The Woods Are Lovely, Dark, and Deep: August 2015

Sunday, August 30, 2015

J.B. Davol

J. B. Davol

Joseph Benjamin Davol (1864-1923) was a marine painter and art teacher. He was born in Chicago. Following art studies in Boston and New York, Davol studied in Paris at the Académie Julian in 1895-96. In Paris he studied with Henri Laurens, Benjamin, and Constant. He was a student of Charles Herbert Woodbury, and lived in Ogunquit, Maine during his active years a professional painter until his death. He commissioned the building of a studio from the noted architect John Calvin Stevens. Davol died in Ogunquit and his obituary appeared in the New York Times Sunday June 17, 1923. Davol was a silver medal winner at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Ann Lofquist

Ann Lofquist

Ann Lofquist (b.1964) is a painter whose landscapes resonate with a strong sense of place. Her intimate views capture transitory moments in time such as twilight, dusk, and dawn. Human yearnings and philosophical queries into our relationship with nature are all expressed through her exquisite rendition of form and light.

Like her historical predecessors in the French Barbizon School and the 19th-century American painter George Inness, Lofquist shares in the romantic search for meaning through an intimate and nuanced portrayal of nature’s changing light and mood. By continually revisiting the same sites and drawing new subtleties from her motif, Lofquist’s paintings speak to the transcendental experience of nature, its inherent spirituality, and to the importance of maintaining harmony between the natural and manmade worlds. Human presence, subtly included in all Lofquist’s work, is kept to a minimum in order to prevent the intrusion of any specific psychology.

Despite their calm and objective presence, Lofquist’s paintings are imbued with a sense of the sublime that is as much a function of her artistic imagination and memory as it is of external reality. She paints directly from the subject on small wooden panels in short, single sessions, then returns to her studio and uses these small sketches as source material for large studio paintings that take months to complete and often deviate from the original scene considerably.

Ann Lofquist received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana University in 1990. From 1990 to 1996, she was an assistant professor of art at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in New York and New England, and has shown at Hackett-Freedman, San Francisco; Spanierman Gallery, New York; Tatistcheff Gallery, New York; Winfield Gallery, Carmel, California; and Gross/McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards, and was included in The Artist and the American Landscape, by John Driscoll (1998). She currently resides in Ventura County, California.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Walter Launt Palmer

Walter Launt Palmer

Walter Launt Palmer’s snow scenes earned him a reputation as a master of capturing winter on canvas. Influenced primarily by the regionalist principles of the Hudson River School, Palmer’s travels through the Catskill Mountains, Hudson River Valley, Paris and Venice are reflected in his landscapes, as well as his domestic interiors and portraits.

Born into an artistic Albany, New York household Palmer grew up and interacted with many of the artistic luminaries of his time including Frederic E. Church, James and William Hart, George Boughton, Homer Dodge Martin, and Edward Gay. Palmer studied portrait painting with Charles Loring Elliot and landscape painting with Frederic Church in his early teens, and at the age of eighteen had his work accepted for a show at The National Academy of Design in New York.

In 1873 the Palmer family traveled to Europe and visited Scotland, France, Germany and Italy. While there Palmer studied with Charles Carolus Duran. During his time in Europe Palmer also spent time with many other artists including John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and Frank Duveneck. On his first visit to Venice Palmer was struck by the city’s natural and historical beauty and began painting its canals, churches, buildings, and interiors, subjects which he returned to often throughout his career.
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At the age of twenty-four Palmer had become a protégé of Frederick Church, and ultimately shared a studio with him in New York city from 1878-1881. When Palmer and Church parted ways professionally, Palmer returned briefly to Europe and upon his return moved back to his native Albany. In 1890 he married Georgianna Myers, daughter of an Albany department store magnate, who unfortunately died in childbirth two years later. Palmer later married Zoe de Vautrin Wyndham.

A large number of Palmer’s canvases were painted from Palmer’s detailed notes, sketches, and photographs, which he compiled over time. He also was extremely meticulous about keeping records of his works, something he and Frederick Church had in common.

While Palmer’s many Venetian scenes were in vogue among his clients and provided a steady income for the artist, he was equally if not better known for his luscious renditions of snowy woods and streams. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired his snowscape Silent Dawn. Many of his winter scenes earned him awards and prizes from various art clubs. Palmer attributed much of his success with winter snow scenes to painters John Ruskin and other Pre-Raphaelites who inspired his experimentation with blue shadows on traditional white snow. He was able to capture the variations of colors reflected in the winter landscapes around the Hudson River Valley. In 1908, the New York Times art critic covering Palmer's annual exhibition at the Noe Galleries in New York wrote,

Mr. Palmer is a devotee of the bleak and wintry season of
        the year, when everything is snowed under, that is, except
        Mr. Palmer's work, and all but one of these fourteen pictures
        are snow scenes-- the exception is a hot, turgid, sunny
        Venice... as rosy red and warm as his snow pictures
are blue and blue, and Mr. Palmer is no less happy in both.¹

Walter Launt Palmer lived in Albany from 1882 until 1932 when he died of pneumonia. The Walter Launt Palmer Collection now resides in the Library at the Albany Institute of History & Art and includes diaries and personal papers, photographs, and his studio books, which document the provenance of much of Palmer’s work.

Edmund Darch Lewis

Edmund Darch Lewis

Edmund Darch Lewis (1835-1910) was an American landscape painter known for his prolific style and marine oils and watercolors. Lewis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a well-to-do family. He started training at age 15 with German-born Paul Weber (1823–1916) of the Hudson River School. At age 19 he exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and was elected an Associate of the Academy at age 24.

Lewis' early work in oil, because of his excellent training, was precocious and is considered by some collectors to be superior to his later work. He traveled throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, painting river scenes, and for two decades he traveled to the White Mountains and painted landscapes of mountains, rivers, and lakes.

He made extensive marine paintings throughout New England, becoming a prolific and successful artist. His work was appreciated because of the luminosity of their subjects. Because of this lively and glowing work, he is considered to be among the Luminist painters of the Hudson River School.

Maurice Haycock

Maurice Haycock

Maurice Haycock, perhaps best known for his sensitive and extensive oeuvre of Canadian Arctic work, also painted across Southern Canada and concentrated on the upper Ottawa Valley which was near his home in Ottawa.

He began painting in watercolors and pastels, then oils, in the Ottawa area during the mid 1930s. In 1941 he reacquainted with A. Y. Jackson, whom he had first met on the ship Beothic, at Pangnirtung Fiord on Baffin Island in 1927. Haycock was a young geologist doing mapping at the time and Jackson was on a painting trip. After 1941 they continued to travel and paint together throughout the Ottawa Valley and across Canada, until Jackson’s death in 1974.

From the late-1940s until the mid-1960s Jackson, Haycock and Burton took many sketching trips together through the Upper Ottawa Valley and Madawaska Valley. They recorded in their paintings the rugged geography and post war rural farming country.

After 1965, when Haycock retired from his position as mineralogist with the Geological Survey of Canada, he spent his summers painting in the Arctic. A collection of his northern art and painting experiences, On Site with Maurice Haycock, Artist of the Arctic was published in 2006 by his daughter, Kathy.

Haycock continued to paint “up the Valley” during the early spring thaw and in the fall until his death in 1988.

Friday, August 28, 2015

Elmer Wachtel

Elmer Wachtel

Elmer Wachtel was born in Maryland in 1864 and at 18 moved to San Gabriel, California where his brother had married Guy Rose’s sister and was foreman on the Rose Ranch. Elmer had taught himself to play the violin and in 1888 became the first violinist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Discovering his visual arts talents late in life, Wachtel entered the Art Students League in New York in 1900. Upon his return to Los Angeles, Wachtel continued to earn money as a violinist while also building his reputation as an artist and teacher. One of Wachtel’s pupils, Marion Kavanaugh, an outstanding artist in her own right, would eventually become his wife. Elmer and Marion Wachtel would become two of the most recognized names in early California painting, with Elmer working in oils and Marion in watercolors which helped avoid competition.

John Marshall Gamble

John Marshall Gamble

Born in Morristown, New Jersey, John Marshall Gamble, influenced by French Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, is known for his California floral coastal and landscape paintings, especially fields of poppies and lupines. From Santa Barbara, he was one of the leaders of the California plein-air painting movement, and he was also a successful portrait painter. Another favorite painting subject was coastal views of Pacific Ocean sunsets, and judging by his auction records, he occasionally painted in Arizona and Utah. One of his closest painting companions was Elmer Wachtel.

Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel

Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1876 into an artistic family, Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel's mother was an artist, and her great grand-father a Royal Academician in London. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under Vanderpoel and in New York City with William M. Chase.

For several years she taught at the AIC and established a reputation in Milwaukee as a portrait painter. A commission from the Sante Fe Railroad Company to paint scenes in their ticket offices brought her to California.

Arriving in San Francisco in 1903, she became a pupil of William Keith. Learning of her proposed move to Southern California, Keith suggested that she contact Elmer Wachtel. A romance blossomed and they married in 1904. After Elmer’s death in 1929, she was inactive for a few years but continued to live in their Arroyo Seco home; by the early 1930s she was painting and exhibiting again.

Mrs. Wachtel worked exclusively with watercolors until after her husband’s death and then used both watercolor and oil. Regular exhibitions with both the New York and California Watercolor Societies made her paintings popular on both coasts. Her early works are tighter and more meticulously detailed than those produced after 1920. After her marriage, the artist dropped the "u" in her surname and spelled it "Kavanagh". She died at her home in Pasadena in 1954.