Art of Jeffrey T. Larson
Here's a nice appreciation for the work of Minnesota artist Jeffrey T. Larson. His work reminds me of my favorite painter, John Singer Sargent.
My favorites of Larson’s paintings, though, are his landscapes (bearing in mind that most of his figurative paintings are also landscapes in effect). These force me to resort to those overused terms “fresh” and “immediate” because nothing else sums them up quite as succinctly.Art of Jeffrey T. Larson (Lines and Colors)His landscapes evoke the dappled sunlight on an intimate creek or the cool haze of a winter sky with beautifully efficient brush strokes and a subtle handling of color variation. He’s chosen a position on the spectrum of tight to loose rendering that I find particularly appealing.
Something I found of special interest in Larson’s work is they way he constructs the image with the direction and shape of his brushstrokes. He isn’t just dabbing color in, filling in shapes with slapdash blots of paint, he’s drawing with his brushstrokes, defining the shapes of objects in same way lines and textures applied in a drawing can follow and define the form. (This is a characteristic I particularly associate with painters like Sargent or Cecilia Beaux.)
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Very fine paintings!
i love sargent, too!
there is/was a Sargent painting of a little girl in the Dallas Museum of Art that I used to stare at a lot. His economy of brush stroke was amazing: up close a collection of measured brush strokes; back away, and it resolved into a pretty compelling portrait of a young girl.
i always wondered how he worked, and how much thought and practice went into each brush stroke. i imagine that most of it was unconscious, built into his hand over the years.
sigh... gorgeous. Almost no paint on the canvas. So much said with so little. Brilliant. Thanks for this post.
beautiful piece! quite unlike the rest of his work which has a more trompe-loeill feel. almost photographic. excellent painter!
Very nice works. We have a museum of Russian art here in Minneapolis (lots of Russian immigrants too). A lot of classic peasants in the field working hard kind of stuff. I wonder if he has been influenced by some of that?
What I find most fascinating about his style, is that his landscapes have an unnerving lack of detail to them -when you look at them directly. It's almost as if the only thing that the eye sees is the individual brushstrokes and the distinct lack of detail. This is in direct contrast to his still-lifes that have an almost photographic quality to them -highly detailed in their colors and treatment of light, shadow, and reflections.
However, when you divert your eye to the left or right, so that you are viewing these works with your peripheral vision, suddenly there is this amazing, lifelike, portrayal that appears. It tends to draw your eye back to the painting -as if your mind is telling you that there is something there that you have missed and you need to look again to see it- yet when you do, the image's detail vanishes and you are left with the impression of simple brushstrokes on canvas. It gives one the impression of images that one might see in a lucid dream, more details are seen and greater visual gratification is obtained when one does not focus on them too intensely.
HA. one of the paintings in 'figures' shows a boy and a dog and is titled "Brock and Sarge". It wouldn't be surprising if Larson loved Sargent just as much as you do Mark!
If these take your fancy (and they are very good imho) you might like Russian landscape painters such as Shishkin, Levitan or Kuindzi...
Wonderful work. Incredibly loose, yet it evokes a fantastic sense of place. He has an amazing way with light. The thumbnails look almost photo-realistic, but when you see the larger image, you can see just how painterly it is.
Reminds me of this great artist, who just happens to be my better half! :-)
Clicked the RSS thingy to read the article and the picture above appeared.
Paint, light, art stuff.
Whatever.
I don't remember a bloke with an easel being about when I was 12.
Nice. Very nice.