Rocky Hawkins

Bazooka Joe

2021

This is an unframed original painting on paper. Rocky Hawkins was born in 1950 in Seattle, Washington and grew up in small towns near the Cascades Mountains. His interest in the myst...

This is an original unframed, oil painting on canvas. Rocky Hawkins was born in 1950 in Seattle, Washington and grew up in small towns near the Cascades Mountains. His interest in th...

This is a framed painting on paper. Biography Creating paintings inspired by western movies and by Remington and Russell, he is a native of the West, having been born and raised in rural Colorado. He studied art at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he earned a Master's Degree in 1979. For two decades he worked as curator at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, before leaving in 1999 to begin work as a full-time painter and independent curator. His work is in the collections of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming; the Art Museum of Missoula; and the Yellowstone Art Museum; the Federal Reserve Bank in Helena, Montana; and the Deaconness Medical Center in Billings, Montana. Artist Statement For a long time, the images in my paintings have been identifiably, even iconically, western-stagecoaches and false-front main streets, poker games and gun battles, cowboys, Indians, cavalry troopers and horses, all suspended in a choreographed matrix of dancing paint. Distinct from the traditional western genre-which inventories the minutia of cowboy gear or tells sentimental stories of rangeland romance-my paintings embody something more elemental and timeless, animated and abstract. The images tend to be stark, graphic, and charged with painterly energy. Though they are derived from fugitive television images, the paintings, as paintings, are still, silent and non-ephemeral. They register the technological transfer of primal shadows onto the electroluminescent screens of our collective consciousness, a shimmering blur of perception and memory transposed in an interchange of gesture and description, painted marks simultaneously arresting and embodying movement. I've always liked what a painter friend, Marc Vischer, wrote in 1988 about an early group of my western paintings. Now, I'm fourteen years closer to actualizing my vision for this work, and his astute remarks seem more pertinent today than they did then. He wrote in part, "For McConnell, a searing light emanates from a new desert: that of television. And from that most desolate backdrop, he salvages fragments from a movie world that spoke of honor in a land that was lawless. In a romantic sense, McConnell's works are a visual seance. Figures, like specters distorted through intense heat waves, are captured from their eternity of 24 frames a second. Their shapes and shadows are brought back into a radically different world and given substance and texture. It is an impossible attempt to freeze them, to arrest the present's ceaseless molestation of the past, to close off the continuum. Sometimes this is done darkly and thickly as an emphatic gesture of permanence. In other works a few light strokes quickly applied suggest the ephemeral nature of film and perhaps the fleeting nature of our own lives." I have been examining new imagery in my paintings, drawing subjects from Mexican graphic novelas, modern women and men of romance and mystery from the mid-20th century, motorcycles and airplanes. The end titles of movies, stated in several languages, have inspired me to begin a new series of cross-media translations in both acrylic and watercolor. My paintings have long begun where the movies have left off. The elements of water and light co-mingle in some pieces from this series and in others which take the viewpoint of a swimmer, watching other swimmers from the wet side of this aqueous membrane, looking up toward the light. My arrival in Montana in 1982 brought me into intimate contact with some of the most storied places of the historic West and also gave me the opportunity to study the paintings of two of the most influential codifiers of western imagery, Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell...

Electric Coffin is coded within art history and ideologies from archetypes of mysticism. We explore found truths from modernity and a personal historical perspective. A process-drive...

Thomas Swanston was born 1956 in Annapolis Md., Naval Hospital. He graduated from Hobart & William Smith Colleges 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts, with studies in London and at the Stud...

This piece is a diptych. Thomas Swanston was born 1956 in Annapolis Md., Naval Hospital. He graduated from Hobart & William Smith Colleges 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts, with studie...

2021, Acrylic on Italian linen

2021, Acrylic on Italian linen

2022, Acrylic on Italian linen

2022, Acrylic on Italian linen

Large Nature Diptych by Alex K. Mason of Heron Rookery, " The Rookery" is watercolor & acrylic on Yupo mylar unframed with greens, grays, blues and ...

Henry Bermudez is a seasoned American contemporary artist born in Venezuela. Emerged from the Caribbean tropics, his artistic life has been an unexpected hybrid of ideas informed by an acute sensitivity to the past, stenciled as part of a personal inventory onto different foreign places that throughout his life have become his home and his artistic working territory. "My paintings are steeped in mythical dream imagery within an otherworldliness of carefully constructed creature and plant forms. Further defined by my identity as a Latino, my work combines symbols and myth from ancient pre-Hispanic cultures with the iconography of contemporary art. The result of this autobiographical vision is a blend of cultural diversities that further defines itself through my immersion in societies other than the one I was born into. Through my exposure to religious and social syncretism, my visual itinerary became charged with powerful influences which provided a unique vision of the African Diaspora in the Americas, its symbolism, and iconography." - Henry Bermudez The acrylic and glitter on canvas painting "COMPANIES" depicts an Afro-Latinx figure with animals and blue, silver, and red flowers. In the Venezuelan coastal Afro-Caribbean community of Borbures, religious and social syncretism provided a unique vision of the African Diaspora in the Americas with its symbolism and iconography. Bermudez’s journey of unique geographical, artistic and human observation has taken him from educational experiences in small isolated communities in the Caribbean up to representing Venezuela in the Venice Biennial. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA); Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY); Modern Art Museum of Mexico (Mexico City); Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); Venezuela National Gallery (Caracas); Museum of Contemporary Art (Maracay, Merida, Maracaibo, Caracas); Modern Art Museum of Costa Rica; Museum of Art a Ralli @Punta Del Este Uruguay; and many private collections across the globe. Since his arrival in the USA in 2003, Bermudez has been commissioned by the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia on several major projects. In 2011, he was one of a handful of artists chosen to work with the Philagrafika print collaborative founded by artistic director and curator Jose Roca. In 2012 Mr. Bermudez received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He was elected to present an installation at The Philadelphia International Airport Art...