Thomas Fransioli Paintings

Magnolia After the Rain is 24 x 36 oil on canvas . Gallery Wrapped Susan is a native Houstonian. She is passionate about oil painting, specializing in large scale florals. She was inspired to start painting florals when she began photographing flowers on her daily walks. Susan is an early childhood educator and teaches at a private school in Houston. She is a member of the Lassaulx studio in Houston, Texas. Susan graduated from HCC with honors with a degree in Fine Arts. She studied at the Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Susan Meeks...

"Approach to Lee's Ferry" by Kim Whitesides, oil on canvas, 18 X 22 inches (Framed size: 21.5 x 25.5 inches) Whitesides made an impact in the art community at a very young age. While working as an illustrator in New York City from the late 60s through the mid 80s, his paintings appeared in many publications, including Time Magazine, Rolling Stone and Playboy. He received numerous awards from The Art Directors Club of New York and The Society of Illustrators. It was at this time that Whitesides began a period of bold work with the airbrush that emphasized the simplified spaces and clean lines of art deco and art moderne, for which he gained a national reputation. A native Utahn, Whitesides believes art is a language and an opportunity for his vision to inspire others. He continues to grow as an artist, as his art is constantly opening doors on new vistas...

William Astor Pilots the New York Yacht Club Run A superior and graceful schooner as grand as any ever built, AMBASSADRESS was William Backhouse Astor, Jr's "floating home" from its launch in 1877 until he sold it in 1884 and purchased his massive steam/sail yacht...

Lowell Nesbitt's paintings are in most major museum collections. He is the artist that NASA selected to commemorate the Apollo Moon missions over 50 years ago. In the 1950s he dabb...

Unframed dimensions: 25 x 44 inches Framed dimensions: 31 x 50 inches Born and raised on the Adams Shore section of Quincy Bay in Massachusetts, Richard Loud cannot remember a time ...

'Moving Sky' is 48 x 53 inches. The unique work bridges realism with surrealism. The painting is unframed and is ready to hang and enjoy over a lifetime. Signed and dated by the ar...

Ethereal landscape with water celebrating morning light. Oil on canvas is 30 x 40 inches, and it is meticulously painted by Brooks Anderson. Signed, ti...

John Steuart Curry "Sketching Wisconsin," 1946 oil on canvas 31.13 x 28 inches, canvas 39.75 x 36.75 x 2.5 inches, frame Signed and dated lower right Overall excellent condition Presented in a 24-karat gold leaf hand-carved wood frame John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) was an American regionalist painter active during the Great Depression and into World War II. He was born in Kansas on his family’s farm but went on to study art in Chicago, Paris and New York as young man. In Paris, he was exposed to the work of masters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Eugène Delacroix and Jacques-Louis David. As he matured, his work showed the influence of these masters, especially in his compositional decisions. Like the two other Midwestern regionalist artists that are most often grouped with him, Grant Wood (American, 1891-1942) and Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889-1975), Curry was interested in representational works containing distinctly American subject matter. This was contrary to the popular art at the time, which was moving closer and closer to abstraction and individual expression. Sketching Wisconsin is an oil painting completed in 1946, the last year of John Steuart Curry’s life, during which time he was the artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The painting is significant in Curry’s body of work both as a very revealing self-portrait, and as a landscape that clearly and sensitively depicts the scenery of southern Wisconsin near Madison. It is also a portrait of the artist’s second wife, Kathleen Gould Curry, and is unique in that it contains a ‘picture within a picture,’ a compositional element that many early painting masters used to draw the eye of the viewer. This particular artwork adds a new twist to this theme: Curry’s wife is creating essentially the same painting the viewer is looking at when viewing Sketching Wisconsin. The triangular composition of the figures in the foreground immediately brings focus to a younger Curry, whose head penetrates the horizon line and whose gaze looks out towards the viewer. The eye then moves down to Mrs. Curry, who, seated on a folding stool and with her hand raised to paint the canvas on the easel before her, anchors the triangular composition. The shape is repeated in the legs of the stool and the easel. Behind the two figures, stripes of furrowed fields fall away gently down the hillside to a farmstead and small lake below. Beyond the lake, patches of field and forest rise and fall into the distance, and eventually give way to blue hills. Here, Curry has subverted the traditional artist’s self-portrait by portraying himself as a farmer first and an artist second. He rejects what he sees as an elitist art world of the East Coast and Europe. In this self-portrait he depicts himself without any pretense or the instruments of his profession and with a red tractor standing in the field behind him as if he was taking a break from the field work. Here, Curry’s wife symbolizes John Steuart Curry’s identity as an artist. Compared with a self-portrait of the artist completed a decade earlier, this work shows a marked departure from how the artist previously presented and viewed himself. In the earlier portrait, Curry depicted himself in the studio with brushes in hand, and with some of his more recognizable and successful canvases behind him. But in Sketching Wisconsin, Curry has taken himself out of the studio and into the field, indicating a shift in the artist’s self-conception. Sketching Wisconsin’s rural subject also expresses Curry’s populist ideals, that art could be relevant to anyone. This followed the broad educational objectives of UW’s artist-in-residence program. Curry was appointed to his position at the University of Wisconsin in 1937 and was the first person to hold any such position in the country, the purpose of which was to serve as an educational resource to the people of the state. He embraced his role at the University with zeal and not only opened the doors of his campus studio in the School of Agriculture to the community, but also spent a great deal of time traveling around the state of Wisconsin to visit rural artists who could benefit from his expertise. It was during his ten years in the program that Curry was able to put into practice his belief that art should be meaningful to the rural populace. However, during this time he also struggled with public criticism, as the dominant forces of the art market were moving away from representation. Perhaps it was Curry’s desire for public acceptance during the latter part of his career that caused him to portray himself as an Everyman in Sketching Wisconsin. Beyond its importance as a portrait of the artist, Sketching Wisconsin is also a detailed and sensitive landscape that shows us Curry’s deep personal connection to his environment. The landscape here can be compared to Wisconsin Landscape of 1938-39 (the Metropolitan Museum of Art), which presents a similar tableau of rolling hills with a patchwork of fields. Like Wisconsin Landscape, this is an incredibly detailed and expressive depiction of a place close to the artist’s heart. This expressive landscape is certainly the result of many hours spent sketching people, animals, weather conditions and topography of Wisconsin as Curry traveled around the state. The backdrop of undulating hills and the sweeping horizon, and the emotions evoked by it, are emphatically recognizable as the ‘driftless’ area of south-central Wisconsin. But while the Metropolitan’s Wisconsin Landscape conveys a sense of uncertainty or foreboding with its dramatic spring cloudscape and alternating bands of light and dark, Sketching Wisconsin has a warm and reflective mood. The colors of the foliage indicate that it is late summer and Curry seems to look out at the viewer approvingly, as if satisfied with the fertile ground surrounding him. The landscape in Sketching Wisconsin is also revealing of what became one of Curry’s passions while artist-in-residence at UW’s School of Agriculture – soil conservation. When Curry was a child in Kansas, he saw his father almost lose his farm and its soil to the erosion of The Dust Bowl. Therefore, he was very enthusiastic about ideas from UW’s School of Agriculture on soil conservation methods being used on Wisconsin farms. In Sketching Wisconsin, we see evidence of crop rotation methods in the terraced stripes of fields leading down the hillside away from the Curry’s and in how they alternate between cultivated and fallow fields. Overall, Sketching Wisconsin has a warm, reflective, and comfortably pastoral atmosphere, and the perceived shift in Curry’s self-image that is evident in the portrait is a positive one. After his rise to favor in the art world in the 1930’s, and then rejection from it due to the strong beliefs presented in his art, Curry is satisfied and proud to be farmer in this self-portrait. Curry suffered from high blood...

Battle Mountain, Nevada (2005), oil on canvas, 30x40 inches (framed size: 39 x 50 inches) Earl Jones (1937- ) is one of Utah’s best known landscape artists. As an undergraduate at the University of Utah, where he earned a BFA in 1959 and an MFA in 1962, Jones was preoccupied with the figure, studying under the tutelage of portrait painter Alvin Gittins. He then ventured from Utah to New York and the Art Students League where he took figure painting classes with Joseph Hirsch. Later Jones became heir to the landscape legacy of LeConte Stewart...

The impressionist land and water scene from Brooks Anderson. This estuary scene of Marin captures you and takes you on a journey from stream to ocean. Artist signed, titled and dated...

Outlaw Mesa Shadows, oil on canvas 17 x 30 inches (Framed size: 18 x 31 inches), $2,900 Leslie Thomas returned to painting after working 20 years as a computer engineer. She has since studied painting under Mark Knudsen...

Hen and Chicks in Basket is a 12.5 x 15, oil on canvas still life and animal scene by female, American painter, Mary Russell Smith. The painting is framed and signed en verso. Mary ...