Louis Newman | Holiday Selections 2023

SELECTIONS: WINTER 2023

cover: Timothy Barr, Stirling, 2022, oil on panel, 25 x 40 in

SELECTIONS: WINTER 2023

Photo: LewAllen Galleries

Louis Newman Director of Modernism

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | newman@lewallengalleries.com

Seth Tane Seth Tane’s representational urban and rural landscape paintings illustrate the diversity of his subject matter, from the busy streets of New York City to the expansive vistas of the remote Southwest high desert.

His artwork shares a personal history of the places he has lived, which include unique geographies such as New York City, the Pacific Northwest, and coastal South Carolina. He paints scenes of busy subway stations and bustling city sidewalks, as well as highways, railroads, shipyards, buildings, and wide-open spaces, frequently from unique vantage points.

His work is a blend of realism, with an occasional touch of the surreal, as he places unlikely subway station entrances into a desert landscape, or a mossy, rock-lined creek over the tracks of a subway train. Tane’s appreciation of realist painters is also evident in his art, as he paints his subjects and settings with meticulous detail. He counts as influences the work of artists like Edward Hopper, George Bellows and the Ashcan School painters, as well as more recent realists including Richard Estes and Rod Penner.

Born in New York City in 1953, Tane has been fascinated with the sights and sounds of the urban environment since childhood. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s, working in mixed media. While he has painted throughout his life, he has also lived and worked in the marine industry, serving as a captain on a variety of vessels, and doing marine salvage. He also performed rigging and transportation services to move monumental sculptures for artists, galleries, and museums in the New York City area.

Tane lives and works in New York along the Hudson River on his liftboat studio. In addition to his oil paintings, he also creates a variety of assemblage sculptures using steel, wood, and mixed media. His work has been featured in galleries and museums and can be found in numerous public and private collections throughout the US.

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Canal & Broadway, 2012 Oil on panel, 48 x 72 in.

All Eyez on Me, 2023 Oil on panel, 6.75 x 10 in.

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Can You Hear Me Now?, 2023 Oil on panel, 6.75 x 10 in.

Ben Aronson Ben Aronson is recognized as one of America's most respected and evocative painters of the contemporary urban landscape.

Aronson’s cityscapes demonstrate the artist’s remarkable capacity to convey the sensory experience of a captured moment in the life of a city by employing masterful combinations of impressionistic atmosphere, color, and light. Aronson's signature synthesis of realism and abstraction expressively translates the everyday reality of metropolitan forms and life – rooftops, skyscrapers, streets, stop signs, and sidewalks – into a tableaux of urban geometry, motion, light, and shadow that uniquely compresses the spirit of a place. The artist’s expressive painterly style is characterized by fluid, yet restrained brushwork. “The main objective is not merely to capture physical likeness,” Aronson says, “but rather to aim for the most concentrated form of a powerful visual experience.”

In 2007, arts writer George Tysh noted Aronson’s firm place in art history – positioning him with Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, and Fairfield Porter, "[All four are] realists whose compositions express an acute awareness of underlying geometries and forms, and who never forgot about the paint in painting."

Aronson has been called a painter of the frozen moment. His works offer quiescent instants in space and time, allowing the viewer glorious moments of reflection. The paintings possess a remarkable capacity to suspend motion, slow the tempo, seduce attention, and liberate regard.

In this work, Aronson dissolves the rush and tumult of everyday life to reveal the remaining fundament of beauty in these places and things. His paintings uncannily concentrate and epitomize visual resonances of the cityscape, whether it be New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Côte d’Azur, or any other place – and transform the everyday into orchestrations of inestimable beauty. Like the poetry of the place itself, his paintings inspire the mind and stir the heart.

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Graffiti on Canal, 2023 Pastel on rag board, 23.50 x 24 in.

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Southern California Coast, 2019 Oil on panel, 72 x 60 in.

Lake Shore, Chicago, 2017 Oil on panel, 24 x 24 in.

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White Buildings in Sun, 2019 Oil on panel, 25.38 x 24 in.

Jivan Lee Up close Jivan Lee's paintings celebrate paint for paint’s sake – luscious, colorful, moldable.

When viewed at a distance, the paintings collect into studies of light, architecture, and landscape – a transformation that highlights the relationships between raw material and familiar image.

Lee’s oil paintings explore the raw material of paint to create images and engender emotional response. He has become a leading figure of contemporary landscape painting, known for his lively sense of color, his textural application of paint, and his reflective, cerebral approach to engaging with his subject. His art engages his viewers in a visceral involvement with the landscape, which he achieves through a highly physical plein-air painting process.

By design, Lee’s plein air practice is a body of work that requires him to paint the land as it changes before him—the sunrise as it begins to illuminate the earth in the morning, or perhaps an afternoon storm as it gathers strength and then unloads or dissipates. Even beyond the daily shifts of light, weather, or atmosphere, Lee’s paintings remind of the way the land exists as an accumulation of momentary shifts that take place over thousands of years: the way a river carves a valley, or perhaps the slow, majestic formation of mountains. As the hours, days, and even seasons change, Lee’s art also stresses the way that time and the various forces of nature and humanity relate and affect each other.

Lee is originally from Woodstock, NY, and studied painting and environmental policy at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY. Following graduate school, he taught for the University of New Mexico in Taos, and founded and directed the Project for Art and the Environment. His paintings have been exhibited nationally at museums and educational institutions and covered in numerous art publications.

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West from 150 at Noon (diptych), 2023 Oil on panel, 48 x 96 in.

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Aspens in Taos Ski Valley #2 (Happy little trees #2), 2023 Oil on panel, 48 x 90 in.

Bill Barrett Over the course of his distinguished seven-decade artistic career, Bill Barrett has become legendary for exploring in his elegant and lyrical sculpture the interplay between positive and negative space in bronze and other metals, material one thinks of as static and inflexible.

Additionally, Barrett is widely acclaimed for a singular level of technical mastery. His graceful sculptures coherently transform visual symmetry with improvisational sequences of gestural spontaneity and free-flowing movement. Paradoxically, for art rendered in the solidity of metal, Barrett’s work nevertheless calls to mind the fluidity of calligraphic strokes frozen in space and portray a dream-like sense of floating forms and emanating energy.

The energy of modernist gesture infuses his graceful, dance-like metal forms with an ironic spontaneity reminiscent of action painting and the improvisational spirit of Abstract Expressionism. For this reason, Barrett’s work manifests a striking quality of kinesis that manages to seem elegant and organic, despite the solidity of the metal medium. Art historian and critic Peter Frank has written about Barrett’s work noting that, "These sculptures are not bodies gesturing, they are the gestures themselves.”

As an iconic figure in American Modernist sculpture, Barrett is considered a leader in the second generation of American metal sculptors. His work has been highly influenced by that of predecessors such as David Smith, Henry Moore, and Arshile Gorky. He has been exhibiting his work since the mid-1960s and has been included in many museum exhibitions and international art expositions—the Whitney Sculpture Annual in 1970, Art Basel in 1989, the Tokyo Expo in 1990, and the Armory Show in New York in 1996, to name only a few.

Barrett attended the University of Michigan from 1954 to 1960 and earned his BS and MS in Design and his MFA from the same institution.

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Magic III, 2017 Cast Bronze, 15 x 12 x 10 in.

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Plexus, 2019 Fabricated bronze, 112 x 176 x 98 in.

Timothy Barr Timothy Barr finds great inspiration in the landscape and serenity of rural mid-Atlantic America. His intimate paintings of stone walled farmhouses, centuries-old trees, and domestic scenes embody the solitude and grandeur of pastoral life. While he is able to capture the beauty of the countryside, many of Barr’s compositions are the products of experience and imagination, brought to life through study, patience, and his sophisticated use of light. “I’m interested in the contrast that light brings to a scene,” Barr has said. “It’s fleeting and needs to be slowed down with paint so we can love it always.” Barr’s paintings are imbued with the characteristics of Luminism, a late 19th century technique highlighting reflective waters, magnificent skies, and heavenly spotlit pastures.

Barr was born in 1957 in Hamburg, Pennsylvania. Growing up in an artistic family had a great influence on his choice to become a painter. His mother is a part-time artist and his father is a part-time musician. Barr attended Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts and received a BFA from the Tyler School of Fine Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.

His love and understanding of nature is strikingly represented in each of his paintings.

Barr’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA; the Reading Public Museum in Reading, PA; Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, TN; the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, FL; and the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY. His work can also be found in public collections, such as the Reading Public Museum in Reading, PA; Susquehanna Heritage Corp. – Zimmerman Center in Wrightsville, PA; and the The Baker Museum at Artis-Naples in Naples, FL.

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Abe Levin, 2018 Oil on panel, 33.5 x 29.75 in.

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Indian Steps, 2023 Oil on panel, 24 x 48 in.

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Skip Steinworth The radiant drawings of Skip Steinworth, while often of ephemeral objects, convey a sense of timelessness. Steinworth states, “It’s a process of mentally deconstructing, analyzing and distilling the visual essence of a subject.” Steinworth transcends subject matter by capturing the ultimate, almost spiritual essence of objects, what Ingres called their “inner form.”

According to Art Scene Magazine, Steinworth’s drawings are “gutsy in their rejection of bombast.” In their masterful composition, evocation of light, space, and form, they retain a remarkable energy. Like the Dutch and French old masters before him, Steinworth pays careful, almost obsessive attention to arrangement, lighting, scale and subject matter, elevating the everyday to resplendent expression.

Steinworth lives and works in Minnesota. He earned his BA and MA from St. Cloud University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Art Institute, among others.

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Thistle, 2021 Graphite on board, 19.5 x 12.5 in.

Timepiece, 2022 Graphite on board, 22 x 25 in.

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Three Apples, 2010 Graphite on board, 14 x 16 in.

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | newman@lewallengalleries.com © 2023 LewAllen Galleries back cover: Jivan Lee, Riverbends - Fall #7 (Sunrise Snow), 2022, oil on panel, 30 x 30 in.

Artwork © Each Artist