Albert Contreras - Geometric Abstraction

Albert Contreras (1933-June 17, 2017) was an artist and painter based in Santa Monica, California known for gestural and geometric abstraction.Contreras painted from around 1960 to 1972, and then stopped painting for 25 years.He resumed painting in 1997. Contreras has donated many of his works to museums and university galleries..."Then, in 1972, Contreras stopped painting. “I was paintings like a lot of Minimalists at the end of the 60s: reductive,” said Contreres. “We wanted to finish off painting. I painted myself to where I wanted to disappear. And I succeeded! I had come to the end of the line, and it was all over. There was no use for me to paint anymore.”So after moving back to Los Angeles (by way of New York), he shut down his studio and went to work for Santa Monica. For the next 20 years, he was a full-time employee, driving garbage trucks, operating heavy equipment and working as a crewman on a front-end skip loader, resurfacing asphalt streets.After retiring in 1992, Contreras spent five years in therapy. In 1997, he was done with that and went back to painting. “I don’t know exactly how I took up painting again. One day I said, ‘You know, I think I can paint again.’ I picked up exactly where I had left off, making monochrome paintings with little gestures in them. The first paintings I made were nearly 30 years late.”(lagunaartmuseum.org)

 

Sonia Gechtoff - Abstract expressionism

"American artist Sonia Gechtoff (1926–2018), whose work was featured in the landmark exhibition “Women in Abstract Expressionism,” organized by the Denver Art Museum in 2016, died on February 1, at the age of ninety-one. An important yet overlooked figure of the Bay Area Abstract Expressionist movement, Gechtoff was known for producing vibrant large-scale works featuring expressive gestural brushstrokes and thickly-applied layers of oil paint.Born in Philadelphia in 1926, Gechtoff began painting at an early age. Her father artist Leonid Gechtoff, a portraitist who painted former president Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover, encouraged her artmaking since she was the age of five. Gechtoff went on to study at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (formerly the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art) on a scholarship. Shortly after graduating in 1950, she moved to San Francisco and joined the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts, where she met her future husband, Abstract Expressionist painter James Kelly, who passed away in 2003. While in San Francisco she also met and was influenced by artists Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, and Elmer Bischoff.The artist had her first solo show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957. She had gained national recognition in 1954, when her work was exhibited in the “Younger American Painters” show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, alongside paintings by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. Her work was also featured in the US pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair; “Annual” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1958; the 1958 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh; and the 1961 São Paulo Bienal.
While Gechtoff and her husband permanently moved to New York in 1958, she attributed her success as an artist to the time she spent among the Bay Area arts community. “I felt that they treated me equally, that they weren’t thinking of me as a woman painter, but as another painter,” Gechtoff said. The artist found that the New York art scene was less accepting of women. For Gechtoff, San Francisco was “a very special place.” “I wish it would get more credit,” she said. “You know, people here in New York are so reluctant to admit that anything major went on there.”(artforum.com)

Mixed media paintings James Coignard

"James Coignard, painter, ceramist, sculptor and etcher, was born in Tours in 1925. At the age of 23 and after a brief career in the French administration, he discovers the landscapes of the French Riviera and decides to study at Arts décoratifs in Nice. Four years later, he quits his job at the administration to commit himself entirely to his artistic career. The encounter with Paul Hervieu in 1950 is decisive. His collaboration with gallery Hervieu made him known in artistic circles, nationally and internationally and then particularly in Scandinavia. At the beginning of his career, art critics label James Coignard as a member of Ecole de Paris. Soon, his painting and ceramic distances themselves from those of his colleagues and he goes it alone. At the beginning of the sixties, he starts to work with glass but the technical turning point occurs in 1968 when his friend Henri Goetz discovers a new etching technique, using carborundum. Etching then becomes central in his work. At the same time, his career takes off internationally. He travels a lot, especially to Sweden and USA where he lives during a few years. 1978, James Coignard participates in the creation of the etching studio Pasnic, with which he starts a long collaboration. During the eighties, he shares his time between Paris and the French Riviera and takes an interest in artist’s books and publishing issues. He exhibits now all over the world, and is acknowledged as one of the greatest painter-etchers of his time. Until his decease in 2008, James Coignard was a prolific painter, sculptor and etcher and leaves behind an immense work."(.jamescoignard.net)

"In both his mixed media canvases and his works on paper, Coignard also achieves a deep, heavy texture that is another distinctive trait of his art. He is also an accomplished sculptor as well, working with such varied materials as bronze and glass. Coignard is a compulsive worker, producing entire series of paintings and prints in intense sessions that sometimes last up to three months. His methods are meticulous, in the tradition of the Old Masters. He starts each piece with dramatic swashes of blue, red, yellow, green and black that are his signature colors."(elliottgallery.com)

Mixed-Media