Mark Kellett

Storm Approaching IX

2007

20" x 26" Unframed Serigraph of 145 II Hand Signed by Diana Christensen

10.5" x 10.5" Unframed Limited Edition Serigraph of 1 Hand Signed by Mark Kellett 2007

Recently graduated from Pasadena’s legendary Art Center College of Design, Tom Baldwin created the series of inkjet prints Japanese Gardens in 1996 on his computer, using then-nascent graphics technology to "paint" his images on the computer screen. Baldwin embraced this technology and its accompanying printing process not just for the speed and ease of their use, but because the artist could achieve the absolute flatness that the principles of modernism preached but ultimately--because of the limitations of their tools--never reached. These colorful, semi-abstracted views of Japanese temple landscapes subtly, but radically redefine picture space. Baldwin shifts fore and backgrounds, giving equal weight to skies and hillsides. Endowing a lowly bush with a vibrant purple or orange might cause it to pop out of proportion, but ultimately lends balance and stability to the work itself, in short, returning the composition to its original, harmonious whole in keeping with the subject matter. these original prints employ a color scheme that seems more reminiscent of 1980s Japanese pop art beer advertisements...

Reclining Cubist Nude Woman Max Weber (April 18, 1881 – October 4, 1961) was a Jewish-American painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art. He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant (1915), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, "the finest canvas of his Cubist phase," in the words of art historian Avis Berman. Born in the Polish city of Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, Weber emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn with his Orthodox Jewish parents at the age of ten. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was a fortunate early influence on Weber as he was an "enlightened and vital teacher" in a time of conservative art instruction, a man who was interested in new approaches to creating art. Dow had met Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven, was a devoted student of Japanese art, and defended the advanced modernist painting and sculpture he saw at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. In 1905, after teaching in Virginia and Minnesota, Weber had saved enough money to travel to Europe, where he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and acquainted himself with the work of such modernists as Henri Rousseau (who became a good friend), Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other members of the School of Paris. His friends among fellow Americans included some equally adventurous young painters, such as Abraham Walkowitz, H. Lyman Sayen, and Patrick Henry Bruce. Avant-garde France in the years immediately before World War I was fertile and welcoming territory for Weber, then in his early twenties. He arrived in Paris in time to see a major Cézanne exhibition, meet the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, frequent Gertrude Stein's salon, and enroll in classes in Matisse's private "Academie." Rousseau gave him some of his works; others, Weber purchased. He was responsible for Rousseau's first exhibition in the United States. In 1909 he returned to New York and helped to introduce Cubism to America. He is now considered one of the most significant early American Cubists, but the reception his work received in New York at the time was profoundly discouraging. Critical response to his paintings in a 1911 show at the 291 gallery, run by Alfred Stieglitz, was an occasion for "one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America." The reviews were "of an almost hysterical violence." He was attacked for his "brutal, vulgar, and unnecessary art license." Even a critic who usually tried to be sympathetic to new art, James Gibbons Huneker, protested that the artist's clever technique had left viewers with no real picture and made use of the adage, "The operation was successful, but the patient died."[8] As art historian Sam Hunter wrote, "Weber's wistful, tentative Cubism provided the philistine press with their first solid target prior to the Armory Show." The Cellist...