Terry Redlin

Cabin by the Lake, Night Sky, Terry Redlin

It's been almost two years ago now. I was visiting our friendly neighborhood hospital. It was while being led through the labyrinth of corridors to a treatment room that I first encountered the paintings of Terry Redlin. I was there to have my brand new pacemaker checked out. Gradually I came to realize that one reason healthcare is so expensive in this country has to do with the art print collections many such facilities have hanging on their walls. And with all those corridors, man do they have a LOT of walls. Actually, being an artist and a patient on Social Security, I don't begrudge them the relatively modest cost of the artwork; but can you imagine how much it must cost to have all those prints matted and framed behind glass? Why, it must add at least two cents to everyone's hospital bill in order to provide patients and staff a pleasant, artistic working environment.

Autumn Afternoon, Terry Redlin

My first reaction in seeing Redlin's work was one of delight. His sunsets or sunrises (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference) were nothing if not spectacular. Moreover his penchant for silhouetting country folk up early in the morning (or late at night) striving to eke out a living in a rural environment was an interesting departure from most sun-setting landscape painters who, at best, usually manage only a fence or two, maybe a barn, and perhaps a few other mundane farm items. I wouldn't go so far as to say I fell "in love" with Redlin's work, but I did find it fascinating...at first. Then I came to realize that Terry Redlin was kind of the rural version of Thomas Kinkade, whose syrupy sweet work I detest. The only difference seemed to be that while Kinkade's cute little well-lit bungalows were sweetened with sugar, Redlin's glaring sunsets were sweetened with molasses.



Redlin, the wildlife artist...

More recently, I've mitigated my opinion of Redlin somewhat as I've noticed that there's more to him than pretty sunsets/sunrises. Redlin was a wildlife painter. That's not to say he didn't veer off into prettified landscapes from time to time, but...what the hell...as Kinkade proved again and again and again, that's the kind of art which, with astute marketing, makes them the most popular artists in this, and probably several other countries. Whether urban, suburban, or rural, sentimental nostalgia sells. In fact, in some cases, the average print buyer would be hard-pressed to tell a Redlin print from a Kinkade.

Name the artists.

Terry Redlin

Few artists can rival the standards of excellence achieved by Terry Redlin over the past twenty-five years. Born in 1937, he is truly one of the country's most widely collected painters of wildlife and Americana. For eight consecutive years, 1991 through 1998, Redlin was named America's Most Popular Artist in annual gallery surveys conducted by U.S.ART magazine. His induction into U.S.ART's Hall of Fame in 1992 followed the magazine's poll of 900 galleries nationwide which, that year, placed five of Redlin's limited editions in the top 11 in popularity. Over the life of the poll, 30 of Redlin's prints have been included on that list. His use of earthy colors, blazing sunrises and sunsets and nostalgic themes are often cited as the reasons for his immense popularity. Much the same could be said of Thomas Kinkade.



The Conservationists, 1991, Terry Redlin

In the 1920s wood ducks were close to extinction. Thanks to thousands of concerned outdoorsmen and women, not to mention artists such as Redlin, these beautiful ducks are today one of our most abundant waterfowl. Redlin's The Conservationists (above) salutes one episode in this story. Early on a spring morning, three generations of one family, work together, to assure the next generation of wood ducks a secure nesting site.

Opened in 1997, over 150 of Terry Redlin's original paintings have been seen by more than two-million visitors.

On Friday, September first, of this year (2017), the Redlin Art Center in Watertown, South Dakota (above), will place Terry’s final painting in the gallery. For years, the Redlin family held the painting, unsure of how to explain why it is so different from the rest of Terry’s collection. The colors are different. The level of detail is different. The overall style is different. The painting is a reflection of a very difficult time in Terry Redlin’s life. Quite apart from their similar style and content, Thomas Kinkade and Terry Redlin have one other thing in common. Kinkade died in 2006 of a drug overdose. That same year, at the age of seventy, Terry Redlin was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease.

Evening on the Ice, 2007, Terry Redlin (his final painting).

Less than a year later, Terry Redlin announced his retirement. The painting, Evening on the Ice (above), was his last. He lost his ability to paint. He lost his memories as well. He began working on the painting in 2005, but as time passed, it became more and more of a losing struggle. He simply could not finish it. In 2007, Terry’s wife, Helene, and son, Charles, finally convinced him to stop working on the painting and allow it to go to press. After a lifetime as an artist, the disease stripped Terry of something so second nature to him he once remarked, “To me, painting is like breathing.” Terry Redlin struggled with his disease for nine years. Then, on April 24, 2016, he died. In an effort to raise awareness about Alzheimer’s Disease, the Redlin Art Center will display Evening on the Ice for the entire month of September (2017) in an effort to raise awareness of the disease that took the artist's life.

What a difference a day makes.



Hightailing, Terry Redlin

 

José Luis Benício

Marilyn Monroe by Jose Luis Benicio. Diamonds, not to mention satins, makeup, and a good hairdresser, are a girl's best friend.

Despite what the suggestive images below might suggest, this is not about glamorous movie stars. Some might argue that so-called glamorous movie stars are not, in and of themselves, glamorous at all. In most cases, it takes a whole team of designers, seamstresses, makeup artist, drama coaches, fitness trainers, photographers and, yes, artists to make entertainment celebrities appear glamorous. The cheesecake or beefcake beneath all the glamour are just the raw materials. Take away the glamour team and these people are much more like the rest of us than we might think. Ironically, our glamour queens and kings wouldn't have it any other way. It allows them to wash their faces; don some ordinary duds; and a pair of shades; then blend in with the rest of us. Deglamorizing allows them at least a modest chance at privacy and reality that money cannot buy.
 

José Luis Benício

Instead, this is about a Brazilian artist whose palette seemed to literally drip with glamour. Jose Luis Benicio was born in 1936 near the town of Rio Prado, (southern) Brazil. Originally a teenage pianist, he abandoned music to devote himself to drawing, in a career spanning more than fifty years he has created thousands of Pocketbook covers, more than three-hundred movie posters, and hundreds of disc covers, print ads, and book illustrations. Beginning his career as an apprentice designer in Porto Alegre at the age of 16, Benicio moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1953, working in the various art departments of advertising agencies and magazine. From 1961, he began working for McCann Erickson Advertising, doing important jobs for Coca-Cola, Esso, and other major clients.

Once called "dime store novels,' though very few such
American outlets stooped to handling such titillating trash.

In the 1960s, Benicio gained fame by drawing voluptuous women to cover pulp pocket books of the late Editora Monterrey, particularly the Giselle series (above). Benicio was quite adept at handling women with curves and the exaltation of the female body, much like Vargas, the famous designer of American Playboy. Benicio became known as the "king of pin-ups" in Brazil. He claimed his greatest influence was the work of the American artist, Norman Rockwell. There's no indication Rockwell returned the compliment. By the 70's Benicio was the most requested and most famous poster illustrator in Brazil, though he was forced to quibble and negotiate with the censorship of the military dictatorship to get his works approved.

Pretty tame stuff as compared to Benicia's book covers.

Clark Gable and Carol Lombard,
Jose Luis Benicio

Benicio continued to be a very busy man all through the 1980s. He worked with gouache paint, until the inauguration of President Fernando Collor, who closed the Embrafilme and paralyzed movie produc-tion in Brazil for lack of financing. It was during this time that Benicio began work-ing with American studios even as the brush began to be replaced by the com-puter, making the execution of works cheaper. His glamour portraits soon be-came less requested by the cinema. With more than 50 years of his career, illus-trating architectural projects and illustrat-ing works for the magazines Veja, Playboy and Isto É, among others, nowadays Beni-cio devotes most of his time to advertisements for internal magazines in his studio in Rio de Janeiro.



 

In 2011, the publisher, Reference Press, released the art book Sex & Crime: The Book Cover Art of Benicio. At the end of 2012, the publisher Opera Graphica launched E Benicio Created the Woman by the journalist Gonçalo Junior, which relates the artist's personal and professional history while bringing to view more than 200 illustrations made by the artist throughout the decades. The book is a revised, updated, and expanded with works by Benicio--a profile of the master of pin-ups and movie posters released in 2006.

Personifying glamour in gouache.



I'd buy a refrigerator from her.
Wouldn't you?

 

Karl Hagedorn (both of them)

Barges on the Regent's Canal, 1930, Karl Hagedorn



The Big Wheel, Karl Hagedorn

As a writer and, to a lesser extent, a researcher, I've ranted a few times as to the difficulties and confusion deriving from the fact that two artists sometimes have similar names. Add to that the penchant artists have for changing their names. Worse still, artists sometimes take on pseudonyms thereby painting under two or more different signatures. Confusion abounds. Sometimes I think some international governing authority should grant each professional artist a license with a number which that artist would be required to use in lieu of a signature. Artists, not to mention their gallery agents, would no doubt rebel inasmuch as both work to establish an artist's name, connecting it to a particular style and content in marketing their work. People remember names. Numbers...not so much.

 

Self-portraits, in silverpoint (upper image) and charcoal
(lower image), Karl Hagedorn

Karl-Hagedorn, 1935,
Randolph Schwabe

Today I came upon two artists, born in Germany, roughly a generation apart. They're both dead now, but they had the exact same names--Karl Hagedorn. If you questioned the strange title at the top, now you know why. Their parents weren't even kind enough to give them different middle initials. In researching them I've had to go out of my way just to (I hope) keep the two artists straight in my notes and in my own mind. Inasmuch as this situation is ripe for possible errors, and con-stantly identifying them by their dates of birth would be rather awkward (akin to assigning each a license number) I've decided to indicate which artist I'm referring to by the color of the text.

 

The eldest Karl Hagedorn (left) was born in 1889 and died in 1969. His color is orange. The younger Karl Hagedorn (above) was born in 1922 and died in 2005. We'll color him aqua. Though both artists were born in Germany (the elder Karl Hagedorn in Berlin) the younger one in Güntersberge, located in the mountainous Harz region west of Berlin, it's doubtful the two ever met. There was thirty-three years difference in their ages. Moreover, both artist left Germany early in life, the elder Hagedorn in 1905 for Manchester, England. The younger Hagedorn migrated to the United States in 1959, settling in St. Paul, Minnesota. Although an ocean and half a continent apart, they may have known of one another because of their identical names, nationality, and profession, it's likely they viewed the situation as little more than a minor nuisance.



Recovery Stores at a RAOC Depot, Feltham, 1945, Karl Hagedorn

The British Hagedorn (he became a naturalized British citizen in 1914) was educated in Berlin, and at Manchester School of Technology, Manchester School of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and in Paris, under Maurice Denis. Hagedorn became a leading figure in the Manchester art scene frequently exhibiting at the Society of Modern Painters in that city, and also, from 1913 onwards, at the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club. He served in the British Army during World War I. During World War II, he sold pictures of military subjects to the United Kingdom Government's War Artists' Advisory Committee (above).

Boy Fishing by a Canal, 1952, Karl Hagedorn.

The younger Karl Hagedorn studied at the Munich Academy of Fine arts from 1956 to 1959. While still in Germany, he designed and executed mosaics and murals. In 1959 Karl Hagedorn left Germany for the United States where he worked as a free-lance artist designing stained glass windows. He later became Art Director at the Catholic Digest. From 1960 to 1972 he was a faculty member of St. Paul Art Center before also becoming a faculty member of St. Paul's Hamline University. Having established himself as successful artist, Hagedorn traveled for six months throughout Europe. Upon returning to the United States, he lived and worked in New York for the next sixteen years. He then moved to Philadelphia where he died in 2005. Since 1967 his works have often been exhibited in the United States and Europe.

The Washstand, 1913,
Karl Hagedorn

One might expect that the work of the younger German- American Hagedorn might be in a more modern style than that of his British counterpart. If so, you'd be wrong. The British Hagedorn was of the same generation as Picasso, Matisse, and the Fauves. His early works display Cubist and Futurist influences, although he later adopted a more conventional style. Today, some of his works are in the collections of Manchester City Art Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the United Kingdom Government Art Collection. Hagedorn died in 1969. An exhibition, "Manchester's First Modernist: Karl Hagedorn 1889-1969," was held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, in 1994. Only during the latter years of his career did the German-American Karl Hagedorn move toward abstraction.



The German-American Karl Hagedorn and wife with one of his abstract paintings created shortly before his death.

Venice, Karl Hagedorn. Even the so-called
experts get the Hagedorn paintings mixed up.
I've found sources crediting this and other works
to what appear to be the wrong Hagedorns.

 

Gene Roddenberry

Disruptor Beam, early 21-st century, Randall Mackey



An artist must know how to draw. Right? An artist must know how to sing, or dance, or act, or play a musical instrument. Right? Wrong, on all counts. While any of these talents are helpful as to an artist's career, none of them are necessities. The one necessity, the one talent all artists have in common is the ability to imagine. That means all artists must be able to think of what is not and make it a reality. Gene Roddenberry was an artist, but as far as I know, he couldn't draw worth a damn, couldn't sing, dance, play music, and from all accounts, his acting skills were minimal at best. But far more important than any of the traditional skills we commonly attribute to artists, Roddenberry could think, could communicate, could write and speak the most positive vision of the future ever imagined into a virtual reality far more vivid than any painter, actor, writer, or director he ever employed.

 

TV and movie writer and producer with dozens of hits
(and misses) to his credit.

Roddenberry paid his writing dues during the earliest days of television starting in 1954 with such forgettable series as Highway Patrol (five episodes), Mr. District Attorney (five episodes), West Point Story (1956, eleven episodes), Have Gun Will travel (1957-63, twenty-seven episodes), and finally, Star Trek (1966-68, three seasons). Add to that two seasons of the Star Trek animated series and six Star Trek movies, all featuring the original TV cast. Today, the grandchildren of his original sci-fi TV fans continue to enjoy reruns of the fifty-year-old series. Born in 1921, Roddenberry died of a heart attack in 1991 at the age of seventy. Some of his ashes were sent up in a rocket, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

UPPER PHOTO: Gene Roddenberry and Director, Robert Wise, setting up a shot during the filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Back row, Gene Roddenberry, front row, Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Robert Wise, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Captain Kirk (William Shatner).
LOWER PHOTO: crew of the Starship Enterprise from the TV series. From left: Chekov (Walter Koenig), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Scott (James Doohan) and Sulu (George Takei).

After several studios rejected various pilot projects during the early 1960s, Roddenberry decided to write science fiction. During March, 1964, he brought together a 16-page pitch. On April 24, he sent three copies and two dollars to the Writers Guild of America to register his series. He called it Star Trek. Roddenberry first pitched Star Trek to MGM where it was warmly received, but no offer was made. He then went to Desilu Productions. Desilu was having financial difficulties. They'd not sold a new series in five years; their only success being I Love Lucy. The studio immediately started trying to sell the series to the networks. They took it to CBS, which ultimately passed. They had their own sci-fi project in the works--Lost in Space. Roddenberry next took the idea to NBC, this time downplaying the science fiction elements and highlighting the links to Gunsmoke and Wagon Train. The network funded three story ideas, to be made into a pilot.

July 15, 1965, the series is cast, the film begins to roll.

The pilot was made but test audiences were unimpressed. Desilu agreed to fund a second pilot with the help of western screenwriter, Sam Peeples. This one they titled "Where No Man Has Gone Before." NBC bought it. The series was off and running for thirteen episodes. The show was no instant ratings hit. Roddenberry worked with sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov who suggested teaming Spock and Kirk to resolve various character conflicts. NBC ordered another thirteen episodes and then renewed the series for a second year. Once more ratings declined. It was only through an intense fan letter-writing campaign that the series made it through a third dismal year. The last episode of Star Trek aired just 47 days before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. Roddenberry vowed he would never write for television again.



Each of several Enterprises lived and breathed
as surely as did the cast. This was the final design.

Star Trek had two factors working in its favor. Though the scripts may have been somewhat uneven, the cast was exceptional. The other star of the series was the Enterprise (above) seen in a cutaway image. Though it existed mostly on paper, and on film using highly detailed, large-scale models, the ship changed the look of science fiction forever. Later came Stanley Kubrick's spacecraft, and then those of Star Wars, but all owed their breakaway from 20th-century rocketry to Roddenberry and the artistry of Desilu Studio.



The Starship Enterprise came with a built-in history of greatness dating back to the Revolutionary War

 



The first USS Enterprise

The first USS Enterprise was a captured British supply sloop. It was the first of eight naval ships bearing the name. The two most recent were both aircraft carriers, the latter was the first nuclear powered U.S. Navy vessel. It was decommissioned at the end of 2012. On September 17, 1976, the crew of the Starship Enterprise met at the Rockwell International in Palmdale, Cali-fornia, for the rollout of yet another En-terprise (below), the first U.S. space shut-tle. Though it never flew in space, Enter-prise saw test service for NASA for some thirty years. Today it is on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.

 



Gene Roddenberry (third from the right) in 1976 with most of the cast of Star Trek at the rollout of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at the Rockwell International plant at Palmdale, California. From left to right, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Leonard Nimoy, Gene Roddenberry, NASA Deputy Administrator George Low; and, Walter Koenig.



1987-92

1993



1995



CANCELLED!!!

Where no on has gone before...



































 

Simon Gaon

Times Square, New York City, Simon Gaon

In the city of New York today, there are thousands upon thousands of artists (that is, painters, sculptors, singers, dancers, songwriters, actors, comedians, musicians, etc.). Not one in a thousand of them will ever make a living from their art. They are kept alive by a steady diet of professional training, menial service jobs, self-esteem, talent, and most of all hope. For their efforts, they are getting older, wiser, thinner, angrier, more cynical, more desperate, more lost in their gradual realization that they are not what they thought they were five, ten, even twenty years ago. They are not losers. They have hung onto a dream, but neither are they winners. I'm reminded of the words of the old Drifters song from around 1963--On Broadway. Sing along if you like (bottom.)

 

      "They say the neon lights are bright
       On Broadway.
       They say there's always magic in the air.
       But when you're walkin' down that street,
       And you ain't had enough to eat,
       The glitter rubs right off and you're nowhere.

       They say the women treat you fine
       On Broadway.
       But lookin' at them just gives me the blues.
       How ya gonna make some time,
       When all you got is one thin dime,
       And one thin dime won't even shine your shoes.

       They say that I won't last too long
       On Broadway.
       I'll catch a Greyhound bus for home they all say.
       But they're all wrong, I know they are,
       'Cause I can play this here guitar.
       I won't quit till I'm a star
       On Broadway."

                                     --Mike Stollar, Jerry Leiber, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil

One who didn't take the Greyhound bus for home,
but vividly recalls the urge to do so.

Simon Gaon was one of the above. Born in 1943, he came to New York City in 1962, fresh out of high school from Stamford, Connecticut. He had talent. He'd won a scholarship to the Art Students League, which not only allowed him to study in New York but also in Haarlem--not Harlem in New York, but the Haarlem in the Netherlands. A second scholarship allowed Gaon to stay more than ten years in Paris, where his style evolved. The works of the Fauve painters--Derain, Vlaminck as Soutine, Kokoschka, Corinth, and especially Van Gogh all had a strong influence.



Thanksgiving Day Parade, Simon Gaon

Simon Gaon remembers what New York was like in 1962. So do I. I was there the following year. I was there sheltered by chaperones and my high school classmates on our "senior trip." I was there for maybe two or three days. Yet, even then, fifty-five years ago, the streets of the city were overwhelming. Simon Gaon vividly recalls the feeling of being a struggling art student with dreams he didn't dare let slip from his grip. Today, as one of the founders, and executive director of the American Arts and Crafts Alliance he recalls the past thirty-four years participating, in and guiding the "Crafts on Columbus" (Avenue, that is) show aimed at helping young artists and artisans achieve their dreams of success in the biggest, most brutal, most competitive art market in the world. The problem is, today, "Crafts on Columbus" is no more. Three years ago, New York City politics, being what it is, the city withdrew the group's permit.

The hustle and bustle of Manhattan as seen by the man claiming to be "the last of the classic expressionist."

In New York, and above all, on the island of Manhattan, Simon Gaon tells of the lively bustle on the streets. Nestled in the crowd in Times Square, Gaon emphasizes his love for humanity, as expresses in oils the crowds and chaos--their densely interwoven lives and stories. Tireless and energetic, Simon paints the city smog as well as the vibrant lights, from the banks of the canals, bridges: the subjective faces of passersby. Portraits become inflamed as each figure is unique with its own thick mixtures of pigments, brought to the canvas with a brush, spatulas and fingers--instinctive gestures without hesitation. Every corner of the earth, every face, every semblance, both humans and animals, has for him the same expressionistic lift. Every living form, in the drama of life, stands as worthy of artistic creation.



Night Seascape, 1992, Simon Gaon

Simon Gaon’s canvases are large in scale and swirling with color. He paints the sea too, water, roiled by storms (above) or glinting with reflected light, is a frequent theme. Gaon's Manhattan’s rivers and bridges (below), hang next to sunlight dappling the bay at Shelter Island (at the far eastern end of Long Island), where he spends much of his time. For this artist, paint is a highly tactile medium, verging on three dimensions with juicy, palpable brush strokes. Gaon is also a sculptor, and several of his stone figures are on view alongside the canvases. When not at Shelter Island, Geon lives and paints on New York's Upper West Side, overlooking the Hudson. His work has been exhibited at galleries all over New York City, Sag Harbor, as well as in Europe where he is especially popular in Germany and Holland.

Simon Gaon's bridges to success.

 

June Paintings

Copyright, Jim Lane

Three A.M. ca. 1982, Jim Lane

Father's Day, weddings, vacations, summer, beaches, not the most exciting lineup of painting subjects for the month of June, but better by far than the "dog days' of August or the dreary days of September. When I went searching through my own archive of photographic evidence for my own June paintings, I was startled to realized only a couple beach scenes, and fewer still of other reminders of Junes past. I did, however, find quite a number of scenes of fathers being fathers, any of which would suffice for a Father's Day card. My favorite I titled Three A.M. (above) though this was a scene I don't recall ever having endured myself.

 

The Colors of Summer, Sally Swatland

In looking over the vast quantity of June paintings by other artist I found surprisingly few dealing with Father's Day while the majority depicted the "lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer." I always loved that old Nat King Cole song (click below). Sally Swatland's The Colors of Summer (above) brings forth memories of summers past...a little too far past for my memories, but nonetheless, June at its best.

From a BBC Special, Summer, 1963

 

June weddings have long been the province of photographers far more than painters, though I found one enterprising artist willing to "perform" at a wedding reception painting one of several standard wedding scene portraits for the entertainment of guests. Of course, back before wedding photography became popular, there were artists who specialized in weddings (though not painting them on location). The British painter, Henry Frederick Bacon's The Wedding Morning (below) from 1892, is one such work.

 

The Wedding Morning, 1892, Henry Frederick Bacon.

In a more modern vein, the digital artist, Zhaana, came up with her own version, of an old wedding tradition painted digitally in a far more contemporary style. The Wedding Dance on the Beach (below) depicts the newlywed couple's first dance as husband and wife. It became the cover for the reception menu. Judging by the umbrellas, make that a "rainy" wedding dance on the beach.

http://zhaana.deviantart.com/art/Wedding-Dance-on-the-Beach-300775119

Wedding Dance on the Beach, Zhaana,
loosely based on Jack Vettriano's The Singing Butler.

I would be negligent not to include Norman Rockwell's take on the month of June as seen in his Saturday Evening Post cover, of June 6, 1956, titled, The Graduate, in which he starkly superimposes an innocent-looking, wide-eyed, college (or possibly high school) graduate over the news headlines of the day. HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!

The Graduate, 1956, Norman Rockwell

Summer Painting, Eric Zener