Lucie Jirku Abstract Paintings

Ed Touchette (b. 1948) is inspired by a love of architecture and public spaces to make paintings which express joyful wonder at our built environment — ol...

Shortly before Walt Esslinger died a few years ago, we talked in his small yellow painted studio in Bakersfield. Sixteen years my senior, he’d been my close friend, mentor and running mate since 1960. “You still writing?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered, taking in the space’s renovations he’d recently sub-contracted. Ninety one years old, and he was thinking ahead. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Write the Andy Warhol story.” Walt was a Central Valley guy, an L.A. guy, a Las Vegas guy. A man who knew his way around. “I want you to put on record what happened back then when I bought the soup can painting.” Back then was the fall of 1962. The two of us had been exhibiting our paintings in the L.A. Art Institute’s gallery for locals only. Walt had given legendary Ad Rhinehardt a story about how he and I had been working in both Edward Kienholz’s and John Altoon’s studios (false—we’d only been visiting). One morning, the Institute’s Director, who hadn’t suspected us to be charlatans yet, introduced us to a reed thin, tow headed young man leaning against the main gallery’s wall. “Meet Andy Warhola,” he said. “Andy is from New York.” “Warhol,” the boy/man said. “Painter?” Walt asked him. “Shoe Illustrator.” The director made a snorting noise I took to mean that Warhola or Warhol’s modesty was posed. He mentioned something about Andy having a show on the La Cienega strip of galleries. We exchanged mumbles about how the art world was in flux, nothing more than that, and Walt and I moved on. If this strange cat had anything to look at, we’d see it. It was a Monday, and La Cienega’s twenty some galleries would be opening new shows and serving champagne that evening. North La Cienega Avenue, laid over a network of oil veins decades before, had become the street for the Cool School, a group of artists and gallery people trying to bring Los Angeles’s art scene to life. The galleries were small but proud. Sure, Jazz was born on the Delta and raised in New Orleans, St, Luis and Chicago, but L.A. had fifty-three jazz joints according to Chet Baker, who’d blown with the best. Why then should the West Coast be lagging behind New York in the other truly American expression, abstract art? At the Ferus Gallery that night we found Warhol’s exhibit. “Shit,” I said. Walt grinned. “You no like?” “Not exactly my can of soup,” I said, peeking into the small space, loaded now wall to wall with paintings of Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Walt stepped into the space. “How about the idea of it?” I made my way through spectators looking at once to be confused, amused, enthused and abused. When I came back to Walt he was still smiling. “Why didn’t he silk screen ‘em?” I asked. “That’s probably his next move,” Walt said. “You wanna stay?” Walt’s keen eyes cased the joint. “I see Irving Bloom over there,” he said. “Believe I’ll stick around and talk with him.” Bloom had been operating this popular gallery for some time now. “One hundred a month,” he’d told me. “It’s not like I’m getting rich.” I stood around for a bit, heard a fellow abstract expressionist I’d met tell a young lady who looked to be lost, “Okay that’s the soup. Come with me, baby, and I’ll show you the juice.” Two doors down I stopped at the Primus-Stuart Gallery. A group of people had gathered around a display of soup cans, stacked grocer’s pyramid style in the window. All Campbell’s. All Tomato. A sign leaning against the grouping stated: “Get the real thing. Thirty cents each.” That’s the way it was. Twenty-four galleries forming a gauntlet between La Cienega’s 300 block, all the way up to Barney’s Beanery at the corner of Santa Monica. Hollywood types dressed to the nines, Beats dressed for the times just gone. Champagne popping...

You are viewing a modernist acrylic painting by Robert Blair in which the artist has utilized a comb to create designs within the painting. Robert Noel Blair (American, 1912-2003)...

"Masquerade" 2024, 48" H x 60" W. Large-scale, multi-colored abstract painting consisting of acrylic, house paint, pencils, and oil pastels on canvas by Argentine-born artist Karina ...

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"In A Mood" 2023, 72" H x 96" W. Large scale abstract painting consisting of acrylic, pencils, and oil pastels on canvas by Argentine-born artist Karina Gentinetta (featured in Elle ...

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"Untitled" 2019, 25" x 31" horizontal drawing on paper by Argentine-born artist Karina Gentinetta (featured in Elle Decor, the New York Times, Tradi...

In the summer of 1970, I had been using acrylic for four years and had yet to find a way to develop color like a composer might orchestrate a symphony from a piano score. (The symphonic was then my visual ideal.) After the 106th acrylic of “majestic” size, I got real about scale—smaller—and switched to colored sticks of soft pastel so I could hold a rainbow in my hand. I kept on with the streaming lines of the big acrylic paintings, but I filled the spaces between with the soft pastels. –Fred Martin...

Dandelion 18.0 x 24.0 x 0.75, 7.5 lbs Acrylic, archival paper, and wood panel Hand signed by artist Artist's Commentary: "This modernist abstract piece features bright yellow and ...

Abstract #410, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Excerpts from DENIS PHILLIPS written by Jane Connell “I’ve never really known a time in my life,” Denis Phillips muses, “when one ...

Patricia Zippin Spring Cherries VIII 1980s Acrylic on Cotton 30"x.1.75"x30", unframed Signed in paint along right edge of canvas, and titled and signed on reverse in ink.