Frank Klepper

"OLD FARM PLACE" FRAMED 15.5 X 19.5

20th Century

Jose Vives-Atsara (1919-2004) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 16 x 20 Frame Size: 25 x 28.75 Medium: Oil on Canvas Applied by Palette Knife "River Bend" Biography Jose Vives-Atsara (1919-2004) His list of Pallbearers says it all. They were not just buyers of his art they were some of his closest friends. Pallbearers: E. Glenn Biggs, James M. Cavender, III, Tom C. Frost, Jr., James W. Gorman, Jr., George B. Irish, Joseph R. Krier, Robert L. Mooney and H. Bartell Zachry, Jr. Jose Vives-Atsara was born April 13, 1919, in Villafranca del Penedes near Barcelona, Spain. A native Spaniard, he developed a love of painting at an early age, and by age 11 had committed himself to becoming an artist. He studied at Colegio de San Ramon and had his first one-person show at age 14. The Spanish Civil interrupted his idyllic young life as he was forced to serve in the Communist Army, and then was imprisoned, suffering many hardships. Soon after the war he married Emilia Hill Domenech, and in 1947 set out to move with his wife and child aboard a tramp steamer to the United States. Unfortunately, immigration quotas did not allow them to move directly to the United States, and it was eight years before they achieved that goal. During this interim before obtaining temporary visas, he and his family lived first, in Caracas, Venezuela and then in Mexico City, Mexico. The family settled in San Antonio, Texas, where he had made friends on a previous visit. He and his wife and children gained citizenship in time for their first Christmas in the United States. He became such an exemplary immigrant citizen that officials of the U.S. District Court for the Western District Court regularly invited him to share his thoughts and advice for living in America with newly naturalized citizens Vives-Atsara also developed a close relationship with the Incarnate Word College, becoming, over the years, both a professor of art, and Artist in Residence. As a painter, he depicted many local scenes including San Antonio missions and the San Antonio River. For special guests such as Pope John Paul II, heads of state, and royalty from foreign countries, he was commissioned to provide paintings as gifts. His paintings were also commissioned for Frost Bank and the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. For his vibrant oil paintings, he used only nine colors, mixed in a variety of ways. They have been described as both realistic and impressionistic. "Vives-Atsara believed that art is a reflection of the artist's soul, if this is true; his paintings reflect a beautiful, bright spirit." (Richardson) Jose Vives-Atsara died in San Antonio on January 13, 2004 and is buried there in Sunset Memorial Park Mausoleum. Jose Vives-Atsara was born in Vilafranca del Panades in the Catalonian region of Spain on April 30, 1919. As a small boy he loved to sketch with pencil and paper. He began painting at the age of eleven. His first one-man show came at the ripe old age of fourteen. From that time on, painting has been his love and his way of life. Jose studied art at Saint Raymond College and School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. He is quick to admit that his most inspirational teacher has been nature itself. Mr. Vives-Atsara came to San Antonio in 1956 where he has established his art career. His use of a palette knife in painting allows him to blend rich pure pigments to achieve his goal of creating a powerful statement of color directly on the canvas. This style is intended to produce works that are distinctively 'Vives-Atsara'. Vives-Atsara is represented in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Spain; Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas; His Royal Highness Juan Carlos...

Fred Darge (1900-1978) Dallas Image Size: 18 x 24 Frame Size: 27.5 x 33.5 Medium: Oil on Board "Approaching Storm" Biography Fred Darge (1900-1978) Friedrich Ernst Darge Born: March ...

John Austin Hanna Born 1942 Fredericksburg Artist Image Size: 24 x 48 Frame Size: 28 x 52 Medium: Oil on Canvas Mercedes Benz 300SL "Gullwing" Coupe Ralph Lauren's personal vehicle Biography John Austin Hanna Born 1942 John Austin Hanna - Fredericksburg, Texas John graduated from Texas Tech University with a degree in Advertising Art & Design. As a 20-year illustrator in New York and Dallas he has been published in several magazines such as Automotive Quarterly, Car and Driver, Saga, Town & Country, Flying, Popular Boating, and Popular Science. He has also done work for several large corporations such as Mercedes, Volkswagen, Bell Helicopter, Lockheed Martin, Borden’s, Pearl Beer...

Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) San Antonio Artist Image Size: 30 x 40 Frame Size: 39 x 49 Medium: Oil on Canvas Dated 1957 "Bluebonnet Creek" Texas Hill Country Biography Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) Porfirio Salinas was a self-taught artist who painted landscapes of Central Texas with an emphasis on the vast bluebonnet fields that grow there in the springtime. Born in 1910 in Bastrop, Texas, he attended public schools in San Antonio. He also observed works in progress by the director of the San Antonio Art School, Jose Arpa, as well as landscape painter, Robert Wood. Wood is said to have paid Salinas five dollars a picture to paint bluebonnets because "he hated to paint bluebonnets". Salinas served in the military from 1943 to 1945. Although he was assigned to Fort Sam Houston, he was allowed to live at home. At the fort, Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk assigned him to paint murals for the officer's lounge and various other projects, and Salinas continued to be able to paint during his entire conscripted period. Even before he achieved notoriety among galleries, dealers, and museums, Salinas was widely followed and appreciated by many Texans, including former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who may be considered responsible for launching Salinas popularity beyond the boundaries of Texas. In 1973, Texas capital, Austin, honored Salinas for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings". Salinas died in April 1973 in San Antonio, Texas. From the years of the Great Depression through President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s, Texan Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973) remained one of the Lone Star State's most popular artists. Today, his works remain popular with Texas collectors and those who love landscapes of the beautiful "Hill Country" that lies in the center of the state. One of the first Mexican American painters to become widely recognized for his art, Salinas was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as of Sam Rayburn, the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Texas Governor John Connelly. In fact, President Johnson was so enamored with his Salinas paintings that the artist will forever be associated with America's first Texas-born President. Works by Porfirio Salinas are in a number of museum collections, grace the halls of the Texas State Capitol and the Governor's Mansion in Austin, and are included in virtually every major private collection of Early Texas Art. Porfirio Salinas was born on November 6, 1910, near the small town of Bastrop, Texas, about thirty miles from Austin. His father, Porfirio G. Salinas (1881-1967), and his mother, Clara G. Chavez, struggled to make a hardscrabble living as tenant farmers, but eventually were forced to give up farming. The family moved to San Antonio, where Salinas' father was able to get a job working as a laborer for the railroad, but the scenic area around Bastrop, with its pine trees and the wide expanse of the Rio Grande River, would forever remain a touchstone for the artist. For the rest of his life, Salinas and his brothers went back frequently to visit their grandmother in her little farmhouse. When in Bastrop, Porfirio painted on the banks of the Rio Grande or in the groves of pine trees. The Salinas family was close-knit and Porfirio was the middle child of five children, so he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger brother and sister. His mother was a native of Mexico, so throughout his childhood the family made the long drive to Mexico to visit Clara Salinas' family. As a child growing up in the bi-lingual section of San Antonio, Salinas drew and painted incessantly and by the time he was ten, he was already producing work that was mature enough to sell to his schoolteachers. Many years later in an article in the New York Times he was described as a "boy whose textbooks were seldom opened and whose sketchbook was never closed." Instead of studying, the young artist spent his spare time watching artists paint in and around San Antonio. As an aspiring painter, Salinas was fortunate to grow up in the historic city, which had the most active art scene in Texas. It was his exposure to older, professional painters that encouraged the precocious young painter to leave school early in order to help his family and pursue a career as a professional artist, despite his father's inability to see art as a career with any future for his son. When Salinas was about fifteen he came to know the artist Robert W. Wood (1889-1979). He met Wood while he was employed in an art supply store and he soon began to work as an assistant to the English-born painter, who had moved from Portland to San Antonio in 1924. Although the diminutive Englishman was already an established professional artist, he did not have a great deal of formal art training and so he was then studying with the academically trained Spanish painter Jose Arpa (1858-1952) in order to augment his knowledge and give his work a more polished look. Salinas was an eager young man, and while working in Wood's downtown San Antonio studio he learned to stretch canvases, frame paintings and to sketch in larger compositions from small plein-air studies for the English artist. He began to accompany Wood and Arpa to the hills outside San Antonio, where they painted small Plein-air studies of fields of blue lupin - the state flower, the famous "Bluebonnets" of Texas - in the springtime and scenes of the gnarled Red Oaks as they changed color in the fall. He was soon assisting Wood in the tedious work of painting the tiny blue flowers that collectors wanted to see in the landscapes they purchased of central Texas. According to a 1972 newspaper story, "Legend has it that one day in the 1920s artist Robert Wood decided he could not bear to paint another bluebonnet in one of his landscapes. He hired young Porfirio Salinas to paint them in for him at five dollars a painting." Whether this story is accurate or apocryphal isn't clear, but the ambitious and independent young Salinas wasn't destined to be anyone's assistant for very long. The formative event of Porfirio Salinas' teenage years was the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, a Roaring-Twenties dream of the eccentric oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes donated by the philanthropic Davis, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The "Davis Competitions," as they were known, helped to cement San Antonio's reputation as an art center, a legacy that remains with the "River City" today. The shows generated a great deal of excitement in the area, helping to make celebrities of the some of the artists who had already settled there and encouraging others to make San Antonio their home. Over the three years that the wildflower competitions were held, more than 300 paintings were exhibited, and many thousands of viewers saw the paintings at the Witte Museum and on tours throughout the state and in New York. Each year Davis would generously purchase the winning paintings and then donate them to the San Antonio Art League. Young Porfirio Salinas would have been able to not only watch his two mentors - Robert W. Wood and Jose Arpa - paint the works that they entered in the Davis Competitions, he would have been able to see Arpa take several of the major prizes, receiving the judge's accolades for "Verbena," "Cactus Flower" and "Picking Cotton," works that are still on view at the San Antonio Art League Museum today. Unfortunately, Davis eventually put his donations to work in other charitable endeavors, bringing to an end the wildflower events, but only after they inspired Salinas and other young painters and had helped to make wildflower paintings the most sought-after subject for traditionalist Texas collectors. In 1930, when he was only twenty, Salinas hung out a shingle and began to paint professionally, augmenting the sales of his easel paintings with what little business he could garner by painting signs for local concerns. It was a struggle for the young artist to make a living, as the effects of the Great Depression were settling in. His early works are very similar to those of Robert Wood's, both in subject matter and treatment. Salinas did small paintings of Bluebonnets for the tourists who visited San Antonio to see the famous Alamo as well as paintings of the Texas missions...