermont; Endicott, New York; and Macon, Mississippi. In 1934 he painted Paper Workers, Finch Pruyn & Co. (the leading Glens Falls, New York company) for the WPA. In the 1930s Crockwell developed an interest in experimental animated films that occupied him for the rest of his life. In 1936 and 1937, he collaborated with David Smith, a sculptor, to create surrealist films. Because of his interest in experimental films, his output of paintings was limited to just twenty to forty illustrations a year during this time. Crockwell painted his first of many Saturday Evening Post cover in 1933. He also worked for Life, Look, and Esquire, and numerous national advertisers including Friskies dog food, Welch’s Grape Juice, Republic Steel...

NYC Subway Mid 20th Century Modern American Scene Social Realism Contemporary David Atkins (1910 – 2012) Subway Train Departure 24 x 30 inches Oil on can...

Michaela Jean is an accomplished painter, devoted gardener, and mother from Southern California (USA). Her lifelong passion for art and nature began in childhood, inspired by her gra...

A dynamic, colorful 1930s painting of a boxing match in Mexico by famed Chicago Modern artist Francis Chapin. Painted during one of the artist's early trips to Mexico, an exceptional painting showing Chapin's steadfast interest in sporting scenes, particularly boxing matches. Image size: 12 x 28 inches. Framed size: 15 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches. Estate stamped on reverse. Provenance: Estate of the artist. Francis Chapin, affectionately called the “Dean of Chicago Painters” by his colleagues, was one of the city’s most popular and celebrated painters in his day. Born at the dawn of the 20th Century in Bristolville, Ohio, Chapin graduated from Washington and Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. He would set down deep roots at the Art Institute of Chicago, exhibiting there over 31 times between 1926 and 1951. In 1927 Chapin won the prestigious Bryan Lathrop Fellowship from the Art Institute – a prize that funded the artist’s yearlong study trip to Europe. Upon his return to the United States, Chapin decided to remain in Chicago, noting the freedom Chicago artists have in developing independently of the pressure to conform to pre-existing molds (as was experienced by artists in New York, for example). Chapin became a popular instructor at the Art Institute, teaching there from 1929 to 1947 and at the Art Institute’s summer art school in Saugatuck, Michigan (now called Oxbow) between 1934 – 1938 (he was the director of the school from 1941-1945). Chapin’s contemporaries among Chicago’s artists included such luminaries as Ivan Le Lorraine Albright...

Chess Players WPA Depression Era Mid-20th Century American Scene Realism Modern. Signed upper right and verso 8 x 10 inches oil on board. BIO The son of a men's haberdasher, Mervin ...

Michaela Jean is an accomplished painter, devoted gardener, and mother from Southern California (USA). Her lifelong passion for art and nature began in childhood, inspired by her gra...

"Old Shoemaker" Ashcan 20th Century Modernism 1924 California WPA Realism Worker. Signed “Otis Oldfield” lower left. 14 x 12 inches. Exhibited: Galerie des Beaux Arts, San Francisco, CA, 1925 Provenance: Estate of the Artist Born in Sacramento, CA on July 3, 1890, Otis Oldfield left high school at age 16 to work in a local print shop. In 1909 he arrived in San Francisco and enrolled at the Best Art School. After working for two years as a bellhop at the Argonaut Hotel and as a hat check boy at the Cliff House, he had saved enough money for further studies in Paris. In 1911 he sailed for France and enrolled at Académie Julian. Caught up in the activities of wartime Paris, he was an apprentice for a book...

My painting is an inquiry. I make images as a way of responding to experiences that are important to me. Experiences that help me to understand why I’m in this world often happens when I am outside in large open spaces. Painted images act as a tool. I respond to the spaces my art suggests. That response is usually non-verbal. I am interested in the experience of non-duality that “getting lost” in big spaces can sometimes produce for me. The paintings have gone through a range of artistic treatments with the recent years seeing a focus on space, light, textures, atmosphere and distance. My landscape paintings are made from memory, not from on-site drawings or photographs. I use memory as a filtering agent to remove non-essential visual elements. When a work is successful, it must have a sense of poetry. There is nothing “new...

"Sock Hop" Mid-Century American Modernism WPA Female Artist 20th Century Realism. 30 x 24 inches. Oil on canvas. Signed on stretcher, c. 1940s. Frame is likely original to the painting. Realist painter-printmaker Kyra Markham...

A wonderful original figure painting for a 1930's illustration by Charles Kinghan (American, 1895-1984). A woman in a plaid green skirt and mustard yel...

"In my paintings I take on the role of poet-painter, creating sentimental and idealized landscapes that are devoid of any figures or formal devices traditionally used to tell a story...