Inspiration

John Ruskin

John Ruskin

(1819-1900)

 

"All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own."

Study of a Velvet Crab- by J. Ruskin

Emile Gruppe

 

 

" I was also lucky to have had great teachers- not only academic men who drilled me in the fundamentals, but also teachers who stressed the importance of feeling and imagination.

...I felt free to move things, making them bigger or smaller as best suited my purpose. I said that Carlson made us do meticulous tree studies in order to increase our understanding of nature. But once we understood a subject, he encouraged us to alter it to fit our mood. We could interpret the scene in a lyrical or tragic way- as long as we got the feeling of the place.


 

-Emile Gruppe, Quote and Painting from his book 'Gruppe on Color'

 

 

 

Emile Gruppe, son of painter Charles Gruppe, was born in Rochester, New York. Part of his childhood was spent in Holland, where his father worked as an art dealer. In the United States he apprenticed to his uncle, a sign painter.

He attended the National Academy School, the Art Students League, the Grande Chamiere in Paris, and studied with John F. Carlson, Richard Miller, George Bridgman, C. Chapman and Charles Hawthorne.

Gruppe was a resourceful artist, teaching, painting posters for movies and prizefights, doing landscape backgrounds for an animal artist, and briefly working in advertising. He was one of the first artists in Rockport, Massachusetts to advertise his paintings for sale at a time when most artists sold their works in city galleries. After the Great Depression, he spent winters painting in Vermont, rejoining his family each summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he ran the Gruppe Summer School.

Gruppe spent nearly sixty years working almost exclusively as a plein-air artist, until suffering a slight stroke in his late seventies. His work grew looser and freer as his career progressed. He is best known for his fishing scenes and views of Rockport and Gloucester. Gruppe enjoyed a national reputation, and exhibited widely throughout the United States.

 

The Arrow And The Song

The Arrow And The Song

Poem lyrics of The Arrow And The Song by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow.

 

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

 

 

*Artwork- "The Hawk And Arrow" 4 x 6", colored pencil, Aaron Holland

Brian Lewis

Mr. Brian Lewis was my mentor for about three and a half years at the Bougie Studio (MPLS) where he instructed his students in classical drawing and painting techniques.

Brian's lineage as an artist comes also from the French Academic approach, specifically classical realism, or neo-classicism via Richard Lack (et al. Gammel). Brian is probably best known for his still-life and portraiture. He is in fact one of the finest portrait and figurative painters alive. He is also a well respected landscape painter.

I remember on weekends, or sometimes on a week-long vacation, Brian would take a sketching trip to Colorado or the North Shore or some distant, beautiful location with other artists and return with a bundle of small plein air sketches under his arm. All of us students would gather around to admire his paintings. These paintings would often become the subject of large-scale finished paintings like the one above. The picture(above) hung in the foyer of the Bougie Studio for a number of years while I was attending. Brian is currently instructing at The Atelier in Minneapolis, and is preparing for a one-man show which is to be announced.

For more information about Mr. Lewis or The Atelier tradition click here.

All paintings copyright Brian Lewis