Charles Harris ( Beni Kosh )

untitled (Reclining Female Nude)

1950

Created in 2017 this series, Baggage Claim, speaks to the symbolic emotional weight one accumulates through life and how the accumulations weigh down the spirit. The artist used handbags...

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...

Signed "Rhonda V" in memory of the artist's mother From the series: Baggage Claim, inspired by the death of the artist's mother. The reference to "Baggage" is symbolic to all the emotion and hurt one accumulates through life and how the accumulations weights down on the spirit. Watercolor on Yupo paper...

Homage to Morandi Watercolor, c. 1990 Signed lower right: Sloane An important exhibition size watercolor by the artist. Acquired by the Cleveland Clinic, de-accessed in 2021 Conditio...

Chrysanthemums and Tiger Lilies Signed and dated lower left (twice), see photo Watercolor on paper, 1935 A symbol of the sun, the Japanese consider the or...

Trompe-l'Oeil Study Watercolor on heavy wove paper, 1943 Signed with the artists initials, lower center of image; Dated 1943, lower center of image Provenance: Swann Galleries, 2007, realized $2,640 Condition: Excellent. Fresh colors. Framed with conservation glass. Sheet: 14 3/4 x 11 1/4" Frame size: 20 3/4 x 17 Berman brothers (painters) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Eugene Berman in Italy in the 1960s Eugène Berman (Russian: Евгений Густавович Берман; 4 November 1899, Saint Petersburg, Russia – 14 December 1972, Rome) and his brother Leonid Berman...

Mary Finlayson Flowers II Gouache on Paper 22.5 x 17 inches, framed Mary Finlayson’s interest in painting interior spaces portrays how environments reveal identity. Navigating the themes of intimacy, memory, and self, Finlayson’s gouache paintings reflect the vulnerable narratives unveiled through ownership of possessions. Flattening the perspective of each scene, her still lifes provide a voyeuristic glimpse in to each curated space. Considering the personal attachments and importance of objects, her compositions skew and distort to capture the feeling of a space rather than an accurate depiction. Rendered with vivid color and an emphasis on texture, Finlayson creates spaces that are partly real and partly imagined. Mary Finlayson lives and works in San Francisco as an artist, teacher, and art therapist. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen's University, a Graduate Degree in Art Therapy...

Jo Haran Drenched Chrysanthemums Original Flowers Watercolour, gouache and gesso Image size: H:73 cm x W:54 cm Paper size: H:76 cm x W:56 cm x D:0.001cm Sold Unframed Please note t...

Season End by Jo Haran [2020] original Watercolour, gouache and gesso Image size: H:65 cm x W:49 cm Complete Size of Unframed Work: H:66.5 cm x W:53 cm x D...

White and Grey By Jo Haran [2020] original Watercolour, gouache and gesso Image size: H:63.5 cm x W:51 cm Complete Size of Unframed Work: H:66 cm x W:64 cm x D:0.001cm Sold Unframed...

Rambling Rose by Jo Haran [2020] original Gouache, watercolour ink and gesso. Image size: H:72.5 cm x W:52.5 cm Complete Size of Unframed Work: H:76 cm ...

"The collector’s house blue" Manuel Santelices 12 in. H x 9 in. W Unframed The worlds of fashion, society and pop culture are explored through the i...