My New Art Heroes: Richard Diebenkorn and Emily Eveleth

My friend Liz Sweibel, an excellent artist herself, introduced me to two artists whose work I now greatly admire and find inspirational, Richard Diebenkorn and Emily Eveleth.

 With Richard, I like his work that is more representational such the smaller tomato and knife to the left than his abstract expressionism and the well-known Ocean Park paintings. Here is another example, Cityscape 1963, a larger scale 60 ¼ “ by 50 ½ “ found in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (image form Wikipedia).

With Emily, the painterly realism of common objects and the style of the figures are truly an inspiration. I also like the scale as you can see in the installation view from the home page of her web site showing some giant jelly donuts.

 

I like exploration of the details of figures in a style that reminds me of Sargent, and before him Velazquez.  Here is another image from her web site.  Emily went to the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, as did my friend Liz. I used to teach education there in the art education department in the late 70s. She now shows at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston. I hope to get there to see some of the paintings and go beyond just seeing images.

 

I do want to paint more textured and closer to the style shown in Emily’s figure above and will someday make the switch to oils primarily for this reason.  I often start out textured and then smooth it out as I try to paint what I see. But I often think maybe I should stop at the more textured stage.  Below is a painting I did that also explores some of the details of a figure in a style inspired by Sargent.

 

 

Comments

[Mick Mather]

Good company, Bill.

[bill Ives]

Mick Thanks - I am honored as you say company as I see them as heros. Bill