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Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

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Item Ships From: Tri-State Area
Trees, Large Watercolor Painting by Richard Karwoski
By Richard Karwoski
Located in Long Island City, NY
Trees Richard C. Karwoski, American (1938–1993) Date: 1984 Watercolor on Canvas, signed Size: 50 x 67 in. (127 x 170.18 cm)
Category

1980s Abstract Impressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Canvas, Watercolor

Central Park in Fall, Framed Photorealist Watercolor Painting
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Unknown Title: Central Park in Fall Medium: Watercolor on paper, signed lower right Image Size: 17.5 x 25 inches Frame Size: 28 x 35 inches Watercolor of The Mall in Centra...
Category

1980s American Modern Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

It’s Ok, 2017, (Série I CRY TO) 123 x 123 cm
By Matheus Goulart
Located in Palm Desert, CA
Matheus is greatly influenced by the city he now calls home -- New York has long been the epicenter of fashion, hip hop, and street art, where he feels his interest in contemporary a...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Surrealist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Gesso, Watercolor

Honey, I cry to, 2017, (Série I CRY TO)
By Matheus Goulart
Located in Palm Desert, CA
Matheus is greatly influenced by the city he now calls home -- New York has long been the epicenter of fashion, hip hop, and street art, where he feels his interest in contemporary a...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Romantic Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

India Ink

A Catastrophic Perspective, Colored Pencil and Watercolor by Richard Davies
By Richard Davies
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Richard Davies Title: A Catastrophic Perspective Year: 1991 Medium: Watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, collage, signed in pencil Size: 60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm) Frame...
Category

1990s Conceptual Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Color Pencil, Graphite

Dodge and Truck - Photorealist Watercolor on Paper by Don David
By Don David
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Don Davis Title: Dodge and Truck Medium: Watercolor on paper, signed l.r. Image Size: 18 x 24 inches Frame Size: 24.75 x 30.25 inches This watercolor by American artist Don ...
Category

1980s American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Archival Paper

Crosswalk, New York City - Photorealist Watercolor on Paper by Don David
By Don David
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Don Davis Title: Crosswalk Medium: Watercolor on paper, signed lower right Image Size: 27.5 x 19.5 inches Frame Size: 35 x 27 inches Amid construction that constantly reinve...
Category

1980s American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Archival Paper

Three Women, black and white work on paper, landscape
By Charles Buckley
Located in New York, NY
We are delighted to debut Charles Buckley’s most recent series of ink drawings, based on photographs sourced from the mid-20th century. Buckley ...
Category

2010s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink

Monhegan House, Modernist watercolor, Maine, (Fisherman’s Shack)
By Albert W. Wein
Located in Greenwich, CT
Albert Wein visited Monhegan, Maine and created a modernist series of watercolors depicting the landscape, coast and life on the Island. Richly colored, t...
Category

20th Century Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

6-29-22, Impressionist, abstracted landscape drawing with colored pencil
By Sandy Litchfield
Located in New York, NY
Sandy Litchfield brings her magical abstracted landscapes to a new medium in her recent colored pencil drawings. Loose, delicate lines scramble over one another, bringing a diffuse, ...
Category

2010s Impressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Color Pencil

Miss Maude Hunters Cabin, Pop Art Watercolor by Gay Kabbash
By Gay Kabbash
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Gay Kabbash, American Title: Miss Maude Year: 1988 Medium: Watercolor on Paper, signed and dated Size: 18 in. x 23.5 in. (45.72 cm x 59.69 cm) Frame Size: 23 x 29 inches
Category

1980s Pop Art Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

French Countryside, Watercolor Painting by Jacques Despierre
By Jacques Despierre
Located in Long Island City, NY
Artist: Jacques Despierre, French (1912 - 1995) Title: French Countryside Medium: Watercolor on Paper, signed in pencil l.l. Image Size: 10 x 14 inches Frame Size: 16 x 20 inches
Category

1960s Post-Impressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

UNTITLED (lake)
By Deborah Cornell
Located in New York, NY
pastel drawing on paper of a lake with trees in brown frame
Category

1980s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper

Riverbank 5, photorealist graphite landscape drawing, 2021
By Mary Reilly
Located in New York, NY
Mary Reilly’s laborious method of toning her paper serves as the starting point for her intricate compositions. She begins by covering the entire sheet with up to eight smooth, unmod...
Category

2010s Photorealist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Graphite

Saguaro 15
By Russ Havard
Located in Fairfield, CT
Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Lights, Parachute Jump and Smile, Coney Island, colorful, text
By Janet Morgan
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Pastel on black paper. Ms. Morgan says: When I finally started riding the subway again during Covid isolation - going down to the ocean was a real treat. The collection of fisherma...
Category

2010s Expressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper

Study For Tyvek (2019) Graphite on paper drawing, architecture, truck, house
By Francesca Reyes
Located in Jersey City, NJ
Study For Tyvek (2019) by Francesca Reyes Graphite on textured archival paper black and white drawing Architecture study, truck, house, building under construction Study / Drawing /...
Category

2010s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Archival Paper, Graphite

It Could Fall Down (2019) Gouache on paper painting, landscape, cityscape, sky
By Francesca Reyes
Located in Jersey City, NJ
It Could Fall Down (2019) by Francesca Reyes Gouache on paper painting, landscape, cityscape, skyscape, sky, yard, urban scene, architecture, buildings Study / Figurative Art / City...
Category

2010s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache, Archival Paper

Gotthardt Kuehl Rathausplatz Bremen Pastel
Located in Astoria, NY
Gotthardt Johann Kuehl (German, 1850-1915), "Rathausplatz, Bremen", Pastel on Paper, signed and titled lower left, wood frame. Image: 19" H x 18" W; frame: 24.5" H x 23.5" W. Provena...
Category

Late 19th Century Impressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Pastel

Sumac, colorful Abstract Impressionist landscape gouache
By Sandy Litchfield
Located in New York, NY
Sandy Litchfield found peace and inspiration in regular solitary walks through nature throughout the pandemic. Her most recent body of work diaristically documents her constitutional...
Category

2010s Abstract Impressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Kathleen Beausoleil, Renew, 2018, blue ink on paper, landscape drawing
Located in New York, NY
Kathleen Beausoleil lives and works in Fair Haven, NJ. Primarily working in oil paint, her works focus on what it means to be a social being. Beausoleil received a 2022 Fellowship fr...
Category

2010s Abstract Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink

PLUM ISLAND GRASS
By Deborah Cornell
Located in New York, NY
pastel on paper landscape brown wood frame
Category

1980s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Pastel

BLUE JAY WAY
By Christina McPhee
Located in New York, NY
BLUE JAY WAY, 2012 ink and graphite on Arches cold press paper 44.5 x 75 inches / 1130 x 1905 mm  unframed Christina McPhee’s expansive abstract paintings, drawings, photographs, and videos test or query how can we know, and who is we? Moving from within a matrix of measurement, observation and contingent effects, her work resists characterization as product, and continually accesses fields outside itself. For her, process equals trial. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, from a perspective of the non-self– a world beyond identity. McPhee’s dynamic, performative, physical engagement with materials, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphic gestures and mark-making. The tactics of living are in subterfuge, like the ‘dazzle ships...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Graphite

TOWER BRIDGE
By Valerie B Hird
Located in New York, NY
watercolor, gesso, and gilding on BFK paper. Gold Leaf. Depiction of the Tower Bridge in London. Medieval figures.
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Gold Leaf

erotica al fresco, narrative architectural fantasy w female nudes
By Stephen Basso
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Pastel on toned paperABOUT Stephen Basso Stephen Basso's highly original pastels and oil paintings are romantic, yet thought provoking fantasies. His whimsical works are alive wi...
Category

2010s Surrealist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Pastel

Boats in Tunisia - Drawing Ink on Paper Unique Post Impressionist, 1920
By Albert Marquet
Located in New York, NY
Albert Marquet Boats in Tunisia, ca. 1920 Ink on paper 7 7/10 × 5 3/10 in l 19.5 × 13.5 cm Hand-signed by the monogram lower right
Category

1920s Impressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink

"East Providence" Oscar Bluemner, Drawing of East Providence, Architectural
By Oscar Bluemner
Located in New York, NY
Oscar Bluemner East Providence, December 21st, 1926 Inscribed with location and dated, upper left "East Providence Dec 21-26" Black crayon on paper 5 x 7 7/8 inches Julius Oskar Bl...
Category

Early 20th Century Modern Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Crayon

Saguaro 6
By Russ Havard
Located in Fairfield, CT
Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Saguaro 1
By Russ Havard
Located in Fairfield, CT
Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Flag
By Russ Havard
Located in Fairfield, CT
Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Secret Garden, Portal, colorful pastel on paper, abstracted flower pattern
By Janet Morgan
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Pastel on black paper. These works have a have a "stained glass" quality of light coming through the dark paper Ms. Morgan says: During 2020 we discovered a small garden next to a church in our neighborhood in Brooklyn that was well taken care of and always open. We brought our ground chairs...
Category

2010s Expressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper

VFD 3, watercolor, unframed, Industrial landscape, work on paper, Building
By Ferdinanda Florence
Located in Riverdale, NY
VFD #3 is an industrial watercolor painting on paper by California artist, Ferdinanda Florence. It is 11.25 x 7, unframed. It is based on the building in Vallejo California where the fire department conducts training. Ferdinanda Florence was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Arlington, VA. She received a degree in art history and studio art at The American University in 1994, and has continued to pursue a successful professional life as a scholar, teacher, and practicing artist. She earned her Master’s degree in art history at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1998. A second-generation Armenian-America, Ferdinanda has explored in her research the role of place in artistic expression. Her Master’s thesis detailed the link between Armenian religious rituals and church architecture. In her travel to sites in France, Italy, and Germany, she has researched the symbolism of doorway and floor decoration in Romanesque buildings. In her artwork, she uses industrial sites in her home city of Vallejo to explore issues of place on a more personal level. Ferdinanda’s exhibitions reflect her varied interests and concerns. Her work has appeared at the Di Rosa Preserve, Napa (“All in the Family IV,” 2005); the University of San Francisco Law School (“Creative Justice: A Social Art...
Category

2010s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Archival Paper

Secret Garden, Iris, colorful abstracted floral pastel on dark paper
By Janet Morgan
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Pastel on black paper. These works have a have a "stained glass" quality of light coming through the dark paper Ms. Morgan says: During 2020 we discovered a small garden next to a church in our neighborhood in Brooklyn that was well taken care of and always open. We brought our ground chairs...
Category

2010s Expressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper

Riverbank 3, photorealist graphite landscape drawing, 2021
By Mary Reilly
Located in New York, NY
Mary Reilly’s laborious method of toning her paper serves as the starting point for her intricate compositions. She begins by covering the entire sheet with up to eight smooth, unmod...
Category

2010s Photorealist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Graphite

TOBACCO ROAD Mid 20th Century Realism 1940 Drawing from the Novel WPA Literary 3
By David Fredenthal
Located in New York, NY
TOBACCO ROAD Mid 20th Century Realism 1940 Drawing from the Novel WPA Literary 3 10 1/2 x 6 (sight), Signed David Fredenthal lower right. Framed by Lowy. Offered here is one of several original drawings by WPA artist David Fredenthal that were first published in the 1940 illustrated edition of the novel TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell. Background on the Drawing Erskine Caldwell remarked, on seeing the work of David Fredenthal, 26-year-old painter: "That boy could draw my Tobacco Road people." A casual comment, it was enormously productive. The young painter was just finishing a two-year Guggenhcim Fellowship, preceded by a year's study in Paris, two one-man shows at New York's Downtown Gallery, and a fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy near Detroit. He was out in Colorado Springs when he heard what Caldwell had said about him. Fredenthal hadn't read Tobacco Road. He had not even seen the play - now breaking all records in its seventh year on Broadway. But he swapped a portrait for a second-hand Ford and headed East. In New York he learned that Dnell, Sloan & Pearce were bringing out a deluxe edition of Tobacco Road. But he had no entrée to the publishers, and Caldwell, to his disappointment, was out of town. So he drove on to Georgia to have a look at the Tobacco Road people. He found Dr. I. C. Caldwell, the author's father, in Wrens, Ga., going on his ministerial rounds among people like the Lesters. Fredenthal got a room from a couple who ran a 1-pump filling station...
Category

1930s American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor

"Salt and Sky, " Abstract Landscape Watercolor Painting
Located in Westport, CT
This abstract landscape painting by Melissa Kircher is made with watercolor and ink on paper. It features intricate line work over washes of paint to create a whimsical coastal hill-scape scene in a cool and earthy palette. The painting itself is 11.5" x 8.5", and measures 18.5" x 16" framed. The paper is matted and professionally framed in a warm silver frame. It is wired and ready to hang. This piece pairs beautifully with Peaceful Tides and Sea View by the same artist. Please see the three hung together in the image gallery. Contact us for more information or to purchase the three paintings together. Melissa Kircher is a painter and illustrator who enjoys everything bold and beautiful. She works with acrylics, watercolor, and ink to create pieces that invoke her deep love of nature and the human spirit. Kircher graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts from Gordon College...
Category

2010s Abstract Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor

Flowering Hillside, grayscale photorealist graphite landscape drawing, 2018
By Mary Reilly
Located in New York, NY
In her newest landscape drawing, Flowering Hillside, Mary Reilly explores the full tonal depth of graphite. She finds all of the soft subtleties of gray in her movement from the mome...
Category

2010s Photorealist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Graphite

Cloudy Sunset, Coney Island, wildly colorful abstract sky, water, beach
By Janet Morgan
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Pastel on black paper. Ms. Morgan says: When I finally started riding the subway again during Covid isolation - going down to the ocean was a real treat. The collection of fisherm...
Category

2010s Expressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Archival Paper, Pastel

Assisi II, dramatic diptych architectural print monochromatic black and white
By Agnes Murray
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Edition of 30 + 10AP Print unusual vertical diptych by master printer Agnes Murray
Category

1980s Photorealist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Archival Ink, Archival Paper

Sleep Watchers, mystery, collage, figure, night
By Audrey Anastasi
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper paint charcoal collage Paper charcoal collage These collages were created first in the presence of a live model, working quickly, in charcoal and pastel, and again, later, alon...
Category

2010s Assemblage Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Charcoal, Archival Paper, Magazine Paper

Firewood Series No. 3, hyperrealist nature still life, colored pencil drawing
By David Morrison
Located in New York, NY
In "Firewood Series No. 3," David Morrison uses colored pencils to capture the finest details of a frayed and peeling piece of birch wood. With his careful and methodical handling of...
Category

2010s Photorealist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Color Pencil

Summer, Iceland #5
By Jennifer Bartlett
Located in New York, NY
Jennifer Bartlett Summer, Iceland #5, 2000 Pastel on paper 30 x 44 1/4 inches (sheet) Unsigned
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Pastel

The Day I met a Man Named Precise under the Parachute Jump, Coney Island
By Janet Morgan
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Pastel on black paper. Ms. Morgan says: When I finally started riding the subway again during Covid isolation - going down to the ocean was a real treat. The collection of fisherma...
Category

2010s Expressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper

Lights, Parachute Jump and Smile, Coney Island, colorful historic amusement park
By Janet Morgan
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Pastel on black paper. Ms. Morgan says: When I finally started riding the subway again during Covid isolation - going down to the ocean was a real treat. The collection of fisherma...
Category

2010s Expressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper

Dark Water, mystery, collage, figure, black yellow, night
By Audrey Anastasi
Located in Brooklyn, NY
Paper paint charcoal collage on colored paper These collages were created first in the presence of a live model, working quickly, in charcoal and pastel, and again, later, alone in ...
Category

2010s Assemblage Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Charcoal, Archival Paper, Magazine Paper, Mixed Media

Rhythm
By Russ Havard
Located in Fairfield, CT
Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --RUSS HAVARD Artist Statement I'm drawn towards nature imagery that depicts isolated elements in their continual struggle to flourish ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

City Landscape #2, black and white monochromatic urban architectural abstraction
By Mauricio Trenard Sayago
Located in Brooklyn, NY
acrylic on archival Canson watercolor paper Mauricio Trenard is an artist, educator and arts activist. He says this series is of great interest to him, as it offers the potential ...
Category

Early 2000s Abstract Geometric Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Acrylic, Archival Paper

TOBACCO ROAD Mid 20th Century Realism 1940 Drawing from the Novel WPA Literary 2
By David Fredenthal
Located in New York, NY
TOBACCO ROAD Mid 20th Century Realism 1940 Drawing from the Novel WPA Literary 2 10 1/2 x 6 (sight), Signed David Fredenthal lower right. Framed by Lowy....
Category

1930s American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor

Black Sky (The Cave Series), 4
By Panos Familis
Located in New York, NY
Black Sky (The Cave Series), 4 graphite on paper 77 x 112 cm
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Archival Paper, Graphite

"Rail Yard" Urban Industrial WPA American Scene Drawing NYC Mid-Century
By Joseph Solman
Located in New York, NY
"Rail Yard" Urban Industrial WPA American Scene Drawing NYC Mid-Century. Initialed "JS" upper right Solman was a pivotal figure in the development of 20th century American art. He ...
Category

1930s American Modern Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Bare Landscape, Impressionist Watercolor on Paper by Daniel Newman
Located in Long Island City, NY
Daniel Newman, American (1927 - 1994) - Bare Landscape, Year: circa 1960, Medium: Watercolor on Paper, signed lower right, Size: 11 x 20 in. (27.94 x 50.8 cm)
Category

1960s Impressionist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

William Johnstone, Autumn Landscape, 1970
By William Johnstone
Located in New York, NY
William Johnstone OBE (1897-1981) watercolour of "Autumn Landscape" signed lower right, c.1970 Dimension: 22" W x 18.5" H x .63" D; sight 14" W x 9.75" H Provenance: Duncan R. Mille...
Category

20th Century Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Study for Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway, Morris Canal)
By Oscar Florianus Bluemner
Located in New York, NY
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...
Category

20th Century American Modern Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal

160
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Category

21st Century and Contemporary American Realist Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Josette Urso, On Spot, 2019, Ink Brush Drawing, 12 x 13 in
By Josette Urso
Located in Darien, CT
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Category

2010s Abstract Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Josette Urso, Broken, 2018, Ink Brush Drawing, 12 x 13 in
By Josette Urso
Located in Darien, CT
The view from my studio, looking across Brooklyn’s lower lying factory and warehouse buildings toward the tall grandness of Manhattan, is incredibly complex and at times overwhelming...
Category

2010s Abstract Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Josette Urso, That Daffodil, 2019, Ink Brush Drawing, 12 x 13 in
By Josette Urso
Located in Darien, CT
The view from my studio, looking across Brooklyn’s lower lying factory and warehouse buildings toward the tall grandness of Manhattan, is incredibly complex and at times overwhelming...
Category

2010s Abstract Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

Josette Urso, Backyard 2, 2005, Ink Brush Drawing, 6 x 8 in
By Josette Urso
Located in Darien, CT
The view from my studio, looking across Brooklyn’s lower lying factory and warehouse buildings toward the tall grandness of Manhattan, is incredibly complex and at times overwhelming...
Category

Early 2000s Abstract Tri-State Area - Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Ink, Archival Paper

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