Karin Johannesson Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

This captivating floral artwork "Summer blooming flowers in a blue vase" is an exuberant portrayal of a bouquet, radiating vibrancy and textural complexity. The piece commands attention with its vigorous brushstrokes, creating a sense of movement and depth. The bouquet is composed of blooming flowers in a rich palette of colors ranging from various shades of pinks and purples to luminous whites. Each flower is rendered with bold, gestural layers of paint, creating a tactile surface that invites the viewer to appreciate the artist’s dynamic technique. The background, with its harmonious blend of cool blues and popping greens, forms a vivid contrast against the warm tones of the flowers, enhancing their visual impact. Noteworthy is the blue-checkered vase...

Abstract Watercolor N.8 by Dmitry Samygin Minimalist and geometric paintings. Technique: Watercolor Color: Teal blue Size: H. 35.5 x 27.5 x 0.1 cm Dmitry Samygin is a Furniture a...

This artwork commands attention with its vibrant and dynamic use of color and form, creating a visually striking composition. At the center of the piece there is a vase combining blu...

'Lily Study III' by master watercolorist Gary Bukovnik, who fuses sensual vitality with fluid yet powerful colorations to create floral images of great depth, intensity, and size. I...

This artwork commands attention with its vibrant and dynamic use of color and form, creating a visually striking composition. At the center of the piece, a bold, reddish vase...

Lilacs and Peonies, Mid Century Floral Still-Life with Pink & Purple Vibrant mid century floral still-life featuring lilacs and peonies by Carolyn Tyson (American, b-1941). This lov...

In this abstract still-life floral artwork "Summer bouquets and summer fruits" I experience the world of nature through the bright colors of a summer period. While painting, I sough...

This contemporary small-format original oil painting, titled "Just Bananas", is part of a recent series by French artist Natalya Mougenot, focusing on expressive still lifes inspired...

This still life painting "One green apple and two red apples" features a blue jar with lid, a blue cup, two red apples, and a green apple on an orange-red surface. This piece eman...

This framed 27" x 37" watercolor painting by Irish artist, Peter Healy is from the 'In Flux' Pandemic Collection. The painting comes vibrantly alive as the...

Plum Branches and Flowers watercolor on wove paper, 1985 Signed and dated in pencil lower right corner From the artist's 1985 sketchbook Inspired by O'Sickey's love of Japanese and Chinese art and calligraphy. Provenance: Estate of the artist Condition: Excellent Image/Sheet size: 13 5/8 x 17 inches Joseph B. O’Sickey, Painter 1974 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS The title conferred on him by Plain Dealer art critic Steve Litt in a 1994 article, “the dean of painting in northeast Ohio,” must have pleased Joseph O'Sickey. It was more than 30 years since he had burst onto the local (and national) art scene. O’Sickey was already in his 40s in that spring of 1962 when he had his first one-man show at the Akron Art Museum and was signed by New York’s prestigious Seligmann Galleries, founded in 1888. In the decade and a half that followed, he would have seven one-man shows at Seligmann, which had showed the work of such trailblazing figures as Seurat, Vuilliard, Bonnard, Leger and Picasso, and appear in all of the group shows. O’Sickey took the Best Painting award in the 1962 May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). He and would capture the same honor in back-to-back May Shows in 1964 and ’65, and again in 1967. The remarkable thing, noted the Plain Dealer’s Helen Borsick, was that he accomplished this sweep in a variety of painterly styles, even using that most hackneyed of subjects, flowers. “The subject doesn’t matter,” he told her, “what the artist brings to it is the important thing.” O’Sickey’s garden and landscape paintings were big and bold, eschewing delicate detail in favor of vitality and impact. The great art collector and CMA benefactor Katherine C. White, standing before one of O’Sickey’s vivid garden paintings, compared the sensation to “being pelted with flowers.” Though he might represent an entire blossom with one or two smudged brush strokes or a stem with a simple sweep of green, O’Sickey rejected the moniker of Impressionist—or Pointillist or Abstract painter or Expressionist. “My work,” he said, “is a direct response to the subject. I believe in fervor and poetic metaphor. I try to make each color and shape visible and identifiable within the context of surrounding colors and shapes. A yellow must hold its unique quality from any another yellow or surrounding color, and yet read as a lemon or an object, by inference. It does not require shading or modeling—the poetic evocation is part of the whole.” “The subject,” O’Sickey used to tell his students at Kent State University, where he taught painting from 1964 to 1989, “has to be seen as a whole and the painting has to be structured to be seen as a whole.” He liked to think of it as “a process of controlled rapture.” When, in the 1960s, fond childhood memories drew him to the zoo, he found himself responding to the caged animals in their lonely dignity (or indignity) with sharp-edged, almost silhouette-like forms that evoked Matisse’s paintings and cut-paper assemblages. One observer was left with the impression that the artist had “looked at these animals, past daylight and into dusk when they lose their details in shadow and become pure shapes, with eyes that are seeing the viewer rather than the other way around. This is a world of shape and essence,” wrote Helen Borsick. “All is simplification.” O’Sickey attributed his ability to capture his subjects with just a few strokes—in an almost iconographic way—to a rigorous exercise he had imposed upon himself over a period of several months. Limiting his tools to a large No. 6 bristle brush and black ink, he set himself the task of drawing his pet parakeet and the other small objects in its cage (cuttlebone, feeding dish, tinkling bell) hundreds of times. The exercise gave him “invaluable insights into painting. . . . Because of the crudity of the medium, every part of these drawings had to be an invention and every mark had to have its room and clarity.” Then he began adding one color at a time—“still with the same brush and striving for the same clarity”—and headed off to the zoo where “the world opened up to me. I learned how little it took to express the subject.” Born in Detroit at the close of the First World War, O’Sickey grew up in St. Stanislaus parish near East 65th and Fleet on Cleveland’s southeast side. (The apostrophe was inserted into the family’s proud Polish name by a clerk at Ellis Island.) An early interest in drawing and painting may have been kindled by the presence on the walls of Charles Dickens Elementary School, one of only three grade schools in the district with a special focus on the arts, of masterful watercolors by such Cleveland masters as Paul Travis, Frank N. Wilcox and Bill Coombes. As a youngster O’Sickey took drawing classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and he and his brother spent hours copying famous paintings; while a student at East Tech High School in the mid-’30s, he attended free evening classes in life drawing with Travis and Ralph Stoll at the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Institute, and Saturday classes at the Cleveland School (later the Cleveland Institute) of Art, where he earned his degree in 1940 under the tutelage of Travis, Stoll and such other legendary figures as Henry Keller, Carl Gaertner, William Eastman, Kenneth Bates...

I have worked on a new series of small oil paintings. This is the one of them. This series is dedicated to the scenes of everyday life. This painting of a bouquet of flowers in a v...