Mike's water colors from Wales


Sweet Peas




Mike's 2005 calendars

Jack Vettriano

Only the Deepest Red II
 

Singing Butler

Born in 1951, Jack Vettriano has emerged from the unlikely background of an early working life in the Scottish coal-fields to become Britain's best known contemporary artist; he is entirely self taught. He has only been painting full time since 1988 after his work first came to public prominence at the Royal Scottish Academy open exhibition. Since then there have been sell out exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and New York.

In less than fifteen years, the average price of his paintings has risen from a few hundred to tens of thousands of pounds. The demand for Vettriano's work is reflected in the successive record breaking prices that his paintings have achieved at auction in the last few years, most notably with the sale of The Singing Butler, the artist's most iconic image, which sold for £740,000 at Sotheby's in April 2004 a record breaking price for a painting by a Scottish artist.

Aside from his exhibitions, Vettriano has acquired a vast following through the licensing and distribution of his images. To date, more than 3 million posters and cards featuring Vettriano's paintings have sold worldwide.

In June 2003, Vettriano received an OBE for Services to the Visual Arts, despite being a controversial figure within the art establishment. The only example of his work to be featured in a public collection is a painting donated by a collector to the Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery in Fife. To his critics, his work is at best nostalgic pastiche and at worst misogynistic soft porn; the latter description triggers an interesting debate in that the greater majority of his fans are women. The critics' disdain of his work has been matched by Vettriano's scorn but his popularity and earning power are undeniable. He is an artist whose work is adored and reviled in equally extreme measures.

There was increased media interest in Jack Vettriano in 2004, highlights being a South Bank Show documentary entitled The People's Painter followed by guest appearances on Breakfast with Frost and Desert Island Discs.

Vettriano's last exhibition, Affairs Of The Heart, was at Portland Gallery in July 2004 and there is an exhibition of paintings and new limited edition prints opening on 8th April 2006.

from portlandgallery.com/index.php?page=jackvettriano

The Missing Man

many of the beach and umbrella paintings

Dancer for Money                             Table for One

Norman Rockwell

Making Friends - Post cover 9/28/29, Features Rockwell's dog Raleigh.
"Raleigh (The Dog) Travels"

Norman Rockwell
1894 - 1978

graphics from Rockwell Gallery Collection
 

Pride of Parenthood  -  1958

Norman  Rockwell created 321 covers for
The Saturday Evening Post from 1916 through 1963.

Triple Self Portrait  - Post cover 2/13/60, Rockwell is the post modernist here showing himself as he is and how he would like to be.
In his oil painting, Triple Self-Portrait, for a February 1960 Post Cover, Norman Rockwell pictured himself at an easel. For inspiration, clips of four small self-portraits were pinned to the upper right corner of his canvas: Durer, Michelangelo, Picasso and Van Gogh.  A hundred years from now another painter will likely tack portrait prints of his or her heroes for inspiration. Perhaps those masters will include a boyish, lanky, hard-working illustrator: someone known for his enormous Adams apple and even larger heart.  More than any other artist, and arguably more than any other storyteller, he recorded 20th century America.
 from  antiquetalk .com/column274.htm

The Norman Rockwell Museum  another source for prints
PBS Norman Rockwell
literary traveler.com /rockwell/normanrockwell.htm
tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m369.htm  Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia
Museum of Norman Rockwell Art,  Reedsburg, Wisconsin
The 4 Freedoms
Saturday Evening Post Covers

Sugaring Off   1943

"Sugaring Off" was one of Grandma Moses' most popular themes, and evidently also one of the artist's personal favorites.  Certain stock images do tend to recur in the "Sugaring Off" paintings, among them the burning cauldron, the mother pouring maple sugar on the snow where it would harden into instant candy, the men with buckets, and the little "sugar house".  This painting dates from 1943, at the height of Grandma Moses' first truly mature style. 
from "Grandma Moses  25 Masterworks" by Jane Kallir
 

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Joy Ride   1953

 The Quilting Bee    1950
 

Horse Shoeing   1952
 

  Other favorite paintings include:
Eagle Bridge Hotel   1959
Checkered House  1943
Apple Butter Making  1947
Halloween  1955

There are a number of Halloween paintings.  In the painting from 1955 the boys on the house roof are putting pumpkins down the chimney and there is other mischief going on.

The Checkered House is also a favorite subject in a number of seasonal paintings.  The Checkered House in the 1943 painting has a fall harvest in the background.   The Checkered House was a local legend.  Situated along the Cambridge Turnpike, it was an inn where stagecoach drivers had changed horses as far back as the eighteenth century.  During the Revolutionary War, the inn served as General Baum's headquarters and field hospital.  It's checkerboard front made the house a distinctive landmark that was remembered long after it burned in 1907.

Grandma Moses (1860-1961), American self-taught artist, known for her scenes of rural life in New York State. Born Anna Mary Robertson to a farming family in Washington County, New York, she spent much of her life on farms. She worked on a neighboring farm before her marriage in 1887 to Thomas Salmon Moses. The couple farmed in Virginia until their return to New York in 1905. By then, Moses had borne ten children, five of whom died in infancy. Back in New York, the couple bought a farm in Rensselaer County in the Hoosick River Valley, where Moses lived until her death. Her husband died in 1927, and Moses began painting for her own enjoyment in the mid-1930s when she was in her 70s. She took up painting because arthritis made it difficult for to hold the needles for the embroidery and needlework she was accustomed to doing.

Halloween   1955

Note the mischief on the roof - boys putting pumpkins down the chimney and what is the other group of boys doing up there?