Out of This World

Here is a painting I didn't expect to see at the Scottsdale Museum of the West.  This was painted by Robert McCall (1919 - 2010) who worked as an illustrator for Life Magazine back in the1960's.  He created promotional materials for many films including Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey.  Later he worked as an artist for NASA.  

This painting is called "Capriccio".  Capriccio is a term used to describe a piece of music, painting or type of art that is whimsical, fancy or fantastical.  This floating city certainly fits that description.  

 

A Woman Ahead of Her Time

 

In October of 2018, I saw an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York featuring the work of Hilma af Klint.  I had never heard of her before this exhibit and I found her story very interesting.  

Born in Sweden in 1862, af Klint studied art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.  She Graduated with honors and at the time was mostly painting naturalist paintings.  

The death of a younger sister helped to push af Klint toward a type of spiritualism called Theosophy.  In 1906 at the age of 44 she painted her first series of abstract paintings.  She was painting abstract works long before Kandinsky or Mondrian came on the scene.  In the end she felt that her spiritualist work was so ground breaking that it wasn't ready for the world to see it.  She left instructions for her work not to be displayed for 20 years after her death.  In the end, it would be almost 40 years before her work received the recognition it deserved.  

Light and Transparency

 

I found this exquisite painting at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.  It was painted by Janet Fish, an artist who explores the interactions of light and every day objects.  

Janet Fish was born in 1938 in Boston but she grew up in Bermuda.  She comes from a family of artists.  Her father was a professor of Art History and her mother was a sculptor and potter.  Her artistic connections didn't end there.  Her sister is a photographer and her grandfather was the American Impressionist painter, Clark Voorhees.  Fish knew at a young age that she wanted to be an artist.  She attended Smith College and concentrated on sculpture and print making.  After graduating from Smith, Fish enrolled in Yale University School of Art and Architecture.  It was there that she changed her focus to  painting.  She is certainly a master at light, transparency and reflections.

Safe at the Museum

 

I recently discovered that the Phoenix Art Museum owns a painting by Willem de Kooning, a painter I posted about last year after visiting one of his paintings that was stolen in a rather bold way.

He is not an artist that I'm particularly fond of but I do have to admit that this painting poses more appeal to me than the one that was stolen.  You can read that incredible story here.  

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist born in Rotterdam in 1904.  This painting is called "Woman in the Pool".  I'm not sure I see her unless that is her in the upper right corner.  

If you enjoy a good mystery, check the link above.  The story of that stolen painting is fascinating.