Lloyd Raymond Ney (1893 – 1965)

Lloyd “Bill” Raymond Ney was a modernist painter of the abstract. He studied at the Industrial School of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, afterwards recalling that “it took me twenty years to forget the scars from five years in an art school.” After serving in World War I, he traveled to Europe in 1920 on the Cresson award money he won in 1917 and lived in Paris for five years amidst the vibrant Left Bank art scene. In 1925 he moved to New Hope, where he would live for forty years, painting and working odd jobs in order to avoid the pressure of creating salable art. He invested in real estate, hoping to initiate in New Hope an art scene to rival the one in Paris. After some controversy, Ney was commissioned to paint the first abstract murals in a government post office, which was located in New London, Ohio. A non-objective painter, Ney exhibited his work internationally. He also taught painting locally and nationally, attempting to reform art education.

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Joseph Meierhans (1890-1981)

Joseph Meierhans was born on February 22nd, 1890 in Ober-Lunkhofen-Aargau, Switzerland. Joseph Meierhans first came to New York in 1917 to work for a Swiss textile mill. Already successful in the textile design field, he settled in the United States. After 15 years in New York, he moved to Bucks County in 1932.

His early work was in watercolor and oil. He primarily painted landscapes, sketches of his native Switzerland, as well as American east coast scenery. His professional career as a textile designer led to a concern for texture and color. His later work moved to the abstract, which became his preferred style. He derived his inspiration as a painter from nature and scenes from everyday life. His work was strongly concerned with

composition, form and color. He was also the owner and founder of Meierhans Gallery in 1956, which became a showplace for Delaware Valley artists. He died on February 1st, 1981 in Murphy, North Carolina.

SEE HIS WORKS HERE

Charles Frederic Ramsey (1875-1951)

Charles Frederic Ramsey was the earliest artist to champion the radical ideas of abstraction within the established Impressionist art colony of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Although some of Ramsey’s innovative paintings were just as avant-garde as those of leading New York modernists, his work was virtually unknown outside of the New Hope colony. Omitted from entire major exhibition catalogues devoted to American abstract paintings over the past thirty years, with the exception of one with regional focus, Charles Ramsey’s ambitious and daring modernist work is now fertile material for criticism and acclaim.

A leader within the New Hope art colony, he opened its first art gallery, organized a regional art school, led in the formation of a local secessionist exhibiting group, and was a key figure in the Cooperative painting Project, whose members met from 1938 to 1939 in a studio in the rear of a New Hope hardware store. Unlike New Hope primitive painter Joseph Pickett, whose work Ramsey was instrumental in rediscovering, and whose paintings are now represented in major New York museums, Ramsey remains almost as obscure today as he was in 1953, when Frederick Walker wrote his article.

Charles’s own formal art training began in 1893 at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (a forerunner to the Philadelphia Museum of Art). The young Ramsey attended for a year during which he was awarded the Weber Prize for work in design. Ramsey then went to France to attend classes at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1896 to 1898.

In 1903, Ramsey took a walking trip to New Hope and subsequently spent the summer there. He became friends with William Lathrop and Charles Rosen, early seminal members of a group of landscape painters known as the Philadelphia Impressionists. The leading Impressionist in the area, however, was Edward Redfield, whose broadly painted snow scenes had earned him a national reputation. Although there is no record of any encounter between Ramsey and Redfield that summer, exposure to the art of Redfield, Lathrop and Rosen may have had some later influence on Ramsey’s development as an Impressionist.

It was probably at about this time that Ramsey completed a group of small oil studies on panel, which were stylistically more advanced than his pleasant Impressionist landscapes. Composed of tiny flecks of paint, two Pointillist sketches dating from around 1911, deliberately distort the visual clarity of a hazy evening on the Delaware. One seems to suggest the reflection of amber and scarlet lights from the opposite shore. The most remarkable work in this group is “Fauve Bridge on the Delaware,” an expressive view of the New Hope/Lambertville Bridge painted during the evening hours and evocative of contemporary Post-Impressionist French painting. “Fauve Bridge on the Delaware” may well be the first modernist painting executed in New Hope.

During the mid-to-late twenties, Ramsey established New Hope’s first art gallery. Called The Blue Mask, it was located on Main Street. Ramsey never exhibited his Synchromist paintings from the late teens, so his gallery was the first place that modernist art was seen in the area. He must have exhibited some of his own paintings there as well as the work of a range of other artists. From time to time, he exhibited Asian and tribal art, both pivotal in the birth and evolution of modernist art. The Blue Mask hosted such artists as Ethel Wallace, a painter known for her batiks and cloth murals, lithographer and etcher Paul Cadmus, modernist painter Adolph Blondheim and stained-glass maker Valentine d’Ogries, who collaborated with Ramsey on some small stained-glass panels based on Ramsey’s designs. During the thirties, Ramsey produced some of his most outstanding abstractions. Although he never acknowledged any foreign influences, judging by his work from this period his most significant influences were probably the famous European abstractionists Piet Mondrian and Fernand Leger. Ramsey’s compositions became more abstract and geometric, adopting crisp, linear contours.

Although the New Hope modernists never produced a manifesto laying out the concepts and practices underlying their work, Ramsey recorded some of his own ideas and discoveries, and hundreds of abstract drawings in a sketchbook covering the period 1936 to 1944. Ramsey illustrates ideas like a “system of balance modulation,” based on ratios of diminishing squares in continued proportion. Basically, Ramsey was searching for a mathematical way to prove the aesthetics of abstraction, or to put it another way, looking for a formula to determine which arrangements of geometric shapes are pleasing to the eye and which are not. The compositions Ramsey executed in the thirties focus on abstracted machine images, although some revisit older themes, such as the female figure. His forms, however, are not as easily recognizable. There is also a greater flatness related to Synthetic Cubism.

The modernist movement lost momentum in New Hope by the 1940s. Ramsey continued to create abstract compositions, such as “White, Black and Orange Abstraction,” but these works are more reductive and decorative, and less complex and intellectual than his earlier abstractions. In his late sixties, Ramsey was perhaps getting too old to attempt an even more radical style.

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Josef Zenk (1904 – 2000)

Joseph Zenk’s artistic career spanned more than forty years of experimentation and development. Encompassing the progressive currents of early 20th-century modernism, his work evolved from a style of expressive representation to one of dramatic abstraction.

Joseph Zenk was born in New York City in 1904. After graduating from high school, he attended the National Academy of Design for three years, and then continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York. In 1926, while on a sketching trip through New England and the Mohawk Valley, Zenk decided to settle in Utica, New York. A productive period followed, yielding numerous landscapes, figurative works, and still-lifes. Zenk was active in a small community of Utica artists who organized exhibitions in 1927-28 of some of the leading American painters of the period, including Hopper, Sheeler and Fiene. In 1930 he was given a full scholarship to study at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica. A one-man show of his paintings at the Institute gallery in 1937 drew the greatest attendance of any exhibition that year. In 1942 ‘Zuni’ by Zenk became the first work purchased by the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute for its Central New York Artists Collection.

After service in the Armed Forced from 1942-45, Zenk left Utica and moved his studio to the New Jersey Palisades. Under the G.I. Bill he began studies at the New School in New York City. With a small group of printmakers including Louis Schanker, a prominent woodcut artist and teacher at the New School, Zenk formed Studio 74 for the purpose of exhibiting their color wood block prints. The group received immediate critical attention: The New York Times described Zenk’s work as “particularly admirable.” His woodcut ‘The Kiss’ was chosen as one of the best prints of 1949 and was exhibited in the National Exhibition of Prints held at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Joseph. Zenk’s works have been shown in over twenty-seven museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of American Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the National Academy of Design. The artist died in 2000.

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RED CRABS

Oil on canvas

21″ x 27″

Recognized Contemporary Canadian Artist and founder of The Automatic Word Drawing/Painting style Richard Rossetto is currently looking for investors interested in accumulating a collection of images created during study and creation over a “year” of  an artist’s life. This work would be An accumulation of works created over the period of ten to sixteen months and include a combination of studies and finished works ranging from still life pencil drawing , small word oil paintings up, portrait studies in all media to on finished 14x 17 inch finished oil painting(subject matter to be discussed by investor and artist). This work would be compiled and sent in mail art form to the investors.

Art Lover 10000$ ( or 1000$ a month) would receive one art package(or one work a month) with a minimum of ten works of art. These ten works would consist of studies(both traditional and non traditional)on paper and canvas, a minimum of three finished works on canvas ranging in size between  14×17 inches to 1×2 feet with the possibility of a commission piece.

Investors 20000$ would receive minimum of fifteen work, which would include: completed word drawings, word drawing studies ( meaning a  composition has not been found), life studies (figurative, still life, portraiture), oil studies on canvas, oil studies  on paper canvas, and one minimum six foot by four foot oil Automatic Word Painting

VIP 30000$-…..

This is an example of what a package might look like. The work is guaranteed and the collection will be worked upon until the patron is satisfied. Please contact rossettoink @ Gmail.com for more information . References available upon request

You can also see more of my art and follow my musing on modern art at this link

http://www.artandculture.com/users/2959-richard-rossetto

Here is a link about art as an investment by Reuters journalist John McCrank

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091120/stage_nm/us_wealthmanager_art_1

Other works available for investment

http://rossettoink.com/2009/10/13/hans-all-over-150000/

http://www.artandculture.com/feature/1352

This work entitled Heros was sent to Ugo Matulic as a thank you note for a recent interview he gave me involving his Norval Morrisseau art collection. Through our interview and countless other discussions he has given me great insight into why collectors collect a particular artist or images.  It is entitled Heros as I believe Norval is very happy to see us working together to defend and promote his work , it is also entitled as when ever I see two figures one male, one female I often consider them father and mother looking to defend and up bring their young, which truly is a lot of work and makes them true heros, just like fire and policemen.  All of these “Heros” give often selflessly for the benefit others. So I guess what I am trying to say is thank you to all the HEROS.

Richard Rossetto

Ps As I was writing this post I realize I spelled heros wrong, That is how the image is spelled on the card so that is the title of the work, a funny note on that is that many pieces have had  names misspelled and often at times changes the name and meaning of the name in the work. I also believe that there is some sort of link between the way I in take and out put written information and how my word drawings are created.

http://www.artandculture.com/feature/1817

by Sarah Louise Byrne 2009. And oh my lord it’s gonna be 2010 soon!!!

A beautiful marriage is ensued when classic and modern design come together.  This is a great example of what I mean.

The Alma House <——CHECK IT OUT.