Bill Sanders

"Mystic Sunset" Explosion of Shapes & Colors, Mixed Media Photography

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY “Untitled” painted in India Ink of two heads was done during what has been call Lester Johnson’s Dark Paintings of the 1960s. In 2013 John Yau wrote with much insight about that period of Johnson’s work - “Lester Johnson (1919-2010) was an innovative figurative painter who has never quite fit into any of the accepted narratives of postwar American art, and that alone makes his work worthy of a longer look. The 1960s was an explosively turbulent era marked by assassinations, race riots, space flights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ first American tours, and the rapidly escalating Vietnam War. Everyone was wary and on edge. Meanwhile, in the New York art world, all eyes were fixated on the rise and triumph of Pop Art, Minimalism and Color Field painting. Johnson was one of the few artists that attuned to the dismay that everyone was feeling during the violent and schizophrenic time, the sense that it could all come crashing down. However, his work was never overtly political or didactic. While his dark, brooding, monochromatic paintings of anonymous men gained a small and loyal following, they also became part of that largely invisible history of a time when New York was a tough scary and exciting place to be. More than fifty years after they were made, Johnson’s Dark Paintings continue to retain a coarseness that we associate with gestural Abstract Expressionism and Jean Dubuffet’s anti-psychological, anti-personal portraits incorporating sand and gravel. One sees in them the antecedents of Joyce Pensato’s gestural exaggerations of Groucho Marx, Homer Simpson and Minnie Mouse. While Pensato brings an infectious humor to her work, Johnson was more somber. I cannot help but think that both these artists chose their bedraggled subjects out of empathy and a trace of identification.” Lester Johnson, was born in 1919 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended Minneapolis School of Art, where he studied under Alexander Masley who was a former student of Hans Hofmann. Johnson continued his artistic career in New York City where he opened his first studio on 6th and Avenue A. His neighbor there was fellow painter Wolf Kahn. During his time there he would share a loft with Larry Rivers and married the art historian Josephine Valenti. In 1961 he briefly taught at Ohio State University before returning to New York City to share a studio with Philip Pearlstein. Jack Tworkov would invite Johnson to teach at Yale, an offer that Lester Johnson would accept and spend the rest of his life in Connecticut. Johnson passed away in 2010. Johnson's work has been exhibited in the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Walker Art Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This work has been framed inside of a custom frame with museum glass...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY The energy and gusto of the applied paint in "Untitled Abstract" appears close to violent except for the calming influence of the circle in the middle. The red circle tempers the movement a little and brings all the strokes and wild directions into a harmony that is bursting with life. This is an extraordinarily expressive painting by Simpson. Simpson became the first African American to receive a prestigious five-year fellowship from the Charleston Scientific and Cultural Education fund and left South Carolina in 1949 for New York City after he finished high school. He attended New York University and Cooper Union while working in the frame shop of Herbert Benevy. Many well-known artists came to the frame shop and in time critiqued Simpson's work and developed a relationship with him. At NYU Simpson became acquainted with Hale Woodruff...

"Untitled Abstract" is by the American painter, Robert Goodnough, known for calligraphy-like markings circa 1960s. Though he was associated with the Abstract Expressionists, Goodnoug...

SALE ONE WEEK ONLY "Red Harmony" is an abstract painting that does have a sculptural presence in the shapes of the red areas. The lush greens blend various shades into a background that while it does contrast sharply with the reds, it is not in conflict. The overall effect of this work is dynamic in its energy while at the same time harmonious. One of the original Cass Corridor artists from the 1960s William Antonow studied at the School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies) and at Wayne State University, where he received his BFA (1967) and MA (1970.) Antonow’s first one-person show at the Willis Gallery in 1971, represented a radical departure from his early work – abstract bronzes shown at the Michigan Artists exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1969 and 1970. A founding member of the Willis, Antonow publicized his exhibition with a cryptic invitation stating, “art isn’t anything.” Echoing the challenge implicit in the exhibition announcement, the works in the show consisted of precariously balanced piles of such non-art materials as wood crates and barrels, corrugated paper or cardboard, cellophane and beer cans. These brash, paint-slathered juxtapositions of salvaged objects were perhaps the first example of the nascent “tough art” aesthetic of the Cass Corridor. (Both Gordon Newton’s wood constructions and Bob Sestok’s crude “radio wheels” first appeared in 1972.) In 1975, in the inaugural group exhibition of the Willis at its new location in the Fisher Building...

'Richmond flow' London, United Kingdom 2020 Limited edition of 20. Printed on heavy-weight fine art paper. Signed front and back, COA included.

'Ultramarine night' Klaipeda, Lithuania 2022 Limited edition of 20. Giclée pigment method print on Hahnemühle photo rag baryta 308 gsm fine art paper. Photograph is signed, stampe...

'Wind stretched daydream' London, United Kingdom 2022. Limited edition of 10. Printed on the finest archival Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, these limited edition photographs are desi...

'Wind stretched daydream' 2022 Photographed in Richmond, London using a 4x5 large format camera. Printed on Fine art Hahnemuehle paper. 40x31cm ...