Wisconsin - Art
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Item Ships From: Wisconsin
Lavanderia, abstract watercolor painting, purple
By Lisa Fellerson
Located in New York, NY
Artist Statement
My paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scrapping, and gouging acry...
Category
2010s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Watercolor, Archival Paper
Late 20th century color lithograph prairie style Frank Lloyd Wright architecture
By Frank Lloyd Wright
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"The Prairie School Collection - Rug" is an offset lithograph poster with gold foil. This piece advertises an exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs. Unsigned.
34 7/8" x 22" art...
Category
1980s American Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Offset
"Love Letter, After Kunimasa" original lithograph signed romantic pop art lovely
By Michael Knigin
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Love Letter, After Kunimasa" is a hand-painted lithograph by Michael Knigin. It is signed in the lower right and is edition 16/200. This print is inspired by the Ukiyo-e prints of U...
Category
1970s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph, Ink
"Little Wolf's Last Camp, " Colored Woodblock A/P signed by Carol Summers
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Little Wolf's Last Camp" is a colored woodblock A/P signed by Carol Summers. In the image, a mountain looms over a circle of teat the edge of a lake, a scene likely inspired by the life events of the Northern Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf (c. 1820-1904) and his leadership during the Northern Cheyenne Exodus. The drama of the image is enhanced by Summers' signature printmaking technique, which allows the ink from the woodblock to seep through the paper, blurring the edges of each form.
Frame: 37 x 37 in
This is an artist's proof from the edition of 100
Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented.
In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother.
From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade.
After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957.
Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape.
In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge.
Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal.
By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MOMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia.
Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape.
In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country.
In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and nonwestern as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image.
The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist.
At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...
Category
1970s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Woodcut
Untitled
By Ananda Kesler
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Edition 1/13
Signed to lower right
Ananda Kesler was born in Haifa, Israel. In 2002 she received her BA in Fine Art from the University of Iowa. She has continued her art education...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
20th century figurative landscape oil painting pastoral scene farm field cow
By Sylvia Spicuzza
Located in Milwaukee, WI
This early work by American artist Sylvia Spicuzza is an excellent example of Regionalism: in the foreground, a farmer in blue stands before a herd of cattle. Beyond the fence of the...
Category
1930s American Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Oil, Board
'Playing Sisters' original Shona stone sculpture signed by Colleen Madamombe
By Colleen Madamombe
Located in Milwaukee, WI
'Playing Sisters' is an original black serpentine sculpture by the celebrated second generation Shona artist Colleen Madamombe. The sculpture presents a character common to Madamombe...
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Stone
Kinderfest (Wie die Alten sungen, so zwitschern die Jungen)
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Framed 46 x 57.50 in13
Printed by L. Angerer. Engraved by Paul Sigmund Habelmann after the original oil painting by Ludwig Knaus.
The inscription "Wie die Alten sungen, so zwitschern...
Category
1860s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Engraving
"Pura Vida" original color woodcut print signed by Carol Summers
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Pura Vida" is an original color woodcut signed by Carol Summers. A multi-colored piece shows a waterfall with red flames behind it in the middle of the piece. On the left stands a tree with yellow leaves on a hill. To the right is a rainbow. This is an excellent example of Summer's printmaking, not just because of the technique and imagery, but because it numbered 1 of the edition of 125. In addition, it contains a personal inscription to the Milwaukee gallerist David Barnett, who has championed the work of Summers and produced catalogs of his work. Indeed, this print appears as no. 189 in the David Barnett Gallery's 1988 catalogue raisonné of Summer's woodcuts.
Feel free to inquire if you would like to purchase a copy of the catalogue raisonné along with your Carol Summers print.
Art: 24.25 x 24.75 in
Frame: 36 x 35 in
signed lower right
titled and inscribed to David [Barnett] lower right
edition (1/125) lower right
Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented.
In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother.
From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade.
After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957.
Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape.
In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge.
Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal.
By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MOMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia.
Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape.
In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country.
In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and nonwestern as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image.
The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist.
At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...
Category
1980s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Woodcut
"Maeght Editeur, " Original Color Lithograph Poster
By Alexander Calder
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Maeght Editeur" is a color lithograph poster. This poster was for an exhibit on Alexander Calder's work in Paris, France. It depicts a black tree with red fruits on the left side an...
Category
1970s Post-Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
"Nude (Bonjour) Ed. of 600, " Color Lithograph signed by Paul Guiramand
By Paul Guiramand
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Nude (Bonjour)" is an original color lithograph by Paul Guiramand. The artist signed the piece in the lower right. This piece is from an edition of 600. It depicts a nude female fig...
Category
1970s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
'Courtesan and Young Man at Fuchu' Original Erotic Shunga Woodblock
By Utagawa Hiroshige (Ando Hiroshige)
Located in Milwaukee, WI
The present work is an excellent example of the erotic Shunga prints produced by Utagawa 'Ando' Hioshige and his school. Shunga imagery became especially widespread in Japan with the...
Category
Mid-19th Century Edo Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Woodcut
"Secret Society Mask-Sierra Leone W. Africa, " Wood created circa 1930
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Secret Society Mask-Sierra Leone W. Africa," is a wood sculpture of a woman's head. The hair has been sculpted with intricate detail, and metal hair adornments...
Category
1930s Tribal Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Wood
Derriere Le Miroir
By Saul Steinberg
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Derriere Le Miroir" is an original color lithograph created by the artist Saul Steinberg.
Edition: 53/150
Artwork Size: 14"x 20"
Frame Size: 33 1/8"x 25 5/8"
From the Saul Steinb...
Category
1970s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Ink, Lithograph
"Derriere Le Miroir" Catalog with Five Lithographs
By Alexander Calder
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Derriere Le Miroir" is a portfolio of lithographs by Alexander Calder. The artist signed the portfolio on the last page. This is edition number 146/150 of the deluxe edition, with t...
Category
1970s Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
"Ellen's Diner, NYC, " Photorealist Watercolor Painting signed by Bruce McCombs
By Bruce McCombs
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Ellen's Diner, NYC" is an original photorealist watercolor painting by Bruce McCombs. The artist signed the piece lower right. This piece features a city diner's neon sign and clock...
Category
Early 2000s Photorealist Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Watercolor
Peruvian Folk Art Hand Painted Glass Mirror springtime motif gift for mom colors
Located in Milwaukee, WI
This colorful glass frame, now being repurposed as a mirror, was hand painted by an unknown Peruvian artist. The opening of the frame is 8 inches high by 10 inches wide and makes a g...
Category
2010s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Glass, Mirror, Paint
From: Ilsée, Princess of Tripoli Recto: "Eldenias " Verso: "Hilderich "
By Alphonse Mucha
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"From: Ilsée, Princess of Tripoli Recto: "Eldenias" Verso: "Hilderich" is an original color lithograph by Alphonse Mucha. Exquisite double-sided color lithographs from "Ilsee, Princ...
Category
1890s Art Nouveau Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
"Dancing Doll" Original Painted Steel Sculpture by: Ralph Wickstrom
By Ralph Wickstrom
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Dancing Doll" is a painted steel sculpture by Ralph Wickstrom created in 1994. One of Wickstrom's more representational pieces, though still considered abstract. Yet, at first glance, the viewer may not catch the whimsical dancing figure. Arms outstretched and hollow head with a triangle body, the sculpture resembles the stick figures so often seen on restroom signs...
Category
1990s Abstract Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Steel
La Magie noire (Black Magic) ed, 16/275 color lithograph by Rene Magritte
By René Magritte
Located in Milwaukee, WI
This color lithograph printed in 2011, Magie noire (Black Magic), by the Surrealist artist, René Magritte, is number 16 in an edition of 275. Facsimile sig...
Category
Mid-20th Century Surrealist Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
"India, " Abstract Woodcut and Monotype signed by Carol Summers
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"India" is a woodcut and monotype signed by Carol Summers. Here, Summer's abstract language for landscape imagery is taken to its most extreme: The image offers a view of a highly stylized waterfall, with red water falling down behind green foliage below. A hint of light blue at the lower left suggests a continuation of the water's flow. Above, purples and yellows mist upward from the power of the water. The playfulness of the image is enhanced by Summers' signature printmaking technique, which allows the ink from the woodblock to seep through the paper, blurring the edges of each form. Summers' signature can be found in pencil at the bottom of the rightmost blue form, with the title and edition at the bottom of the leftmost blue form. A copy of this print can be found in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
37.25 x 24.88 inches, artwork
48.5 x 35.5 inches, frame
Numbered 44 from the edition of 75
Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented.
In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother.
From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade.
After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957.
Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape.
In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge.
Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal.
By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MoMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia.
Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape.
In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country.
In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and nonwestern as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image.
The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist.
At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...
Category
1990s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Monotype, Woodcut
Sunset After Storm
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Original Woodcut in colors on Japanese paper.
Carol Summers has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter.
Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented.
In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned.
Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother.
From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts...
Category
1980s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Woodcut
"But Nothing Happens, " an Abstract Acrylic Painting on Canvas by Dierdre Schanen
By Deirdre Schanen
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"But Nothing Happens" is a contemporary abstract painting, acrylic on canvas consisting of layers of gold with highlights of red and blue. The artist signed and titled the piece on t...
Category
2010s Abstract Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Canvas, Acrylic
City Hall Square, Milwaukee
By George Raab
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Framed 16.25 x 18.75 in
11.38 x 8.75 inches (sheet), 11.25 x 8.75 inches (block)
Linoleum block print on laid paper.
Signed in plate
Category
1930s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Linocut
The Net
By George Raab
Located in Milwaukee, WI
This piece is an original linoleum block print created and printed by George Raab. The lower margin is titled and signed by the artist in graphite. The lower left has the title. The ...
Category
1930s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Linocut
$1,740
20th century woodcut ink black and white figures musical instruments dramatic
By Robert Franz Von Neumann
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Chamber Music" is an original wood engraving by Robert Franz von Neumann. It features a room full of men in the thralls of creating music together. A small audience stands outside their circle.
Image: 5.5" x 7"
Framed: 14" x 15.56"
1888 - 1976 Born in Rostock, Mecklenburg, Germany, Robert von Neumann...
Category
1930s American Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Woodcut
17th century etching black and white figurative landscape trees buildings
By Jan Frans van Bloemen (Orizzonte)
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Conversation Outside Castle" is an original etching by Jan Frans van Bloemen. It depicts a number of figures just outside the majestic walls of a castle. These groups of figures are engaged in their own conversations.
9" x 6 3/4" art
21 5/8" x 19 3/8" frame
Jan Frans van Bloemen (baptized 12 May 1662 - buried 13 June 1749) was a Flemish landscape painter mainly active in Rome. Here he was able to establish himself as the leading painter of views (vedute) of the Roman countryside depicted in the aesthetic of the classical landscape tradition.
Van Bloemen predominantly painted classical landscapes, taking his inspiration from the Roman Campagna. His landscapes, with their recession through a series of planes, soft, warm lightning and classical and religious subject matter, drew on the examples of artists such as Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet. His paintings are exquisitely imbued with that "difficult-to-define pastoral ambience" which helped to make him such a great painter in the eyes of his contemporaries. The technique and subjects of the work of Jan Frans van Bloemen are also related to painters such as Jan Asselijn...
Category
18th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Etching
19th century puppet figure demon red ornate gold mythological Indonesian
Located in Milwaukee, WI
This flat shadow puppet was created by an unknown Indonesian artist. This shadow puppet, 19" high, was used in Indonesian Wayang puppet shows.
Wayang (Krama Javanese: Ringgit ꦫꦶꦁꦒꦶꦠ꧀, "Shadow"), also known as Wajang, is a form of puppet theatre art found in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, wherein a dramatic story is told through shadows thrown by puppets and sometimes combined with human characters. The art form celebrates the Indonesian culture and artistic talent; its origins are traced to the spread of Hinduism in the medieval era and the arrival of leather-based puppet arts called Tholu bommalata from southern India.
Wayang refers to the entire dramatic show. Sometimes the leather puppet...
Category
19th Century Folk Art Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Leather
Silo
By George Raab
Located in Milwaukee, WI
9.25 x 12 inches (sheet), 8.75 x 12 inches (block)
Linoleum block print on laid paper
Framed 16 x 18.88 in
Signed to lower margin
Category
1930s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Linocut
$1,740
Soft Rock, pastel pink abstract watercolor painting on archival paper
By Lisa Fellerson
Located in New York, NY
Lisa Fellerson’s paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scrapping, and gouging acrylic ...
Category
2010s Abstract Expressionist Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Charcoal, Mixed Media, Watercolor, Archival Paper
Milwaukee Bay From Pumping Station
By George Raab
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Framed 19.38 x 16.50 in
8.88 x 12 inches (sheet), 8.88 x 11.88 inches (block)
linoleum block print on green laid paper
signed in plate
Category
1930s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Linocut
Tropical Melt, abstract painting, green and purple
By Lisa Fellerson
Located in New York, NY
Lisa Fellerson’s paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scrapping, and gouging acrylic ...
Category
2010s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Canvas, Acrylic
Lithographie Originale V from Miro Lithographs IV, Maeght Publisher by Joan Miró
By Joan Miró
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Lithographie Originale V" is an original color lithograph by Joan Miro, published in "Miro Lithographs IV, Maeght Publisher" in 1981. It depicts Miro's signature biomorphic abstract...
Category
1980s Abstract Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
20th century color lithograph postcard indigenous figures landscape rock sky
By Joseph Roy Willis
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Navajo Indians At Home" is a color lithograph postcard by Joseph Roy Willis. A number of American Natives of varying ages and genders are depicted in the brightly colored clothing a...
Category
1930s Other Art Style Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Postcard, Lithograph
"The Court Jesters, " Two Woodcuts by Andre Derain
By André Derain
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"The Court Jesters" includes two original color woodcuts by Andre Derain. This is from an edition of 200. It features two vignettes of brightly-clad j...
Category
1940s Fauvist Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Woodcut
Late 19th century color lithograph art nouveau ornate bookplate figures floral
By Alphonse Mucha
Located in Milwaukee, WI
From: Ilsée, Princesse de Tripoli "Ilsee and Jaufre" is an original color lithograph by Alphonse Mucha. Exquisite double-sided color lithographs from "Ilsee, Princesse de Tripoli," ...
Category
1890s Art Nouveau Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
"Jungle, " Color Lithograph Landscape signed by Carol Summers
By Carol Summers
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Jungle" is an important, rare color lithograph signed by Carol Summers from the early years of his production. The image offers a landscape of a dark jungle, printed mostly in black ink. In the center, a blue pool of water is shaded by two trees. Summers' technique in this print renders a painterly quality to the image: the grasses and leaves of the scene are all created with playful, energetic swiping motions much like watercolor paint. This technique and the use of fields of color predict the style Summers would adopt in the coming decades, making this an important early work.
30 x 22 inches, artwork
Numbered 14 of the edition of 27
Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented.
In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother.
From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts. In 1954, Summers received a grant from the Italian government to study for a year in Italy. Woodcuts completed soon after his arrival there were almost all editions of only 8 to 25 prints, small in size, architectural in content and black and white in color. The most well-known are Siennese Landscape and Little Landscape, which depicted the area near where he resided. Summers extended this trip three more years, a decision which would have significant impact on choices of subject matter and color in the coming decade.
After returning from Europe, Summers’ images continued to feature historical landmarks and events from Italy as well as from France, Spain and Greece. However, as evidenced in Aetna’s Dream, Worldwind and Arch of Triumph, a new look prevailed. These woodcuts were larger in size and in color. Some incorporated metal leaf in the creation of a collage and Summers even experimented with silkscreening. Editions were now between 20 and 50 prints in number. Most importantly, Summers employed his rubbing technique for the first time in the creation of Fantastic Garden in late 1957.
Dark Vision of Xerxes, a benchmark for Summers, was the first woodcut where Summers experimented using mineral spirits as part of his printmaking process. A Fulbright Grant as well as Fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation followed soon thereafter, as did faculty positions at colleges and universities primarily in New York and Pennsylvania. During this period he married a dancer named Elaine Smithers with whom he had one son, Kyle. Around this same time, along with fellow artist Leonard Baskin, Summers pioneered what is now referred to as the “monumental” woodcut. This term was coined in the early 1960s to denote woodcuts that were dramatically bigger than those previously created in earlier years, ones that were limited in size mostly by the size of small hand-presses. While Baskin chose figurative subject matter, serious in nature and rendered with thick, striated lines, Summers rendered much less somber images preferring to emphasize shape and color; his subject matter approached abstraction but was always firmly rooted in the landscape.
In addition to working in this new, larger scale, Summers simultaneously refined a printmaking process which would eventually be called the “Carol Summers Method” or the “ Carol Summers Technique”. Summers produces his woodcuts by hand, usually from one or more blocks of quarter-inch pine, using oil-based printing inks and porous mulberry papers. His woodcuts reveal a sensitivity to wood especially its absorptive qualities and the subtleties of the grain. In several of his woodcuts throughout his career he has used the undulating, grainy patterns of a large wood plank to portray a flowing river or tumbling waterfall. The best examples of this are Dream, done in 1965 and the later Flash Flood Escalante, in 2003. In the majority of his woodcuts, Summers makes the blocks slightly larger than the paper so the image and color will bleed off the edge.
Before printing, he centers a dry sheet of paper over the top of the cut wood block or blocks, securing it with giant clips. Then he rolls the ink directly on the front of the sheet of paper and pressing down onto the dry wood block or reassembled group of blocks. Summers is technically very proficient; the inks are thoroughly saturated onto the surface of the paper but they do not run into each other. The precision of the color inking in Constantine’s Dream in 1969 and Rainbow Glacier in 1970 has been referred to in various studio handbooks. Summers refers to his own printing technique as “rubbing”. In traditional woodcut printing, including the Japanese method, the ink is applied directly onto the block. However, by following his own method, Summers has avoided the mirror-reversed image of a conventional print and it has given him the control over the precise amount of ink that he wants on the paper. After the ink is applied to the front of the paper, Summers sprays it with mineral spirits, which act as a thinning agent. The absorptive fibers of the paper draw the thinned ink away from the surface softening the shapes and diffusing and muting the colors. This produces a unique glow that is a hallmark of the Summers printmaking technique. Unlike the works of other color field artists or modernists of the time, this new technique made Summers’ extreme simplification and flat color areas anything but hard-edged or coldly impersonal.
By the 1960s, Summers had developed a personal way of coloring and printing and was not afraid of hard work, doing the cutting, inking and pulling himself. In 1964, at the age of 38, Summers’ work was exhibited for a second time at the Museum of Modern Art. This time his work was featured in a one-man show and then as one of MOMA’s two-year traveling exhibitions which toured throughout the United States. In subsequent years, Summers’ works would be exhibited and acquired for the permanent collections of multiple museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Summers’ familiarity with landscapes throughout the world is firsthand. As a navigator-bombardier in the Marines in World War II, he toured the South Pacific and Asia.
Following college, travel in Europe and subsequent teaching positions, in 1972, after 47 years on the East Coast, Carol Summers moved permanently to Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. There met his second wife, Joan Ward Toth, a textile artist who died in 1998; and it was here his second son, Ethan was born. During the years that followed this relocation, Summers’ choice of subject matter became more diverse although it retained the positive, mostly life-affirming quality that had existed from the beginning. Images now included moons, comets, both sunny and starry skies, hearts and flowers, all of which, in one way or another, remained tied to the landscape.
In the 1980s, from his home and studio in the Santa Cruz mountains, Summers continued to work as an artist supplementing his income by conducting classes and workshops at universities in California and Oregon as well as throughout the Mid and Southwest. He also traveled extensively during this period hiking and camping, often for weeks at a time, throughout the western United States and Canada. Throughout the decade it was not unusual for Summers to backpack alone or with a fellow artist into mountains or back country for six weeks or more at a time. Not surprisingly, the artwork created during this period rarely departed from images of the land, sea and sky. Summers rendered these landscapes in a more representational style than before, however he always kept them somewhat abstract by mixing geometric shapes with organic shapes, irregular in outline. Some of his most critically acknowledged work was created during this period including First Rain, 1985 and The Rolling Sea, 1989. Summers received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Bard College in 1979 and was selected by the United States Information Agency to spend a year conducting painting and printmaking workshops at universities throughout India. Since that original sabbatical, he has returned every year, spending four to eight weeks traveling throughout that country.
In the 1990s, interspersed with these journeys to India have been additional treks to the back roads and high country areas of Mexico, Central America, Nepal, China and Japan. Travel to these exotic and faraway places had a profound influence on Summers’ art. Subject matter became more worldly and nonwestern as with From Humla to Dolpo, 1991 or A Former Life of Budha, 1996, for example. Architectural images, such as The Pillars of Hercules, 1990 or The Raja’s Aviary, 1992 became more common. Still life images made a reappearance with Jungle Bouquet in 1997. This was also a period when Summers began using odd-sized paper to further the impact of an image.
The 1996 Night, a view of the earth and horizon as it might be seen by an astronaut, is over six feet long and only slightly more than a foot-and-a-half high. From 1999, Revuelta A Vida (Spanish for “Return to Life”) is pie-shaped and covers nearly 18 cubic feet. It was also at this juncture that Summers began to experiment with a somewhat different palette although he retained his love of saturated colors. The 2003 Far Side of Time is a superb example of the new direction taken by this colorist.
At the turn of the millennium in 1999, “Carol Summers Woodcuts...
Category
1960s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
Four original etchings of women from 'Aula Veneris' series by Wenceslaus Hollar
By Wenceslaus Hollar
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Presented here as a group are four original etchings of women in European national dress from the master printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar's series "Aula V...
Category
17th Century Old Masters Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Etching, Paper
"Low Tide, " Oil on Canvas Landscape signed by Raymond Suchomel
By Raymond Suchomel
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Low Tide" is an original oil painting on canvas by Raymond Suchomel. The artist signed the painting in the lower right. This painting depicts three boats washed up...
Category
1990s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
"Fall Hare, " Oil on Board Animal Portrait Outside signed by Cathryn Ruvalcaba
By Cathryn Ruvalcaba
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Fall Hare" is an oil on board signed by Cathryn Ruvalcaba. A timid little rabbit sits near the right side looking off into the distance. It is at the edge of over grown land, behind...
Category
2010s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Oil, Board
"Color Field (Chalk on Wet Paper)" original pastel by Sylvia Spicuzza
By Sylvia Spicuzza
Located in Milwaukee, WI
In this composition, Sylvia Spiczza works in the manner of color field artists like Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, presenting a gradation of colors shifting from yellow to red ...
Category
1960s Color-Field Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Pastel
20th century color lithograph poster art deco piano player text bold
By Andre Daude
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Pianos Daude" is an original color lithograph poster. This poster showcases an aerial view of a man in a suit playing a piano. The text and design of the ...
Category
1920s Art Deco Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
Blue Mist
By Craig Lueck
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Framed 15.75 x 13.13 in
Signed to margin
Category
Early 2000s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Watercolor
"Isadora Duncan Dancing #3, " Watercolor and Ink signed by Abraham Walkowitz
By Abraham Walkowitz
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Isadora Duncan Dancing #3" is an original ink and watercolor piece on cream paper by Abraham Walkowitz. The artist signed the piece in the lower center. The drawing depicts Isadora ...
Category
1920s Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Ink, Watercolor
Moulton Barn Silhouette and Tetons
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Alternative sizes and media available:
16 x 16
16 x 20
16 x 24
20 x 20
20 x 30
28 x 28
28 x 35
30 x 45
40 x 40
40 x 50
40 x 60
Matte photo paper or canvas available on...
Category
2010s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Photographic Paper
Left of Center, purple and green abstract watercolor painting on archival paper
By Lisa Fellerson
Located in New York, NY
Lisa Fellerson’s paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scrapping, and gouging acrylic ...
Category
2010s Abstract Expressionist Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Watercolor, Archival Paper
19th century color lithograph portrait Rembrandt expressive sepia contrast
By Claude Weisbuch
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Rembrandt en Habit de Capitaine" is an original lithograph by Claude Weisbuch. The artist signed the piece lower right and wrote the edition number (249/250) in the lower left. This...
Category
1980s Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Lithograph
Optical Art Female Artist 1980s Abstract Geometric Watercolor Pastel Signed
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Log Cabin Humble Beginnings" is a watercolor painting created by Barbara Kohl-Spiro. From 1984 this comes from a series of paintings based on quilt designs. This example depicts the...
Category
1980s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Watercolor
"Bambara Queen, Rep. Mali, " Wood created in Africa in c. 1940
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Bambara Queen, Rep. Mali" is a carved wood sculpture with abstracted human and animal figures.
20" x 6" x 3"
The Bambara are a Mande ethnic group native to West Africa, primarily ...
Category
1940s Tribal Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Wood
Tetons 7G
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Alternative sizes and media available:
16 x 16
16 x 20
16 x 24
20 x 20
20 x 30
28 x 28
28 x 35
30 x 45
40 x 40
40 x 50
40 x 60
Matte photo paper or canvas available on...
Category
2010s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Photographic Paper
"Barbisio, Dog & Hat" offset lithograph poster by Giovanni Mingozzi
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Barbisio (Dog & Hat)" is an offset color lithograph poster by Giovanni Mingozzi, this example coming from the original printing of the poster. It features a white dog surrounded by ...
Category
1940s Modern Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Offset
Beams Blue, abstract painting on canvas, broad blue strokes
By Lisa Fellerson
Located in New York, NY
Lisa Fellerson’s paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scraping and gouging acrylic pa...
Category
2010s Abstract Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Canvas, Acrylic
El Capitan, Yosemite
Located in Milwaukee, WI
Alternative sizes and media available:
16 x 16
16 x 20
16 x 24
20 x 20
20 x 30
28 x 28
28 x 35
30 x 45
40 x 40
40 x 50
40 x 60
Matte photo paper or canvas available on...
Category
1950s Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Photographic Paper
"Homage to Daniel Smith: Premier Triple African Violets, " by David Barnett
By David Barnett
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Homage to Daniel Smith: Premier Triple African Violets" is an original mixed media piece by David Barnett. The artist signed the piece lower right and used iridescent acrylic, water...
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Ink, Mixed Media, Acrylic, Watercolor
"Iridescent Hybrid Rose, " Original Watercolor & Acrylic signed by David Barnett
By David Barnett
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Iridescent Hybrid Rose" is an original acrylic and watercolor painting by David Barnett, signed in the lower left. The rose of the title is a vibrant red, perched atop a stem that g...
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Acrylic, Watercolor
"Bronze Statue - Ife, Nigeria, " Bronze Sculpture created circa 1920s
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Bronze Statue - Ife, Nigeria" is a bronze sculpture created in circa 1920. This figure has short legs and a short torso, but a large head. They held out their hands with two objects...
Category
1920s Tribal Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Bronze
'I Loved You Once' original abstract oil painting by Deirdre Schanen
By Deirdre Schanen
Located in Milwaukee, WI
'I Loved You Once' is an oil painting by the American artist Deirdre Schanen. Schanen's works weave between non-objective abstraction and representative landscape painting. This exam...
Category
2010s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
"Off to the Suburbs, " Oil Pastel on Grocery Bag signed by Reginald K. Gee
By Reginald K. Gee
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Off to the Suburbs" is an original oil pastel drawing by Reginald K. Gee. The artist signed the piece lower right. It features a man on a motorcycle riding...
Category
Early 2000s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Oil Pastel, Found Objects
Deuce
Located in Milwaukee, WI
John Hallett is a Wisconsin-based veterinarian-turned-artist.
Signed left back
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Bronze
$2,610
"Cow Jumping Over the Moon, " Original Mixed Media signed by David Barnett
By David Barnett
Located in Milwaukee, WI
"Cow Jumping Over the Moon" is an original mixed media piece by David Barnett, signed in the lower right. It incorporates watercolor, marker, ...
Category
1960s Contemporary Wisconsin - Art
Materials
Mixed Media, Watercolor