Sue Bartfield

"Landscape Green, " Abstract Landscape Pastel Drawing by Sue Bartfield

1970

Wolf Kahn was commissioned by the Smithsonian to design a postcard for them. He made four designs and they selected a singular one. This drawing here is one of the few rejected desig...

"Harmony on the Third Hole Chenequa Country Club" is a signed pastel drawing by Peggy Leonard. It depicts a golf course, trees, and tall grass in bright colors. 18" x 24" art 25" x ...

"Trellis of Clemantis Chenequa Country Club" is an original pastel drawing on canson paper signed by the artist Peggy Leonard in the lower left. It depicts a garden and expansive lan...

Summer Fields Near Dijon" is an original pastel drawing by Michael DeFrancesco. The artist signed the piece in the lower right. This piece depicts an expansive field under a bright blue sky. 17" x 25 1/2" art 27 1/2" x 36" frame "As I progress in my painting, I hope to say more with less ... to leave the obvious vague ... and to paint only that which is essential ... this is my goal as an artist." Michael Defrancesco received his Fine Arts degree from the American Academy of Art in Chicago. While at the Academy, he was fortunate to have studied under some wonderful instructors such as Bill Parks, Vern Stake, Eugene Hall, Fred Berger, and the renowned watercolorist Irving Shapiro...

"Bandelier #1" is an original pastel drawing signed by the artist Peggy Leonard in the lower left. It depicts a colorful array of light and shadow in a grassy wooded area. 12 1/2" x 9" art 25 1/2" x 21 1/2" frame Peggy Leonard received her BFA in painting and drawing and an associate’s degree in nursing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is both a registered nurse, and accomplished artist, residing in Milwaukee, WI. From the artist: “These paintings are my prayers,” muses Leonard, reflecting on her driving need to express herself through her art. “We are made of the stuff that requires us to respond with our hearts and hands. Often, it requires terrible sacrifice and suffering, something not everyone can understand. But it is done with reverence of life, not irreverence.” Leonard’s pastels and oil paintings capture her reverence of life and reflect her own life’s journey, including earlier forays into the wilderness. Her venture into art began in early childhood, as childless neighbors nurtured her natural ability to draw; concurrently, Leonard’s parents instilled a respect for academic excellence and the higher order of nurturing others. As a young nurse, Leonard “heard and saw poignant messages to travel while one was young and free…while one had one’s health.” Consequently, she took to the open road and public lands, camping across America for months at a time. During these years, her “celebration of the natural splendor of this country” helped shape her sense of artistic expression. She was moved by such sights as the sunset on St. Mary’s Lake...

"Milwaukee River, Third Ward" is a mixed media piece by signed by Peggy Leonard. It was created using gesso, sumi ink, and pastel and depicts a red boat on a gray river. 16" x 20" ...

Signed "Nell Blaine" upper left in pencil. Signed, titled, dated verso on sheet. Signed, titled, dated verso on backing panel. The artist. Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Purchased by private collectors c.1994. By descent. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). From her November 15, 1996 NYT obituary: Nell Blaine, a widely respected New York landscape painter and watercolorist, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 74 and had homes in Manhattan and Gloucester, Mass. Ms. Blaine, who had been hospitalized since July, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1959, when she contracted polio. Ms. Blaine was born in Richmond, Va., in 1922, and first studied at the Richmond School of Art, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. She moved to New York in 1942 to study painting with Hans Hofmann and later studied etching and engraving at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. During her first years in New York, her work, which had previously been tightly realist, turned abstract, inspired by Mondrian, Leger and Jean Helion. At one time she was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists. She was also a founding member of the Jane Street Gallery, one of Manhattan's earliest artists' cooperatives, and had her first solo show there in 1945. Just as Ms. Blaine was becoming known as a promising abstract painter, and gaining the admiration of such critics as Clement Greenberg, she started to shift back to representation. Inspired in part by a trip with Larry Rivers in 1950 to Paris, where she was especially impressed by the work of Vuillard and Bonnard, she immersed herself in the tradition of 19th-century European painting. From the mid-1950's, she cultivated an increasingly painterly and colorful style, usually working directly from nature, or still life, with particular emphasis on the forms and hues of flowers. Her work retained a sense of all-over structure and pulsating energy that she nonetheless credited to abstract art. ''It all goes back to Mondrian,'' she would say. In the 1950's, Ms. Blaine was prominent among a circle of New York artists and poets that included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr. and Rudy Burckhardt. She had her first solo show of representational work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and was represented by the Poindexter Gallery until it closed in 1978, and, in recent years, by the Fischbach Gallery. During the 1950's she supported herself as a commercial artist, designing brochures for art galleries. In 1955, she designed the original logo, column heads and layout for The Village Voice. In 1957, Ms. Blaine was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female artists in America. In 1959, after several months of traveling and painting in Greece, she contracted severe bulbar polio on the island of Mykonos. ''To Nell Blaine,'' an exhibition organized at Poindexter to raise money for her hospital bills, included the work of 79 artists, including Saul Steinberg, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mr. Rivers, Ms. Freilicher and Robert Rauschenberg. After eight months in a New York hospital, including five months in an iron lung...

Abstract Landscape Mid 20th Century Work on Paper Hamptons, NY Drawing Pastel. Signed and dated '62 lower right. 9 x 12 inches (sight) and 15. 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches framed. BIO Robert Dash is known for his Hamptons paintings...

Erle Loran (American, 1905-1999) Set of six landscapes Each mixed media on paper Two signed, lower right and left corners Sheet (largest, unframed): 8.25"h x 11.25"w. Loran was a very influential Bay Area artist whose works are held in public collections across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, de Young Museum, SF MoMA...

This series of paintings is inspired by the relationship between the artist and the Fontainebleau forest region. Here we're talking about the Episy marsh, a sensitive, protected natu...

Ruben Gelardi's depiction of a yellow tram in Copenhagen. Pastel on paper measures 15 7/8 x 20; frame dimensions measure 22 1/4 x 26 3/4 x 1 1/4. Artist'...

Roger Cecil. Welsh ( b.1942 - d.2015 ). Llangorse, Brecon Beacons Watercolor and pastel on paper. Signed. Image size 19.5 inches x 29.5 inches ( 49.5cm x 75cm ). Frame size 24.6 inches x 34.6 inches ( 62.5cm x 88cm ). Available for sale; this original painting is by the Welsh artist Roger Cecil and dates from around 1964. The watercolor and pastel work is presented and supplied in a sympathetic contemporary frame (our stock frame, which is shown in these photographs), mounted using conservation materials and behind glass. The original backboard has been reused but the artwork has been isolated from it using conservation barrier materials. This vintage artwork is in good condition, commensurate with its age. Previous cockling (rippling) of the paper has been eliminated by stretching and the use of a new mounting. Previous foxing and age marks have been mechanically removed and the coarse fiber of the paper has been made good in these areas. The painting is now ready to hang and display. The watercolor is signed lower left. Provenance: Previously with the Howard Roberts Gallery, Imperial Buildings, 69/74 St Mary Street, Cardiff. Roger Cecil was a reclusive painter, draughtsman and teacher who was born in Abertillery, Monmouthshire in 1942. He lived and worked in Wales for the last four decades of his life, much of it in the house where he was born and brought up. Cecil produced abstract work rich in imagery, poetry and color, which were drawn from his environment, the industrial valley towns and mountains. Prolific and obsessive, he was always a solitary artist, with no affiliations to any group or artistic movement. He worked for more than forty years, with an ever evolving and prolific creative output. His pictures capture the geology and the history of the places he knew so intimately, and the impact of man of that environment. Cecil studied Fine Art at Newport College of Art from 1959 to 1963, where his teachers included John Wright and Thomas Rathmell; in 1963 he gained the College’s highest award in the national diploma in design and a place at the Royal College London. In 1964 he won the David Murray Landscape Award from the RA. He took up his place at the Royal College of Art, but after just a few weeks he was unsatisfied and instead took up manual work in opencast mines and building sites. Cecil later spent some time teaching at Ebbw Vale. From 1995 to 1998 he did his MA, which he gained with distinction in communication design at St. Martin’s College of Art. The BBC made a television documentary on Cecil's work called The Gentle Rebel. For a long time Cecil did not exhibit, through choice, and it was friends who helped to promote him. He then had a series of exhibitions at Business Art Galleries from 1987, and in 1995 the Hill Court Gallery, Abergavenny, held a retrospective of his work. In 1998 Gordon Hepworth and Y Tabernacl both showed Cecil's pictures. Cecil’s works were also shown at the Oriel Myrddin Gallery in 2006 and 20011. The small book which takes the name of the earlier exhibition ”Cariad”; has an introduction by gallery manager Meg Anthony which states; “The magic of Roger Cecil’s work is in part down to the man, for he is enigmatic and surprising, diffident and proud. He has deliberately avoided the art establishment, remaining shy of its protocol and systems of exposure and recognition. He has consciously created the space to pursue his art, away from the pressures of publicity and celebrity...... paint is Roger’s passion.” Cecil’s methods were complex; he worked with a mixture of materials, including oil pastels, sandpaper, primer and plaster. He built up layers and then he rubbed and scratched them away. His work is textured and nuanced, and the color reverberates as if it has a life of its own. The paintings are abstract, but there are echoes of monumental shapes and undulations of the female form, the Valleys - the dark hills embracing the bowls of space and the rich, gritty textures of the industrial and post-industrial landscape, highlighted by intricate, personal marks. Sarah Bradford states: “Scale is an important feature of Roger Cecil’s work; he constantly shifts from near and the far off. He also moves his viewpoint from looking at, to looking down on to. This looking down, as though a bird, onto the world of the painting, comes from exploration of his surroundings and from the ordinance survey maps he takes with him when he walks. He has often said how he is inspired by the language of symbols and lines that are used in maps to delineate the landscape. It is easy to see the connection when looking at the networks of invented footpaths, waterways, and other pinpoint features that can be found in his work.” … Mary Lloyd...