Joseph Glasco

Fire Island, Blue & Green abstract painting by New York artist Joseph Glasco

1967

Clarence Holbrook Carter (American, 1904-2000) People, 1964 Ink and crayon on paper Signed and dated upper right 36.5 x 24 inches Clarence Holbrook Carter achieved a level of nation...

Richard Andres (American, 1927-2013) Panama Garden, c. 1964 acrylic on canvas signed lower right, signed and titled verso 46 x 38 inches Richard Andres was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1950, he was immediately drafted and served for two years in the army as a mural painter. He received his Master of Arts from Kent State in 1961. A frequent exhibitor at galleries and museums and winner of multiple May Show prizes, Andres taught art in the Cleveland Public Schools for 28 years, as well as teaching the University of Buffalo, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Western Reserve University. Very little in Richard Andres’ childhood would have predicted his love of classical music, mid-century-modern architecture and certainly not his lifelong passion for art and in particular abstract art. Richard’s father, Raymond, had no more than a third-grade education, and his mother, Clara, was one of thirteen children – only three of whom lived into adulthood and none of whom attended high school. They lived, when Richard was a boy, in a dingy area of Buffalo, NY in a walk-up apartment situated above a tavern. Raymond and Clara supplemented the income from their factory jobs in the bar downstairs with Raymond playing ragtime on the piano and Clara serving drinks. This often left Richard and his two older brothers at home alone to fend for themselves. The two older boys, Raymond and Russell, were - unlike Richard- rather rough and tumble and entertained themselves with stickball, boxing and the like. Richard, on the other hand, from a very young age liked to draw, or better yet even, to paint with the small set of watercolors he received for Christmas one year. Paper, however, at the height of the depression, was hard to come by. Luckily, Clara used paper doilies as decoration for the apartment and Richard would contentedly paint and then cut up doilies, gluing the pieces together to create collages. At eight-years-old, he discovered the Albright-Knox Museum (then known as the Albright Art Gallery) and spent several hours a week there studying the paintings. He was particularly fond of Charles Burchfield‘s landscapes, enamored with their ‘messiness’ and thinking that they somehow captured more ‘feeling’ than works he was previously familiar with. For his tenth Christmas, he asked for and received a ‘how-to’ paint book by Elliot O’Hare. Through this self-teaching, he assembled the portfolio needed for acceptance to Buffalo Technical High School where he studied Advertising Arts. In his Junior year, he was encouraged to enter a watercolor painting, “Two Barns,” in the national 1944-45 Ingersoll Art Award Contest and was one of twelve grand prize winners – each one winning one hundred dollars. More importantly the painting was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute Galleries, which resulted in his winning a national scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (The Cleveland Art Institute). He flourished at the art school under the tutelage of faculty members such as Carl Gaertner, as well as that of visiting artists such as William Sommer and Henry George Keller. He would say in later years that Gaertner, in particular, influenced his attitude toward life as well as art. “Gaertner,” Andres said, “believed that there was no need to be a ‘tortured artist’, that an artist should rather enjoy beauty, family, and life in general.” Free to spend his days as he chose, he wandered the Cleveland Art Museum for most of the hours he was not attending classes or painting; the remaining time was spent drinking coffee at a local hangout with art school friends – which is where he met fellow Henry Keller scholarship winner, Avis Johnson. Richard was immediately smitten with Avis, but being rather shy, it took him the entire summer of 1948 to build up his courage to ask her out. Over that summer he ‘thought about Avis’ and worked in a diner to save money. He also used the hundred-dollar prize money won in High School to visit the first Max Beckmann retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in St. Louis. Over a half century later he spoke of that exhibit with a reverence usually reserved for spiritual matters, “I walked in and it was like nothing I had ever seen before... the color...It just glowed.” Returning to campus in the Fall, the first thing he did was go to the coffee shop in hopes of finding Avis. He did, and she, upon seeing him, realized that she was also smitten with him. They quickly became known as ‘the couple’ on campus, and a year later, with Richard being drafted for the Korean war, they were quickly married by a Justice of the Peace, celebrating after with family at Avis’s Cleveland home. As a gift, faculty member John Paul Miller...

Abstract Composition (c.2022) by Robert Somerton, British, born 1972. pastel on art paper, unframed size: 12.5 x 9.5 inches condition: excellent

Framed 33 X 45.5 image is 29 X 41.5 Hand signed lower left Signed and titled verso Sylvia Carewe (1906-1981) was an American woman artist, painter, writer and poet. Born in New York City to Russian immigrant parents, Louis and Esther Kerewsky, she changed her surname to "Carewe" in 1930. Carewe attended Columbia University and studied further with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at Atelier 17 in New York, with Hans Hoffman in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at the New School for Social Research. During World War II Carewe worked as an advertising copywriter and artist for agencies in New York. She became a prolific abstract artist in a range of media, including tapestry designs for the Aubusson tapestry carpet company in France, felt banners, collage reliefs, and what she termed "blown paintings," which were assemblages (predominantly of children's toy components) overlaid with spray paint. One of the most common subjects in her semi abstract paintings was New York City at night. She also worked in traditional artistic media, including watercolors, oils, lithographs and pastels. In October 1944, she married Marvin Small (formerly Smalheiser, executive for Carter's Little Liver Pills). They had one child, John Marvin, in June 1947. Carewe had her first one-woman show in Poughkeepsie in 1947, after which she opened in New York City at the ACA Gallery in 1948. She had some twenty other American solo shows and her works hung in many exhibits across the United States as well as in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Her works are represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Musée de l'Arte Moderne, Paris, Brandeis University, the Butler Art Institute, Howard University, the Tel Aviv Museum and the National Museum in Djakarta, Indonesia. Her work has been described by French critics as "violent, colorful art, in hard contrasts, not exempt from cold lyricism." ["Les Girls...