Tri-State Area - Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Interior design paintings. The work was done with india ink in black and grey color on Yupo paper. The work is 11 by 14 inches in size, framed with a styrene face on a mat board in white with sizes 16 by 20 in. Mila Akopova...

Maeve D'Arcy Buck a Shuck, 2024 ink and colored pencil on paper 22 x 30 in. (dar146)

Of her recent works, Urso states, "I make exploratory paintings, working in response to my immediate environment. My approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intu...

Genichiro Inokuma, Japanese (1902 - 1993) - Exhibition Poster, Year: 1968, Medium: Poster, with pen drawing, signed and dated in the plate, Size: ...

Elizabeth Murray Untitled Abstract Composition, 1990 Graphite, colored pencil and paper collage on paper (frame bears the original Paula Cooper Gallery label) Signed and dated Spring...

Interior design paintings. The work was done with ink and watercolor on watercolor paper 300g. The work is 11 by 15 inches in size framed (black) with a styrene face on a double mat ...

Vision I by Cheryl R. Riley Metallic abstract geometric symbols, purple, yellow, gray, gold Gouache and metallic ink on 140# cold press watercolor paper Feminist Art and Contemporar...

Interior design paintings. The diptych is made with alcoholic ink on Yupo paper. Each work is 11 by 14 inches in size, framed without glass on a double mat board in dark blue with si...

Half & Half Again is an original work on folded paper by artist Jean Wolff. 30" x 22' 2013 Signed on back (verso) in pencil with name and date Optional framing JEAN WOLFF is a Ne...

There is nobody here (Lady in red) - Line Drawing Woman Body in red dress, 2025. Interior design paintings. The artwork was done with watercolor on watercolor paper 300g. The works a...

Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...

Robert Duran Untitled #1 (with Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) label), 1974 Watercolor on paper Includes labels from the Museum of Modern Art rental gallery label and Donna Schneier Inc; the artist's name is written on the board, not signed 18 × 23 1/2 inches Unframed This work was removed from the original vintage frame but comes with the back board with the original labels from MOMA Rental Gallery in New York and Donna Schneier Gallery in Manhattan (and later Palm Beach) Robert Duran Biography (courtesy of KARMA): Robert Duran (b. 1938, Salinas, CA; d. 2005, New Jersey) found his way from San Francisco to New York City in the mid-1960s, where he became associated with a Minimalist cohort that included Brice Marden, David Novros, and Paul Mogensen...

Stephen Powers Everything is Shit Except You Love (How We Met is Our Story), with unique drawings, 2017 Original graphite drawings on screen print in four colors on 335 gsm Coventry ...

Arnaldo Coen, Mexican (1940 -) - Bust, Year: 1969, Medium: Gouache on Paper, signed and dated lower right and signed in pencil on verso, Size: 14 x 8.5 in. (35.56 x 21.59 cm), Des...

Maeve D'Arcy Friendly Reminder, 2024 ink and colored pencil on paper 22 x 30 in. (dar147)

R/E/A Ryan Cronin Oil-Based Pastel on Paper (ND) 30" x 22.5" When people look at his work Cronin wants them to feel an immediate impact, even if they’re not sure what hit them. The ...

Thomas Anderson Abstract Expressionist painting on paper, ca. 1987 Mixed media watercolor, gouache and marker on paper Signed in black marker lower right front Unique Frame included ...

In an Art Brut style Sweet Life I, 2022 by a.muse is an abstract watercolor collage․ This work on paper is a collection of memories of summer, fragments of ...

Paul Kohn - Abstract Blue Composition, Year: 1970, Medium: Watercolor and pastel on paper, signed and dated in pencil lower right and on verso, Size: 8.25 x 11 x 2.75 in. (20.96 x...

Menashe Kadishman Untitled Sheep Drawing, ca. 1985 Unique Graphite Drawing Hand signed and inscribed on the front Frame Included Unique whimsical drawing...

James Nares Untitled flower monotype, 1988 Monotype on hand made paper Pencil signed and dated by James Nares on the lower right front Frame included: floated in the original wood fr...

This compelling and historically resonant artwork, "No Obits," immediately confronts the viewer with its stark, repeated declaration, drawn from a pivotal moment in LGBTQ+ history. T...

Beeswax, ink, metallic powder on vintage hand made paper. Does not include framing.

Simon Samsonian (1912-2003) Two Sisters, 1995 Poster color and mixed media on paper Sight size: 16 1/2 x 14 3/4 in. Framed: 26 x 23 1/2 x 1 in. Signed ...

Beeswax, ink, metallic powder on vintage hand made paper. Does not include framing.

Meg Hitchcock Supplication to the Takpo Kagyu, 2021 Text from The Aeneid, acrylic, embroidery thread, graphite 14 x 11 in. frame size: 17.75 x 14.75 in. (Hit004)

WILLIAM BAZIOTES Untitled Abstract Expressionist Mid Century Modern ink drawing with Estate COA, ca. 1955 Ink Drawing on Paper Signed lower right recto. Accompanied by letter of aut...

Outstanding pencil on paper Abstract drawing. Marcel Dumont was a Liège artist who painted in oils and gouache, also produced collages and was an illustrator and engraver, doing so in a number of different styles. Early on in his career, he tended to produce paintings displaying a poetic realism but this changed over time until, in 1957, he was employing geometric abstraction and later still, the influence of pop art could be discerned. His geometric style has strong linear structure which occasionally veers to expressionism and the effect of this is an interesting sense of detachment that the viewer of the work can feel and one engages with the subject on a different level than one would normally expect. A critic wrote of him," Sometimes expressionist, sometimes linear, the abstraction forms itself willingly, in Marcel Dumont's world, to leave the rectangular structure to connect to carefully prepared tones. He retains also, in his abundant output, a few poetic pop-art collages together with a number of drawings and engravings illustrating Stefan Zweig...

Of her recent works, Urso states, "I make exploratory paintings, working in response to my immediate environment. My approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intu...

Since 1974, Louise P. Sloane has been actively engaged in the studio as an abstract painter. Her work focuses upon geometric forms, grids and patterns. These detail oriented pieces ...

Polly Apfelbaum Color Circle and Star, 2004 Fabric Marker and Fabric Dye on Velvet Cotton Signed and dated in ink by the artist on the front with artist's inkstamp. Frame Included Si...

Of her recent works, Urso states, "I make exploratory paintings, working in response to my immediate environment. My approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intu...

This unique abstract work is a watercolor by American artist Chris Ritter. The use of broad gestural movement and bold colors creates an engaging composit...

'Untitled (#721)' 2023 by American artist, Clay Johnson. Acrylic on Arches paper, 20 x 16 in. This colorful abstract painting features bands of colors in red, yellow beige, white, an...

Diptych. Paper size: 96.5 x 127 cm/38 x 50"" Image size: 91.5 x 122 cm/ 36 x 48"" Neill is inspired by the fluid geometric qualities of curve and line, in particular how the natura...

Josette Urso "Nest" Water Color on Paper

Robert Petersen After A Rain #2, 1987 Collage on Paper: Pencil, Oil, Acrylic and Cloth Hand signed, dated and titled on lower front with Castelli Graphics label on the back Frame Inc...

Neill is inspired by the fluid geometric qualities of curve and line, in particular how the natural qualities of the earth and sky intermingle with urban elements of object and archi...

Anna Kruhelska is a visual artist and architect working across fields of art and design. She creates abstract, three-dimensional paper wall reliefs that startle in their intricacy an...

Josette Urso Lake and Sky, 2022 watercolor on paper 6 x 6 in.

Richard Stankiewicz Study for Sculpture (Untitled), ca. 1968 Graphite on Paper Signed in graphite lower right front Frame Included: held in original vintage frame with Kulicke label ...

This original abstract watercolor painting by Nealy Hauschildt features a dark blue palette and washy layers of paint. "In this deep blue piece," the ...

ROBERT GOODNOUGH Seated Girl, 1961 Charcoal Drawing on Paper 23 3/4 × 18 inches Hand signed in charcoal on the front Unframed Unique This is an exquisite, rare poignant early Robert ...

Live Transmission Morgan O'Hara's conceptually based performative drawing researches the vital movement of living beings, the human experience of time and space. It is culturally co...

Live Transmission Morgan O'Hara's conceptually based performative drawing researches the vital movement of living beings, the human experience of time and space. It is culturally co...

Colored marker on heavy paper

Classical mythology is fraught with stories of sexual misdeeds by Zeus, King of the Gods. Often Zeus would fall in love with a mortal woman and then transform himself into an animal before acting on his desires. These have been recreated by many masters though the millennia. Here, Reuben Nakian masterfully, yet tastefully, recreates the tale of Leda and the...

Interior design paintings. The triptych is made with alcoholic ink in pale pink, turquoise color on Yupo paper. Each work is 11 by 14 inches in size, framed (gold or black) with a s...

Interior design paintings. Part of the triptych “Does not see. Does not hear. Does not speak”. The artwork was done with watercolor on watercolor paper 360g. The works are 14 by 11 i...

Interior design paintings. The work was done with alcohol ink in green, grey, black, olive color on Yupo paper. The work is 20 by 26 inches in size, framed in fine-quality solid wood...

Nature is often the inspiration for many abstract painters as it gives them the opportunity to have a figurative reference that can be easily re-interpreted into an abstraction. For ...

Shape 10 (2018) by Ryan Park of Shapes Only Abstract, nonobjective, gestural, geometric art, acrylic on 300GSM archival paper. Abstract shape innovated by the artist. Neutral pal...

Marilla Palmer Waiting for Iris, 2022 watercolor, pressed petals, foil, velvet, sequin, Durabrite print on Arches Hot Press paper 15 x 11 in. (pal212) This original artwork by Maril...

Artist's Statement: "My paintings are an attempt to synthesize and enlighten pursuits of eastern and western art and their traditions. Using the full visual language of abstraction –...

Abstract artwork on paper by a Bulgarian/American artist Iliyan Ivanov. Ivanov continues to treat color in a multilayered approach, introducing a wid...

Finesse and delicacy are what characterize best Antonin Anzil’s artistic practice. Paper as a medium seems incompatible with the idea of engraving or sculpturing; and yet. Using a sh...

Shape 32 (2019) by Ryan Park of Shapes Only Abstract, nonobjective, gestural, geometric art, acrylic on 300GSM archival paper. Abstract shape innovated by the artist. Neutral pal...

Peter Halley Prison 14, 1995 Graphite pencil and ink drawing on paper. Hand signed. Titled. Dated. Framed. Hand signed on lower right front corner Unique Frame included Unique earli...

"#187 – HE SAID IT WAS A LIE" is from Amy Williams' series A Farewell to Arms – wherein the artist is working directly onto page 187 of a found copy of Er...

Of her recent works, Urso states, "I make exploratory paintings, working in response to my immediate environment. My approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intu...