Evening Star VI

Evening star VI water color on moderately thick, cream, smooth wove paper with a slightly fuzzy feel. Measured at 22.9 x 30.5 cm, it was painted in 1917. It is one of notable work by Georgia O’Keeffe.

Georgia O’Keeffe was one of America’s foremost modernist artists. A master of abstraction, O’Keeffe is best known for her powerful plant and flower still lifes and vibrant deserts landscapes – most inspired by her love of the southwest.

Georgia spent much of her time in long solitary walks, soaking up the sounds, sights and feel of the land, or in the model, viewing the world s material for art and storing images which are later retrieved and transformed.

Her famous Evening Star was a series of 10 watercolors which evolved over the course of the year of 1917.  It is the design which represented Georgia’s image of the evening sky on the plains.
Evening Star VI 

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the Georges Seurat’s (1859-1886) best known works of postimpressionism.

The Island of La Grande Jatte is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the Neuilly. The painting was the result of Seurat’s ‘scientific’ approach to painting.

In creating the picture Seurat employed the then new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with oranges and blue pigments.

Seurat used thousands of tiny dots of color and principles of color mixing. Seurat, who is known to be the ultimate example of the artist as scientist, used the technique of pointillism, or divisionism, on a massive canvas on order to depict a number of people enjoying a sunny afternoon in a park at the banks of the Seine River near Paris.

The scene includes forty-eight people, eight boats, three dogs, and a monkey.

Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating painstakingly on the landscape of the park before focusing on the people always their shapes, never their personalities. He had begun this painting on May 22, 1884, with little oil sketches on wood panels about the size of typewriter paper.

Indeed, it has become one of the most important works in what is still called the canon of Western art. 

Seurat was only 26 when he first showed Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eight annual and final Impressionist Exhibition inm 1886.

It immediately changed the course of vanguard painting, initiating a new direction that was baptized “Neoimpressionism.”
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat