Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Panoramic of J.R. Mooney Gallery , San Antonio location


Showing you all what the J.R. Mooney Gallery, S.A.  looks like in a full 360 degrees.

Come on in for all your fine art needs in framing and home decor



front counter

side gallery

main front entry

left gallery

framing counter

print room

ready made frame room

back warehouse with custom frame shop


Tragedy of a Neo-Expressionist

Neo Expressionism -- a continuation or progression from the Abstract Expressionism movement aligns with similar ideologies, characteristics and aesthetics of the American claimed school; color intensity, automatic painterly response to automatic drawing, emotional color outpours, and full body gestures.

From color field painting to action painting, the New York artists of 1940’s- 1960’s made a name for themselves after World War II.

C. Nesvadba


Neo Expressionists took to presenting more recognizable subjects, but still dealing with topics and themes in an emotionally charged approach, relying on remarkably intense hues and studious color compositions.

The artwork of Christian Nesvadba celebrates all that is Neo Expressionism, with his semi abstract flower compositions that seem to emit a radiant botanical bounty of color.

Draped in bloodshot crimson and powerful reds, Nesvadba’s color palette invigorates an emotional response.

In Abstract in Multicolors, puffs of light blue and yellow ochre highlights bounce around the inflamed hues that electrify the composition, giving us refreshing bursts of playfulness among intense emotional repose.

Slate greys, muted muddiness and absence of color anchor the painting -- a heavy blanket covering the lower half that make the upper rubicund section seem to float; held up by the black gestural lines within the thick haze of palette scrapes and brashness.

Although the selections appear to be bouquets of flowers, Nesvadba conceals their identity in abstract amorphousness. The squiggles, automatic mark making and linear scribbles attach themselves to the base of the ambiguous blobs, reminiscent of a Cy Twombly-like fashion of writing.

With a life, cut short by a tragic fatal car accident, Christian Nesvadba’ s paintings will only escalate in value due to his signature look, quality of work, and shortened exhibition history – including solo exhibitions in Salzburg and Linz, and a select showing at the  Galerie Otto in Vienna.

© Gabriel Diego Delgado/  J R Mooney Galleries


Christian Nesvadba
Abstract in Multicolors
24” x 31”
$4,815 w/frame
Oil on Canvas

Monday, July 22, 2013

Arches- Not the "golden" ones.. but they can still be painted Yellow


-Gabriel Diego Delgado

Let’s take a look at these often overlooked and sometimes ordinary oval openings of fine art, and how they work as compositional elements in impressionistic painting.
Golden Arches dot the super highway of pop culture; the iconic name stay of over 500 million served.

A far reaching structure that reminds us of a nostalgic time of childhood innocence when we knew our metabolism would allow us to indulge in the sweet satisfaction of fast food feasting; complete with toy or Coca-Cola.

Regressing even further, let’s look to an era of timeless fine art exploration and the portrayals of the curved architectural feature of arches in a time-honored tradition of impressionistic painting.

“Arches appeared as early as the 2nd millennium BC in Mesopotamia”, says the trusted sources at Wikipedia.  Now, with that said, artists have been painting, drawing, and illustrating these profound architectural accents for well over…..humm…….let’s call it a long time -- with possible pictorial depictions early in our art history timelines of the ornate carvings and reliefs of The Arch of Titus, a 1st-century arch located in Rome.

With architectural expressions not spoken much in painting, artists seem reluctant to render a precise depiction of these structures, leaving the intention to trained architects, graphic designers, and the like who will work to get exactness vs. creative painterly expression.

But, every so often, artists will use such building constructions to emphasis the gateway as visual guides to planar differences; seeing through to the distant background, a hidden recluse, or a concealed gem -- an entry to the unknown.

In Erich Paulsen’s Summer Sails painting, the arch is slightly off center for it to be the focal point, but none-the-less, it plays a role as a major component in the composition.  We are able to look out beyond the villas and see the cerulean blue ocean, the port that awaits us; an inviting blue allure. Although his palette knife gestures add an impasto quality to the painting, his strokes illustrating the water change direction to a horizontal motion, mimicking the horizontal land-bridge and archway, its top level brown constructs; reinforcing the brown tiled roofs of the adjacent buildings.



In James F. Yi’s garden delight titled Summer Paradise, competing arches duel for attention. Closer examination reveals a tiered arch doorway shares a common side with another optical curve -- one that does not stop at a dead-end, but a more generalized easement to freedom -- to the wide open world along the ever expanding ocean waves, a current to take you away. Overall, Summer Paradise really is a play on dichotomies,  on one hand a blocked direction with a close door, an entry unrevealed; the other, a visual magnetism drawing us out.



Koster’s Night City evokes a more sinister evocation, a trembling sensibility of some sort of impending doom.  The overcast heavens bear down on us with god-like fury, a blackened sky that covers the cityscape in an ashy haze.  Snow-covered rooftops and barren trees suggest a frigid climate, but the waterways are unfrozen, allowing safe passage of the passing boats.  The arches in Night City are like a trifecta of hollow, barren and utilitarian tunnels leading the way to a banal canal.  All three are marked with a horizontal hint of white snow, a three level color scheme that rises from black, to white to grey -- a repeated color palette of the artist’s choice.



Robbins’ Flowers, Music and Waves is a colorful bounty of floral arrangements, household furniture, and a musical instrument. The piano is centered in the composition, with two arches on either side that make for a pseudo facial expression. Blue water as eyes and seaport as sockets; then you begin to play Dali-esque surrealism games to determine carpet as mouth and piano as nose. The point being these arches are symmetrically balanced with a full on view of the outside, providing a solid anchor to the overly hyped inside cluster of color.  The arches propose the possibilities of such inviting Mediterranean weather.



Arches are, and can be, fully functional compositional features that do two main jobs: they can act as an anchor to all compositional elements within the picture, and as portals that draw your eye beyond the foreground boundaries. Yes, the aspirations of arches; growing up to serve over 500 million in museums and galleries, not just along the highway.  

All the paintings are available for sale at J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art
www.jrmooneygalleries.com








Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Politics, the Right to Choose (or not) and Vives-Atsara

Wendy Davis, Democratic State Senator for Forth Worth, spent 11 hours trying to filibuster the new restrictions on abortion rights. However, a few days later the Texas Senate passes the bill.  All this political debate, Austin antics and women rights conundrums beats loud in the ears of all Texans; ringing with an inescapable expletive of pros and cons.  

However, sides are not important right now! 

What is are the ways in which politics- social and collective seem to shape the world around us and how they force us to reinterpret our daily routines, lives and decisions.

This same investigative assessment can be applied to the re-interpretation of paintings, drawings, sculptures and other fine arts in the chaotic flux we call the art market. When we look at a selection of work by an artist, it is hard not to re-evaluate the assortment without being somehow influenced by the timely issues of today’s national scope of civil rivalries.  


Two paintings that bring to mind the political debate over women’s rights, their ability to choose and government policies and procedures are Jose Vives-Atsara’s Mother and Child and Madre Indigena.
While reproductive rights is front and center on the countrywide stage, Vives-Atsara’s motherly depictions are spot-on with a glowing aura of elegance; as public feedings, no less controversial, move within the women’s right to choose and her child rearing choices and actions in the public sector.

Known for his impressionistic landscapes of Padre Island, the villas of Spain, Texas scenery and wildflowers, Vives-Atsara’s portrait series does not garner much consideration except when systematically re-discovered by fine art appreciators; a long lost series of work that deepens the artists repertoire of genres- a credibility that demands attention.

Mother and Child is a side profile portrait of a woman with her child. While facing to the right the woman’s angle directs us down to the obscured child.  The slope of the vegetation and agave plants in the background align with the sweeping features of woman’s body, exposed flesh-nursing her young. We are directed along with visual route down through the pale blue coverings of the baby’s hood and jacket; pausing at the closed eyes.  We can sense the calming of oneself during the ceremonial feeding and natural nourishment.


Madre Indigena is the opposite angle of the other, a mother and child embracement that portrays the daily life of two symbiotic humans, locked together-one needing the other for life, for substance- nurturing of spiritual and metaphysical essence.  We as observers see the endearing grin of the mother, looking down to the child; reminiscent of a quasi-religious experience. Vives-Atsara’s setting, backdrop and environment in this painting speak to the proletariat, the worker in the field, the peasant, the Mercado worker; a public display of endearment that meets with mixed reactions depending on the viewing geography.

While both can lay the groundwork for discussion, each maintains and depicts the underlying womanly obligations, a chastise-able action by some, but painted with undeterred nobility.

 J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art is proud to offer for sale 15 portrait paintings of women by international artist, Jose Vives-Atsara.  

Be sure to see our full Vives-Atsara collection on our website at www.jrmooneygalleries.com

© Gabriel Diego Delgado/ J.R. Mooney Galleries



Monday, July 15, 2013

Keep Pourin the Wine Mr. Arvid .........


First Pour
Thomas Arvid
60” x 18”
11/40 enhanced giclee
Quintessa Wine label


First Pour, the newest giclee edition released by Thomas Arvid pays homage to a Napa Valley label (Quintessa) with its signature angular perspective and compositional completeness- glass, bottle, and corkscrew.  Arvid proceeds with deliberate off-the-canvas slants that seem to stunt the elements in a seemingly haphazard tipsy aesthetic-an Arvid tilted room effect.


Picture perfect painterly renditions capture the hyperrealism version of this studio set-up that spotlights the reflections in the wine glass, the shimmer of the liquid, and metallic silver finishes; obsessively seamless ovals, curves, and ellipses portray the physicality of this still-life better than a photograph ever could.

Over the past few years Thomas Arvid has celebrated his first museum exhibition, "Arvid: Reflecting the Good Life," at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art in Marietta, Georgia; in addition to successfully shutting down a Chinese counterfeit ring that was flooding the art market with fakes and forgeries.

It’s rumored that Arvid has a 7 year waiting list on original paintings.  Understandably, he works wherever he can, even doing watercolor sketches and paintings on the plane flights as he travels back and forth from California and other wine sponsored events.

Showing strength in size, First Pour measures a larger than life 60” x 18”, making for a vertical masterpiece that admiringly displays the vintage; a stunning selection any wine connoisseur would enjoy.

First Pour can be purchased at J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art. Call 210.828.8214 for pricing.

©Gabriel Diego Delgado



Friday, July 12, 2013

Picture Framing of the week

From time to time we try to showcase some of the magnificent custom picture framing samples that our master framers create for our clients at J.R. Mooney Galleries.

****Picture below are a couple examples of what our framers work on this week.******

wedding portrait in elegant silver frame with silver filler.

Flag stamp shadow box, custom design for proper viewing

details of stamp design

detail of stamp design


W.A. Slaughter vs. Randy Peyton Bluebonnet wars

Bluebonnet landscape paintings have been revered, prodded and poked, coveted and chastised; an ongoing joke of over-produced Sunday painters- a favorite category to paint of “holiday” painters.
However, the history of such a genre of painting has deep roots in Texas and especially San Antonio. Home to the great blue bonnet painters like the Onderdonks, Salinas, Wood, Slaughter and a small legion of others, Texas takes pride in its namesake in Art History, knowing it has inspired these great artists to produce such magnificent work.

Along with this museum collected success story comes positive growth of this art form with subsequent generations of painters that have studied the Texas State flower masters and excelled the painting style to new levels; clearing the way for bluebonnets to be well-respected within the artistic landscape of modern painting.

Randy Peyton

In a compare and contrast study, two paintings back-to-back by master painter W.A. Slaughter and sought after contemporary painter Randy Peyton show a time honored scholarly application of technique, application, and compositional study; with Peyton playing the role of student as he methodically mimics the aesthetics of a signature impressionistic painting.

Slaughter’s rolling countryside landscape eases down into a valley, exposing the rustic rooftop of a barn; weathered from decades and decades of sun drenched Texas weather.  Peyton’s rooftop shows same pitch, same rustic quality, adding modern amenities like a metal roof and chimney, but unchanged, the rolling angles of land work in the same manner- providing movement for our eye to follow as we move from foreground to background in both paintings.

Live Oaks spot the sun bleached Texas grasses with Slaughter’s painted in more subtle approach with minimal contrasts in shadow and detail, while Peyton’s stark shadows create more depth- showing the tree’s character.

Slaughter’s bluebonnets are more like the original Onderdonk style, with cool blues spotted with white highlights, while Peyton’s bluebonnets demand more attention.  They are painted text-book Impressionistic, but are detailed in a way that anchors them more to the ground than Slaughter’s.

W.A. Slaughter

Cactus litter the ground in both paintings, but again detail and shadow are treated different; each artist giving grace to the solar qualities of light, playing color on color with more emphasis on the direct sunlight, its angle in the sky and the projected shade it transmits onto the vegetation around it.

The Texas sky, a signature trait of these parts is often portrayed as ever expanding.  However, Slaughter attacks his heavens with billowing clouds that compliment his overall painterly palette.  But, Peyton’s hard edged aesthetic does not lend itself to a detailed atmosphere.  Peyton’s clouds lack the softness projected by Slaughter’s applications. On the other hand, owning his own style, Peyton works in his own artistic voice while paying homage.

And not in any way to be overlooked, Peyton has indeed studied intently on artists like Slaughter and Onderdonk, among others, and his dedication to craft has proven a successful career in the fine arts.
Now semi-retired, Peyton might one day sit among the great blue bonnet painters of Texas as the next generation attempts to tackle such a widely recognizable Texas icon.

Look for both paintings available for sale at J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art.

© Gabriel Diego Delgado

Texas Landscape
W.A. Slaughter
Oil
16 x 20
$5,250.00


Grand Oak
Randy Peyton
Oil
16 x 20
$1,745.00



Thursday, July 11, 2013

Gantner Strikes again with a beautiful floral



Gantner


Floral Bloom

48” x 36”
$3,200

Born in in Seoul, South Korea in 1948, Gantner started his appreciation of art at an early age.  He continued to feed his artistic desires throughout his teenage and young adult life, arriving at a signature style from years of education.

A prolific impressionistic landscape painter, Paul Guy Gantner was determined to get into the minds of the masters like Poussin, Rubens, and Monet.   He even returned to Giverny to repaint Monet's Japanese bridge and water lilies. Studying the intrinsic methodology of pure impressionistic painting, Gantner found a voice.
Floral Bloom is a pictorial rendition of his direct influence by this scholarly affection to art history. The bountiful fields of flowers are marked with various gestures; made in sweeping motions, dabbed with brushstroke intricacies, minimal applications, and swift raps of paint, each diversifying the ever-expanding countryside of knee-high floras.

Although repetitious, the movement through the turpentine turf is projected with enough fading color and contrasts, while accompanied by sufficiently blurred specks of perfumed petals that we seem to accept the artist’s rendition of pictorial space; not flat, but curved with pitches and rolling grounds that add sweeping movements, ones that guide our eye back to the misty horizon, marked by a smoky one-point perspective.
Angled tree lines on the right and left horizon line guarantee a spoon fed streamline to the murkiness that is centered above the field, laying groundwork for a philosophical moment of what lies beyond the fog-an unknown, a hypothetical what if, marked by the pure positive aesthetic of flowers luring us to the beyond.

© Gabriel Diego Delgado

Gantner in his studio in Korea


Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Video Clip Great Day SA Kens 5 News



Watch the video clip of the Great Day SA Kens 5 Boerne Second Saturday!!

-with Aaron McWilliams and Gabriel Diego Delgado

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J.R. Mooney Galleries on Great Day SA, Kens 5 News

The Boerne Second Saturday crew was on the set of Great Day SA at 9 am this morning promoting the Second Saturday in Boerne this Saturday  July 13, from 4 pm - 8 pm at J.R. Mooney Galleries, Highland House Gallery, Cosas, Carriage House Gallery and Texas Fine Art Treasures.. Pictured are Aaron McWilliams from Texas Fine Art Treasures and Gabriel Diego Delgado and Jerry Atencio, both from J.R. Mooney Galleries.

studio set


Mark Keathley


Jerry Atencio


Texas Treasures Fine Art


Great Day SA


Becky Rogers



Aaron McWilliams and Gabriel Diego Delgado



Cliff Cavin


Friday, July 5, 2013

Along the Fence Line- Arthur McCall



Along the Fence Line , a new painting by San Antonio area artist, Arthur McCall is a striking cactus patch in full bloom with the tundra exposing  their flowerily fragility; juxtaposed by the cactus needles and the rusted barbed wire.  The rusted and twisted cable of this ambiguous property boundary enters in at the upper left, gets nailed to the sun bleached, dried and dilapidated fence post, and sweeps downward to a fallen and hidden country time column. 

The angle of the rustic metal line acts as a visual boundary to the sloping cactus on the right-side, separating the foreground to the nondescript background.  A simple horizon line draws no more attention than it should, keeping the spotlight on the highlighted haven of Texas Xeriscape.  

Not to exclude the rising timber post, McCall deliberately places this cracking and knotted wooden vertical almost center of the painting.  With deep and blackened crevices, this highly detailed boundary marker reaches up over the vegetation as an arm, an extension, or as an impeccable icon of a long forgotten personal possession.

With such detail given to this spikey spot of artistic muse, McCall expands his series of cactus painting, delivering a larger picturesque  painting of pointy plants; allowing us to feel the Texas sun on our backs as we lean in to smell the sweet succulents of summery splendor. 

©Gabriel Diego Delgado

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

San Antonio J.R. Mooney Galleries interior shots of rehang 7-3-2013


**We decided to rehang the San Antonio J.R. Mooney Gallery for the Summer Season.**

With new Thomas Arvid giclees, a host of great impressionistic landscapes, unique consignments, bright and colorful poppies, bluebonnets, roses and other summer enchantments; J.R. Mooney Galleries has something for everyone to enjoy

Pictured below are some installation shots of the main gallery on Broadway St. Our signature aesthetic rings true as each wall highlights the artists' selection of great fine art. 

Take advantage of our custom framing options for those graduation photographs, diplomas, and family portraits this sizzling season.




front counter


sitting and receiving


glorious Grand Canyon


Tulok's copper plating paintings on the right


Tulok's copper plating paintings on the left



Arthur McCall's new cactus painting


X. Song Jiang on the left


Art Consultant desk area with collection of Mark Keathleys


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Randy Peyton wall of bluebonnets, cactus and live oaks


small storage door


three small paintings


Arthur McCall's section of San Antonio Missions, hill country and Texas flavor


Riverwalk scene by Mark Keathley


G. Morante, horses and more horses


impressionistic peasants 


ravishing roosters, Dalhart Windberg and a good cross section of all price levels of fine art


Humphrey and M.S. Park greet the gallery goers 


Bluebonnets and decorative glass make a fantastic first impression