Luc Leestemaker - Painting of Space - Abstract Landscape

Luc Leestemaker (1957 –, 2012) was an American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Hilversum, the Netherlands.

He founded an Amsterdam-based performing arts center; organized the Dutch art collective "Hart Poetry;" and headed Leestemaker & Associates, an Amsterdam-based consulting firm specializing in the arts.

"Luc Leestemaker was a painter of space – increasingly, of pure space. Leestemaker anchors us on earth by composing each landscape painting around a horizon line; but for that, we could be adrift in the cosmos. Around that horizon he confabulates an atmosphere of rich, tempered pigment, of nuanced color, of light captured and diffused, of what can finally only be described as breathable paint.These are the least specific landscapes (or, if you would, seascapes) possible, and yet, or perhaps as a result, we recognize in them so many places we know, or at least remember – recognize them almost, but not quite, to the point of naming them. These could be depictions of foggy days, afternoons at the shore, views from heights shrouded in clouds; but more accurately, they are recollections of such scenes and moments, impressions of impressions, themselves robbed of detail by the vagaries of memory. Leestemaker’s landscape paintings challenge us not only to identify where we are, but ask us to think about where we’ve been. And then, with the palpability of that rich paint, they draw us forward, further amplifying the question: Where are we going?

— Peter Frank, Art Critic(lucleestemaker.com)

Leestemaker's paintings are exhibited throughout the U.S. and internationally. Two retrospective museum exhibitions were held in 2004. Boston Galerie d'Orsay hosted an exhibition with a selection of the museum works for the artist in 2005. The documentary "Swimming Through the Clouds", about the artist's life and work, was screened at a number of film festivals around the world and broadcast by Link TV, a culture and arts satellite network.

Yvonne Thomas- Abstract Expressionism Art

Yvonne Thomas (1913 Nice – August 7, 2009 Aspen, Colorado) was an American abstract artist.
"Yvonne Thomas was born in Nice, France and moved to the United States in 1925. She graduated from Cooper Union is 1928 and joined the Art Students League in 1940.Thomas was nearly forty years old and an accomplished painter when the 9th Street Show opened in 1951.  She had already abandoned a promising career as a commercial artist and fashion illustrator in the thirties to pursue painting.
Her earliest training in New York was under Alphaeus P. Cole at Cooper Union.  In 1948 she met Patricia Matta, wife of the famous Surrealist, who introduced her to a group of abstract painters forming a school called Subjects of the Artist. She enrolled and found a new home.Thomas lived in New York City.Yvonne Thomas’ art acknowledges the union of paint and support that the famous critic Clement Greenberg posed as a modernist quest for a responsible colorist. The poetry and sophistication of the paintings is the culmination of an education received firsthand from several leaders of the New York School’s first generation. Besides her education at Cooper Union and the Art Students League and a period of study at the famous Ozenfant School of Art in France, she was one of five privileged students to be part of the now famous Subject of the Artists School that was conducted by Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Baziotes and Hare in 1948. She subsequently worked a year with Robert Motherwell. These artists did not encourage their student to emulate modern masters. Instead they instilled the formal advances of such figures as Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian. The artists learned how to deal with problems such as how to use color as a way to structure a painting. Through working with Motherwell, Thomas inherited a thorough grounding in improvisational principles of psychic automatism from the surrealists. She was further influenced by Hans Hoffman’s principles at his Manhattan school. From this school she appreciated the emotive potentialities of color and the need to work contrapuntal in terms of positive and negative spaces. She developed an appreciation for the significance of taking the overall dimensions of a given canvas into consideration as a key compositional element. Despite, and on account of this education, Thomas has always held to her own interpretation of these principles.These works of Yvonne Thomas are painted with supple palettes and are described well in a 1960 review of Thomas’ works at the Stuttman Gallery in Manhattan by Donald Judd, "…Wide brush strokes and sweeps of color glissade to plane of the bare canvas. The paint and canvas are identified with one another continued into each other, and the consequent speed and thinness of the surface engender the clarity and singleness of the poetry."(rogallery.com)

Abstract expressionism Michael Loew

Michael Loew (May 8, 1907 – November 14, 1985) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist who was born in New York City.In the late 1920s, Loew studied at the Art Students League with the Ashcan School and was a recipient of a Sadie A. May Fellowship which allowed Loew to continue his studies in France. Michael worked for New Deal art projects from 1933–37 and during this time painted murals for U.S. post offices, high schools and the Hall of Pharmacy for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Loew chose to share his private commission with close friend and fellow artist, Willem de Kooning.From 1939 to 1940 Loew traveled to Mexico and the Yucatán, gathering inspiration for his future work. Joining the U.S. Navy Seabees in 1943 as a Battalion Painter, Loew documented the work being done on the airbase on Tinian Island. It was from this airbase that the Enola Gay would later take off from to drop the atomic bombs. Loew captured much of the work done on the island by the Navy in dozens of watercolors.Returning to New York after the war, having lost much of his hearing, Loew started over with his art studies. He studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, and with Fernand Léger in Paris. Loew became a member of the American Abstract Artists and The Artist's Club as well as The Spiral Group. His works were shown at the Stable Gallery Annuals of 1951–1955.In 1960 and again in 1966, Loew was hired to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He also spent nearly three decades as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts.In 1976 he won a fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 1979 he was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.Wikipedia

Abstract expressionism Fuller Potter

Fuller Potter (April 24, 1910 – 1990) was an American Abstract expressionist artist. He was born in New York City in 1910, attended St. Bernard's School in New York and Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, and lived most of his life in his Ledyard, Connecticut estate, near Old Mystic. Potter started painting in the traditional modes of representation, specializing in still life and landscape. His work was shown in New York in the 1930s at the Marie Harriman Gallery.
Potter spent several of his formative years painting landscapes and portraits in the Southern Appalachia region, later studying painting in Paris with André Lhote from 1929 to 1931, and in New York with Walt Kuhn and with Thomas Hart Benton. In 1950, Potter met Jackson Pollock and changed his mode of painting permanently to abstraction, and had a number of shows of that body of work at the Mystic Gallery in Mystic, Connecticut. When starting his transition towards abstract painting, he combined his graphic skills with his mastery of color, and followed a path that would lead to his artistic peak, during his full abstract expressionist period.

 

During the 1940s, Potter's work was still mostly figurative, but showed deliberate avoidance of ordinary representation. From the early 1950s on, Potter's style kept with the early works of Ad Reinhardt and with Jackson Pollock's 1940s pre-drip works. He painted in the "New York School" style, along with several of his contemporaries, including Franz Kline (1910–1962), Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), Jean-Paul Riopelle, William Baziotes (1910–1963), and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). He had a few shows in that style at several New England art venues. The Museum of the City of New York exhibited Potter's work along with Joan Miró and Georgia O'Keeffe in the main lobby in 1959.

Jeffrey Potter's To a Violent Grave, a biography of Jackson Pollock's last years, reports that Potter shared drinking sessions with Pollock in the mid-1950s. After these encounters, which occupied only a short period of his life, Fuller Potter's work evolved towards a mature and personal form of abstraction. Potter never pursued the drip/throw action mode of abstract expressionism to any notable degree. His paint is delivered with loaded brush in hand, opulently, generously and aggressively.
Fuller Potter is considered one of the major abstract painters of the 20th century. He died of emphysema in May 1990 at Westerly Hospital in Westerly, Rhode Island. He was 80 years old.Wikipedia