Lubomir Tomaszewski

"Born in 1923, alumnus of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Student of the Warsaw University of Technology, is an extraordinary artist, searching for his own artistic way. Ambitious, he aims at creating art nobody else has ever created. He is a representative of experimental realism, a versatile sculptor and painter in love with music, nature and women beauty. He inherited his remarkable humanistic and musical talent from his mother, whereas from his father he inherited his technical and engineering talent. Thanks to this exceptional mixture of genes, Tomaszewski combines an engineer’s approach to nature and human beings with the ability to uncover the human soul. He knew he was an artist from the very beginning. He learned to paint before he could even talk: he made his first realistic drawing at the age of two and a half. The complicated course of events led him to settle down in New York region, the city became his new home, where he could find his way to artistic freedom and fame. He has over 150 individual and group exhibitions around the world to his credit. His works decorate the private studies and houses of Lawrence Rockefeller’s family and of the former President of the United States Jimmy Carter.

Lubomir Tomaszewski creates using three different kinds of media: sculpture, paintings “painted with fire” and porcelain. As a sculptor, he uses ready fragments given by nature: stones or rocks, pieces of wood and bark, and combines them with metal or glass to create unique representations of animals, figures or forest spirits. As a painter, instead of a brush, he uses a torch. The technique of painting with fire and smoke offers not only amazing expression possibilities: it makes it possible to achieve the effect of lightness and dynamism, but also an amazing force of expression. No paint can produce such results. What makes the paintings so captivating is their ethereality and power that has a strong impact on the viewers and touches their emotions. Tomaszewski has been mastering this technique for over 20 years.
While creating porcelain figurines, Professor Tomaszewski approaches the subject with great passion, as he treats them as small sculptures. He works on his own unique style and believes that by designing small-scale sculptures he gives people something beautiful, with modern shapes, something that increases the aesthetic level of the society. His adventure with porcelain figures started in the 1950s in the Institute of Industrial Design, where he used to work.
LubomirTomaszewski’s excellent education, his talent and his extraordinary abilities to observe nature and contemporary art led him to found an international artistic movement: he is the spiritual father and the leader of the Emotionalists, a group established in 1994, formed of painters, sculptors, designers, photographers, dancers and musicians.
The New York Times called him “a motion sculptor”.(ubomirtomaszewski.com/short-biography/)

"Tomaszewski's pieces represent the best quality of form and great aesthetical subtlety. This is really traditional, original, and humanistic art. Art which glorifies nature and mankind with its wisdom, strength, and beauty, It is transcendent art, based on artist's experience, education, and talent. Tomaszewski who comes from the family of artist (Bartlomiejczyks), graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, in 1953 and soon established himself as one of the country best known product design specialists. He came to the United States in 1966 and became a professor of the Department of Commercial and Interior Design in Bridgeport University, Connecticut. During all these years he was improving his skills and cultivating his admiration for the traditional values of Fine Arts. Finally, like in the old masters work he was able to show in his sculptures something metaphysical which makes his work deeply powerful. He was never a subject of the art critics in Poland, but he was well recognized in the United States in early 1970s, even though, he did not belong to any avant-garde movement. He always stays in a shadow, being a very modest and sensitive person, but his works can be found in the most important private and museum collections "(jkkfinearts.com/Tomaszewski/)

Reuben Nakian

Reuben Nakian (born August 10, 1897, College Point, New York – died December 4, 1986, Stamford, Connecticut) was an American sculptor and teacher of Armenian extraction. His recurring themes are from Greek and Roman mythology. Noted works include Leda and the Swan, The Rape of Lucrece, Hecuba, and The Birth of Venus. He was also commissioned to create portraits of Roosevelt's cabinet in the 1930s.

He met and befriended painters Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning in the 1930s and Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp in the 1940s. Poet Frank O'Hara was the curator of a major Reuben Nakian retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in 1966 where the artist was also exhibited in 1930. In the exhibition's catalog, O'Hara noted:
Nakian is unrepressed, un-neurotic, unabashed in his approach to sensuality, however tortuous his esthetic commitment, and whether his subject be death, bestiality, or Arcadian dalliance. This explicitness gives the "Nymph and Satyr" plaques a marvelous joy and ease, the "Europa" terra-cottas a voluptous dignity, and the "Leda and the Swan" drawings an almost comic abandon. Unlike most sexually oriented images in modern art, from Auguste Rodin to Andy Warhol, one finds no guilt or masochism in a Nakian. It is outgoing and athletic even in its releases and defeats: the satyr, the bull, the swan, the goat are each circumvented or absorbed by the goddess of his choice in the most choice of circumstances, that of his own choosing, like the amorous "dying" of the Elizabethans or the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

Later, he became close friends with composer, musician and sound designer, Fred Weinberg who said:

 Reuben and I became very close friends since we are (were) both in the arts, lived down the street from each other and worked on our music, and art in our Stamford, Ct. country studios. As a composer, I would make tapes of the music Reuben loved, especially Classical.. When I traveled for out of town recording sessions, I would leave my parrots, Paco and Lucy with Ruben. He loved those two parrots which he called "birdbrains". Reuben stated upon my seeing Lucy do her 'business" on one of Reuben's sculpture "Reclining Man" "Its good for the patina!.".(I have some great pics of Ruben and myself with the birds.) When I recorded with George Burns in my Stamord, Ct. studio, I introduced the two to each other, and the "Tuesday Club" began- Sort of a "secret society", where we would partake in a few drinks of Bombay Gin...Ok, more than a few.. (Ruben commented on the interesting label of Bombay Gin). One day, near his death, I found him lying on the grass in his backyard,facing the sky and then he winked, and told me "The Gods are going to call me soon". Upon Reubens death, I wrote and performed a classical piece written for Ruben called "Tribute" performed at The Stamford Library.
He taught at Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts and at Pratt Institute in New York City.Wikipedia

Christian Haupt

 Painting & Sculpture

George Segal

George Segal (November 26, 1924 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter and sculptor associated with the Pop Art movement. He was presented with the United States National Medal of Arts in 1999.Although Segal started his art career as a painter, his best known works are cast life-size figures and the tableaux the figures inhabited. In place of traditional casting techniques, Segal pioneered the use of plaster bandages (plaster-impregnated gauze strips designed for making orthopedic casts) as a sculptural medium. In this process, he first wrapped a model with bandages in sections, then removed the hardened forms and put them back together with more plaster to form a hollow shell. These forms were not used as molds; the shell itself became the final sculpture, including the rough texture of the bandages. Initially, Segal kept the sculptures stark white, but a few years later he began painting them, usually in bright monochrome colors. Eventually he started having the final forms cast in bronze, sometimes patinated white to resemble the original plaster.
Segal's figures have minimal color and detail, which give them a ghostly, melancholic appearance. In larger works, one or more figures are placed in anonymous, typically urban environments such as a street corner, bus, or diner. In contrast to the figures, the environments were built using found objects.Wikipedia

FANY G

The modelling of a bird and its coloring ask at the same time
musing and concentration.
I prepare for each bird, metal legs which are going to attribute him its position, its balance, its posture.

Painting & Sculpture