The Beauty in the Banal of Seth Camm's "Bread and Butter" painting

The Beauty in the Banal

“Bread and Butter” by San Antonio artist, Seth Camm is an extraordinary still life painting encased in a rugged and raw skin, breathing with bellicosity.  Thick underlays of heavily applied oil paint are worked and reworked, striving for absolute painterly perfection.  This direct and distinctively meticulous quest for definitive and absolute finesse is mirrored in Camm’s artistic persona of self-tormented pursuit to make the painting come alive.   Camm’s preference for a dark and melancholy aesthetic is fine-tuned and masterly applied to the mundane and banal still life, canonizing it with academic importance.

A toaster with a slightly lopsided slice of warmed bread totters off to the left side, confined to the narrow slots of metal constrictions- an appliance asylum- while purposefully polysemous petals of the floral bouquet adds a sense of traditional still life etiquette; an addition that balances out the arrangement.

The triangular composition of the toaster to the stick of heavily layered yellow butter to the perfectly presented buttered toast gives the eye a pleasant linear anchor to explore the tabletop; all centered on the detail of the convex reflection.  The choice of a white tablecloth starkly contrasts the dark and almost blood red backdrop.  Camm uses an off-kilter and obtuse angular backsplash countertop corner as a repetitive compositional element, mirroring the viand.

However, the key player in this entire quasi-lugubrious classical configuration is the mirrored surface of the metal. The foreshortened reflections, the bantam angular sophistications are striking in their stunted glory.  Carnival horror house distortion mirrors offer an eyeful of edible enticements.

“Bread and Butter” offers edginess that is underlying, a composition that is traditional, and a lustrous aura of a woebegone world.  

-© Gabriel Diego Delgado

Gallery Director

J.R. Mooney Galleries, Boerne

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

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

Ile d' Orleans

Ild d’ Orleans

“The canvas is first prepared with a coat of burnt sienna.  That is the light that integrates all the subject matter.  This coat appears everywhere on the canvas and is one important characteristic of my technique.  That burned sienna is the light that integrates the scene and gives it the desired vibration.  The second important characteristic is the heavy impasto I deposit on the canvas which makes possible the random rendering of the subject.  The third is the vibration of the layers of colors when they are one beside the others to create the atmosphere, the ambiance, and the temperature of the moment.   The fourth is the mix of numbers of colors in the same brush stroke, giving the flickering effect.  Then comes the loose movement I give to each stroke, as if the wind is playing with it, which gives the painting the desired of movement.”  

-Samir Sammoun

**Page 7, “Note from the Artist”-Samir Sammoun Walking with the Giants, J.R. Mooney Galleries, May 2010

Ile d’ Orleans

Samir Sammounb

12” x 16”

Oil on Canvas

$3480.00

A vivacious outlook, Ile d’ Orleans is vibrant glow of exaggerated hues, reminiscent of the 1960’s day-glow posters with neon yellows and pink gestures that scatter amongst the swaying spring grasses.  The ruddy accents dance across all levels of spatial illusions, guiding us like a host of masterful choreographers; offering lessons of color and rhythm.   Three darkened clusters of bush and shrubbery regulate the foreground, blocking off the viewer from the cool calming blue waters; a strong horizontal rendered midpoint in the overall pictorial composition.

   Sammoun recasts another row of linear elements as a buttery embankment and dense tree line, each anchoring the background in its own unique impressionistic manner. The firmament swirls with various blue tones that are overlapped onto the brunt sienna; revealing peeks of a drab brown under painting; an artistic undergarment exposed throughout the whole painting.   

©Gabriel Diego Delgado

JR Mooney Galleries

X. Song Jiang-- 2013 ---At J.R. Mooney Galleries

These are the new  Xiao Jiang paintings that were purchased at ArtExpo 2013.  Available for sale at J.R. Mooney Galleries. 

Call 210.828.8214 for details on pricing and sizes. 

A generic gestalt of tranquility from Richard Riverin

Le Ruisseau

Richard Riverin

30” x 24”

Oil

$7250

J.R. Mooney Galleries of Fine Art

San Antonio, Texas

210-828-8214

A serene sky of cerulean stratums create a tiered arrangement of artist-invented blues and whites. The two houses are so plain in structure that they elude to an artist memory more than an actuality, each one with its own simplified tree. Riverin cares more for the impressionistic qualities of the setting natural light and dominate shadows blanketing the opposing walls of these residences. He completes this trademark landscape with picturesque buildings, but names the painting for the stream that trickles in through the lower half of the painting. 

 Several strong horizontal linear elements act as visual steps as we are led from horizon to riverbank to opposing shore and down to the foreground; all painted with repetitive palette knife swatches that compliment the levelness of the composition with their hard edged impasto ridges. Accents of a patented crimson color compose the brush, the only evidence of a turning season. 

Gleaming with a generic gestalt, Le Ruisseau succeeds as a straightforward and generalized account of ones man’s artistic vision.

© Gabriel Diego Delgado

gabrield@jrmooneygalleries.com

www.jrmooneygalleries.com