Thomas Fransioli

Street Scene in Bar-le-Duc

1952

Signed (at lower left): W.R. Miller/ 1851

Signed (at lower right): John Ross Key 1882

Signed (at lower right): John Ross Key 1882

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...

Karen Woods paints a traveler’s view through the window of a moving vehicle rendered in subtly nuanced gestures in oil on canvas or panel. These views from...

American b. 1939 Renowned Impressionist painter Shirley Cean Youngs is a native New Yorker who now lives on a family compound in Connecticut surrounded by nature and those she loves...

Mid-century female illustrator/artist Gladys Rockmore Davis paints a compelling portrait of a contemplative beauty who looks like Elizabeth Taylor. Frontal and lateral forces work together in this pyramidal composition. The sitter stares down at the viewer creating a frontal tension. Her hypnotic gaze is counterbalanced by the lateral movement of her crossed hands and triggers an emotional response. Gladys Rockmore Davis is both a work-for-hire illustrator and a fine artist- She was an illustrator for clients such as Upjohn, Munsingwear, Elgin Watches, and Johnson & Johnson. Davis had a show at the prestigious Midtown Gallery and Babcock Gallery in New York. She studied at the California School of Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, and Art Students League. William R. French Gold Medal...

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 can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to trap the exceptional. Whether I am outside on site, or in the studio working from memory, painting is a personal, idiosyncratic process founded in obsession, and wonder. "My subjects are genuine locations. They all have names, and many have familiar and private associations. But my attraction to a particular street or building often comes, in part, from a suspicion that it is also, in a sense, nameless. I nurture enduring relationships with a terrain. But for me, a particular motif resonates when it seems eligible for a larger catalog of spatial forms. My paintings are less portraits of Brooklyn than pages in an expansive, borderless inventory of space and light. Their index-like titles and typically symmetrical or balanced compositions intend to hint at something of the monumental, appropriate to a classifying program. It is neither the landscape's planning nor its architecture which conjures the shapes I paint. Rather, it is its observation; it is how a place appears that forms a distinct typology. At street level, tight, box-like canyons of space offer motifs best captured in a square format, while aerial, panoramic views from a rooftop invite me to explode them in a wider canvas. When looking around to frame a wider view, the optical distortions of curvilinear perspective weave parallel lines into trajectories mirroring the dome of the sky. And on a clear day, the path of the sun traces analogous curves across it. Only turning achieves a panoramic view, and sky and street are themselves revealed as events. At times, glare, fog, rain and snow are also deliberately organizing factors in my choice of standpoint. I wait for and design with all of them. Land maps posit an objective viewpoint. But star maps...