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  David Simpson “Little Ibicenco” – California Hard-Edge Abstract painting 1979

  DAVID SIMPSON (1928-) California, US

  “Little Ibicenco” – California Hard-Edge Abstract painting 1979

  Acrylic on canvas

  Marks: David Simpson (script signature) on back of canvas, 1979, #14/79 “Little Ibicenco”, two arrows

  H: 29″ x W: 28 3/4″

  David Simpson has explored varieties of abstraction since the early 1950s, enjoying acknowledgement and success in the art world. In 1963 he was chosen by New York’s Museum of Modern Art curator, Dorothy Miller, to appear in what turned out to be the last in her legendary series of group shows of contemporary American art. In 1964 he appeared in Clement Greenberg’s famous exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At that time Simpson painted landscape-derived abstractions and, in the 70s, he practiced a reductive but relational mode of abstraction. But with his discovery of a new acrylic medium in 1987, he was able to embrace finally and successfully the monochrome’s radicality.

  Simpson uses an acrylic paint with interference properties. The paint is composed of titanium dioxide electronically coated with mica particles. Simpson tends to mix complementaries, but admits that orange and blue also work together well. He also mixes black acrylic with the interference pigments, finding that a little bit of black helps the colour jump out. Interference pigments cause optical effects that are comparable to iridescence. When you look at the painting from one angle, you receive one set of colour sensations. When you shift your position, you get another. As you move back and forth in front of the canvas – and the paintings make you want to do so – the experience changes. The change of light also dramatically affects the optical experience, and the play of light across the canvas surface is subtly kinetic.

  ***David Simpson was associated with the California Hard-Edge Movement.

  Hard Edge Abstraction:
  It encompasses rich solid colors, neatness of surface, and arranged forms all over the canvas. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting. Hard edge is also a simply descriptive term, as applicable to past works as to future artistic production. The term refers to the abrupt transition across “hard edges” from one color area to another color area. Color within “color areas” is generally consistent, that is, homogenous. Hard-edged painting can be both figurative or nonrepresentational.

  Important solo exhibitions include: Studio la Città, Verona (2008); Light Wells +, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe (2007-08); Sonta Roesch Gallery, Houston (2007); Light Wells, Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2007); Iridescent Interference, Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston (2005); Surrealist Landscape and other Departures, Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2005); Cheryl Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2004); James Kelly Contemporary, Santa Fe (2003); Artotek, Köln (2002); Renate Schröder Galerie, Köln (2002); Renate Schröder Galerie, Köln (2001); Studio la Città, Verona (2001); Modernism Gallery, San Francisco (2001); University Art Museum, San Francisco (2000); Renate Schröder Galerie, Köln (2000); Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2000).

  Important group shows include: Galerie Lausberg, Dusseldorf (2007); West Coast Abstraction, Modernism Gallery, San Francisco (2007);  Fundamental Abstraction, Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2007); The Panza Collection – An experience in light colour, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, with catalogue (2007); Inneres Leuchten-Farbe als Malerei, Kunstverein Lingen Kunsthalle, Lingen (2005); Recent Paintings, Galleria G7, Bologna (2005); Je ne Regrette Rien, Studio la Città, Verona (2005); The Forman Collection, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2005); Modernism Gallery, San Francisco (2004); San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (2004); Albright Knox Art Gallery, N.Y. (2003); La percezione dello spazio , Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Verona (2002); Le stanze dell’arte , MART, Rovereto (curated by Gabriella Belli) (2002); Artisti americani ed europei dalla collezione Panza , Palazzo Ducale, Sassuolo (2001); Nebeneinander III (Painting Today – Overseas and Here ), Galerie Renate Schröder, Köln, with catalogue (2001); La collezione Panza di Biumo: artisti degli anni ’80 – ’90 , Museo del Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio, with catalogue (1997).

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  Jack Richard Smith “Spiros Antonopoulos” Oil on Copper 2004

  JACK RICHARD SMITH (1950-) Taos, NM

  “Spiros Antonopoulos” 2004

  Blackoil, wax, lead salts on copper, burl wood and ebonized wood Dutch old master style frame

  Exhibited: “Taos Portraits” by Jack Smith, Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico, Taos, New Mexico, May 14th – August 15th, 2004

  Illustrated: “Taos Portraits” by Jack Smith, May 14th – August 15th, 2004, exhibition catalogue (Taos, NM: Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico) illustr. 16

  Painting: 6” x 6”
  Framed: 13 3/4” x 13 11/16”

  Price: $14,500

  Incorporating blackoil, wax, lead salts, and copper Smith’s small format portraits and paintings are detailed and intimate depictions of creative individuals and charged tableaux. Smith’s singular style of portraits glow with a warm inner light and present honest, straightforward images that speak of personal narratives. Smith’s interest in miniatures developed first as a matter of convenience. In 1982, while preparing for a winter of travel in Mexico, he experienced logistical problems traveling with the larger size painting materials he was using at the time. The solution seemed to be a block of watercolor paper and casein, a milk base paint of versatile possibilities and vehement drying power. Suddenly, his paintings went from three by five feet to three by five inches. The history of oil painting, principally centered around the Dutch schools and their development of a method called black oil painting, often executed in miniature, also captured his interest. Black oil, an oleoresin comprised of white beeswax, raw linseed oil and litharge of lead, suspends the pigment above the painting ground, which was traditionally wood panel, linen or copper plate. This medium seems to suspend the pigment, allowing light to penetrate and reflect from the surface and illuminate the imaged from behind, a sort of light from within. The small format is an act of compression that requires the viewer to draw in close to a more intimate proximity and will, if the painting works, hopefully approach Joseph Campbell’s description of art as an “object of fascination” to engage the viewer and stop for a moment one’s busy mind. Jack Smith was born in 1950. At age 16, he began his training at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan before moving to Ohio to attend Columbus College of Art and Design. He also studied for a brief time at the Instituto de Allende, at San Miguel de Allende, GTO, Mexico. He now resides in New Mexico. Reflecting a profound knowledge of art history and and an alchemist’s sense of the painting craft, contemporary painter Jack Smith has forged his own place amongst the most powerful of contemporary portraitists working in America. Jack Smith recently received a prestigious Past Achievement Award from the Peter and Madeleine Martin Foundation for the Creative Arts, following an important solo exhibition titled, Jack Smith: The Taos Portraits at the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico in 2004. The exhibition featured fifty portraits of Taos, New Mexico residents, executed between 2000 and 2003. The series was intended as a visual biography of this unique artistic community at the turn of the century. Smith’s subjects range from the famous to the infamous — including artists, writers, art patrons, Native peoples, and street peoples. Spiros Antonopoulos’s (he always dropped the s in Spiros when saying his name) past is a little sketchy. I understand that he was trained as a musician and through that came to the world of computers, which he mastered immediately given his hot tub size brain pan. He also told me once that he had “done lots of drugs and some porn movies” while in college. Before we met he used to drive by my house in Arroyo Hondo, NM when he lived above us on the ridge road called Atalaya, about fifteen miles north of Taos and would make funny faces at me through the smudged window of his ghostly, lowrider station wagon. He was wildly eccentric dresser and had a selection of sunglasses that Elton would envy, mostly a thrift store wardrobe kind of guy. As I mentioned before, he tended to remind me of a mad computer geek samurai, which I tried to capture in this portrait. I’ve heard he now lives in the East Village and has forsaken his aforementioned life for obsessive Bikram yoga…… and that’s where the trail gets cold. The Taos portrait series was executed from 1999 to 2003 and was intended as a visual biography of this peculiar valley and town of Taos, NM. The subjects range from famous artists, writers and political activists to street people and what we affectionately call “sage bunnies”, or, folks that live out in the hinterlands in a grow hole with a goat or two and come to town once a month for provisions and bathe in patchuli oil, I presume, to save water. I would have liked to have had more of these folks but lining them up proved problematic as they tend to live in a parallel universe called locally, “the land of poco tiempo”, or “little time” , a condition caused, in their case, by smoking too much cheeba. This same time thing is true of my attempts at several more Native American friends from the pueblo…… it is something I greatly admire about them, unless of course you are scheduling a portrait sitting for the fourth time and they just had to go to Walmart without warning. But then “this is Taos” as John Nichols mentions in the forward to theexhibition catalogue and it is often referred to as an “open air asylum” for a myriad of good reasons. I thought it would be interesting to look back at some future time and see the weft and warp of the tapestry of Taos at the turn of themillennium. I could easily have done three hundred, but one must stop somewhere. The show was hanging in conjunction with Wayne Theibauld’s “City/ Country” exhibition at the Harwood Museum in Taos, New Mexico, June to September, 2004. – as told by Jack Smith, May 2006

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  Richard Harold Redvers Taylor, “Modernist building staircase”, Gouache on paper c. 1949

  RICHARD HAROLD REDVERS TAYLOR (1900-1975) United Kingdom

  Modernist building staircase c. 1949

  Gouache on paper, metal and wood frame

  Signed: RHRT (lower left)

  Marks: Gimpel Fils exhibition label (on back)

  Exhibited: “An Exhibition in the Kettle’s Yard Loan Gallery: Sculpture & Painter,

  14 February – 10 March, 1972” Gimpel Fils, London

  Framed: H: 41 7/16” x W: 30 5/16”

  Richard Harold Redvers Taylor (1900-1975) was born in Brighton on March 14^th, 1900 and educated at Brighton College and Heatherleys School of Fine Art, Chelsea. His father, Harold Taylor, was a headmaster. Redvers Taylor retired from the Army (where he specialized in topographical surveying in Africa) in 1937 but was recalled for war service. In 1946 he began a new career as a professional painter. Between 1948 and 1958 Taylor was given a series of six one-man shows by Lefevre and Gimple Fils in London. In the 1960’s he turned to sculpture, and in 1972 an exhibition of his sculpture and paintings was held at the Kettle’s Yard Loan Gallery in Cambridge. His work is held in the permanent collection at the Beith Uri V Rami Museum in Israel. Louise Taylor (née Hayden), his wife, was an American and the adopted daughter and heiress of Alice B. Toklas, the companion of Gertrude Stein. Louise Taylor died on 21 July 1977.

  Purism, otherwise known as l’esprit nouveau was directly inspired by a spare, functionalist aesthetic and is closely associated with the work of Le Corbusier and his circle in Paris in the second quarter of the 20^th Century. In America this purist style was known as Precisionism, which explored similar imaginary during the late 1920’s and 30’s with artists like Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Ralston Crawford at the forefront of this movement. In England, the Vorticist movement (1912-1915) was founded by Wyndham Lewis and others and was the precursor to the Purist movement in Great Britain in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Redvers Taylor created geometrical landscapes while reducing volumes to colored planes and outlines to ridges. His artwork combines depth and perspective with flattened cubist fields of color. Architecture of industrial buildings was his favorite subject, whereas people and nature were usually absent from his compositions.

   

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  Georgian diamond and crystal “Scarab” ring set in gold with a Contemporary miniature painting by Dina Brodsky, c. 1890