Kenneth Hayes Miller

"The Skaters" WPA American Winter Scene Mid-Century Modernism Figure Skating

1942

Vintage Sunrise Landscape - Sandpipers on the Shore in Oil on Canvas Gorgeous landscape of a coastline in warm sunrise colors by San Diego artist Richard Keith (American, 1937-2003)...

Meet the genuinely exciting modernist William Einstein, who is probably better known in Europe, where numerous publications on his work have been written, than in his native US! Eins...

Figurative Study In Sausalito by Patricia Gren Hayes Berkeley Figurative School Modern painting of a nude woman with the Sausalito landscape in the background by American painter, P...

Milton Derr Spring, 1982 Signed lower right; titled and dated verso Oil on canvas 26 x 28 inches Provenance Acquired by descent from the artist to the present owner Milton Derr wa...

Night Life in the City - Figurative Cityscape Mid 1960s cityscape by an unknown artist. Oil on artists board. Image, 16"H x 20"W

"Mutual Admiration" Flower Mid-Century Modern Oil Painting Monterey Artist Mid-Century Modern painting of a little blonde girl in a white apron adoring her flowers by Monterey Artist Rose Marie (Smith) Ansel, (American, 1921-2012) Rose Marie was born and lived in the Monterey area all her life. She volunteered in various city government associations and founded the Parade of Nations in 1970 which celebrated the many ethnic cultures on the Monterey Peninsula...

This painting is illustrated in the Catalogue of the 1945 Encyclopedia Britannica Collection of Contemporary American Painting, p.84. Written and edited by Grace Pagano. "Painting ...

John Koch is a beloved American realist painter who depicted people in their everyday lives. Here we see a slightly different approach where he has put a painter out in a rural town...

Initially read as archaic and simple, Halleluja is a complex celebratory spring painting full of color, imagination, and humor and combines many elements seen throughout her later ca...

Six O-Clock, c. 1942, oil on canvas, 30 x 20 inches, signed and titled several times verso of frame and stretcher (perhaps by another hand), marked “Rehn” several times on frame (for the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City, who represented Craig at the time); Exhibited: 1) 18th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings from March 21 to May 2, 1943 at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. #87, original price $450 (per catalog) (exhibition label verso), 2) Craig’s one-man show at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York City, from October 26 to November 14, 1942, #10 (original price listed as $350); and 3) Exhibition of thirty paintings sponsored by the Harrisburg Art Association at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg in March, 1944 (concerning this exhibit, Penelope Redd of The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) wrote: “Other paintings that have overtones of superrealism inherent in the subjects include Tom Craig’s California nocturne, ‘Six O’Clock,’ two figures moving through the twilight . . . .” March 6, 1944, p. 13); another label verso from The Museum of Art of Toledo (Ohio): original frame: Provenance includes George Stern Gallery, Los Angeles, CA About the Painting Long before Chris Burden’s iconic installation outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Urban Light, another artist, Tom Craig, made Southern California streetlights the subject of one of his early 1940s paintings. Consisting of dozens of recycled streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s forming a classical colonnade at the museum’s entrance, Burden’s Urban Light has become a symbol of Los Angeles. For Burden, the streetlights represent what constitutes an advanced society, something “safe after dark and beautiful to behold.” It seems that Craig is playing on the same theme in Six O-Clock. Although we see two hunched figures trudging along the sidewalk at the end of a long day, the real stars of this painting are the streetlights which brighten the twilight and silhouette another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, the palm trees in the distance. Mountains in the background and the distant view of a suburban neighborhood join the streetlights and palm trees as classic subject matter for a California Scene painting, but Craig gives us a twist by depicting the scene not as a sun-drenched natural expanse. Rather, Craig uses thin layers of oil paint, mimicking the watercolor technique for which he is most famous, to show us the twinkling beauty of manmade light and the safety it affords. Although Southern California is a land of natural wonders, the interventions of humanity are already everywhere in Los Angeles and as one critic noted, the resulting painting has an air of “superrealism.” About the Artist Thomas Theodore Craig was a well-known fixture in the Southern California art scene. He was born in Upland California. Craig graduated with a degree in botany from Pomona College and studied painting at Pamona and the Chouinard Art School with Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Barse Miller among others. He became close friends with fellow artist Milford Zornes...