Artist of the day

Monday, March 29, 2021

Artist of the day, March 29, 2021: Charles Henry Alston, an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist, and teacher (#1243)

Charles Henry Alston (1907 –1977) was an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher. He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and moved to New York City as a child, where he attended high school and college, earning his MFA at Columbia University. Alston painted during the Harlem Renaissance, experimenting with African motifs as well as depicting the lives of ordinary black Americans.

During the Great Depression, he was one of only a few African American supervisors for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and he taught many young artists, including Jacob Lawrence, at the WPA-sponsored Harlem Community Art Center. Later, Alston helped found Spiral, a group of New York African American artists who met regularly during the 1960s to discuss the relationship of their art to struggles for racial justice.

Claiming the influence of the Civil Rights movement on his work, Alston stated, “the basically important thing is making a good picture … out of what your experience has been, and mine has been the experience of a black man in a fairly racist country.” Alston was one of the first black artists to have work exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. His artwork can also be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Detroit Institute of Art, Butler Art Institute, and Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries.

In 1958, Charles Alston created Walking, a vibrant painting that depicts a group of walking women composed of sturdy shapes and outlined by vivid slabs of color. Inspired by the Montgomery bus boycott and the determined actions of the mostly unrecognized women who orchestrated it, Alston employed abstract techniques to evoke the resolute energy that sustained the protest for more than a year in the mid-1950s. By constructing the cluster of women on the left out of broad, vertical bands of color, and by contrasting them with the women on the right, whom he painted with upward turning faces and with angular limbs that suggestion motion, Alston created a striking left-to-right transition that conveys a sense of spontaneous but purposeful movement. Alston recalled, "It was a very definite walk—not going back, no hesitation"— a mood he captured with his bold handling of paint and carefully arranged scene.

From late 1955 through 1956, a successful and hard fought boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, inspired people across the United States and around the world. Though these events brought international fame to two prominent civil rights figures—a young reverend named Martin Luther King Jr. and a seamstress and activist named Rosa Parks—the boycott also represented a triumph of local grassroots activism on a massive scale. Organized by black women’s political groups and facilitated through churches, the boycott mobilized thousands of black workers to avoid using segregated city buses to protest the unequal and demeaning practices of segregation. Years later, the figures of King and Parks loom large, but the boycotters themselves—and their exhausting, and at times humiliating, effort of walking to work day after day—are often overlooked.

By focusing his painting on unidentified women and, at center, two children, Alston presented an inclusive rendition of the figures that formed the backbone of the Civil Rights movement. His use of abstraction universalizes the notion of protest, inviting it any and everywhere. Painted in 1958, before the 1965 civil rights marches in Alabama, this canvas seems prescient. "The idea of a march was growing," Alston recalled. "It was in the air … and this painting just came. I called it Walking on purpose." Reimagining the daily drudgery of traveling by foot as a determined march, Alston at once celebrates the actions of the protesters of segregated Montgomery and elevates the mundane act of walking to something monumental and heroic.

© 2021. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Charles Henry Alston or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Mr. Charles Henry Alston

CUE STICK NUDE 1930

Cotton Club Dancer 1933

Girl in a Red Dress 1934

Jazz Club 1935

Barn and Tree 1935-43

Deserted House 1938

Stud Poker 1938

Workers (Illustration) 1940

All He Needed was a Little More Gas!! 1943

And While You're in There, Find out Something About a Fellow Named Abe Lincoln
1943

Couple 1945-50

New York City scape 1948

Dancers 1949

Untitled (Seven Figures) 1949

Painting 1950

Summer Afternoon 1951

Untitled 1951

African Theme III 1952-53

The Family 1955

Portrait of a young girl 1958

Untitled (Portrait of a Young Boy) 1958

Walking 1958

Untitled (Abstract Composition) 1959

Untitled 1959

Untitled (Abstract Composition) 1960

Woman on Bench 1960s

Black and White #8 1961

Untitled (Head of a Girl) 1968

Model Life Class 1969

Untitled (Head of a Woman) 1970

Untitled (Figure Composition) 1974

Seated Woman 1963

four dark figures

Untitled (cityscape at night)

Untitled, watercolor

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Artist of the Day, March 27, 2021: Georgy Kurasov, a Russian painter (#1242)

Georgy Kurasov (1958) was born in the USSR, in what was then Leningrad. He still lives and works in the same place. Without any effort on his part whatsoever, Georgy seems to have emigrated from one surreal country to another.

His native city was irrational from the very moment of its foundation. Situated on the same latitude as the southern shores of Alaska, on the swampy delta of the River Neva where no one had ever settled before, this new capital city grew up on the very edge of a monstrous empire.
Here on the totally flat surface carved across by rivers, streams and canals, European architects laid out, like images on a canvas, straight avenues, streets and squares, they built Greco-Roman porticoes and Baroque palazzi, erected sculptures and fountains, amidst something akin to permafrost where half the year is dominated by ice and frost and the other half by damp and rain.

Georgy spent his childhood on the Petrograd Side, to the north of the city, in a tiny little flat with windows that looked out onto an even tinier courtyard. As far as he recalls, he modeled things in plasticine and drew resting on the vast wooden windowsills. Not so much aesthetic pastimes as compensations for the grey minimalism of everyday life, the absence of light and bright colors.
At thirteen years old his mother put him in the art school attached to the Academy of Arts. At the interview it was politely explained that there was nothing for Georgy in the painting department since he had a total lack of feeling for color. So they suggested Georgy Kurasov join the sculpture class. That was when he began his professional training.

In 1977 Georgy Kurasov entered the sculpture department of the Academy of Arts.
He spent six years in the vast studio of a building erected during the time of Catherine the Great, in the late 18th century. Those gloomy, narrow, incredibly high vaulted corridors, the vast, cold, grimy studios, everything was inhabited by the ghosts of long dead masters of ages past, whose influence was far more real than the insignificant apologists of Socialist Realism and of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. The Academy was a solid amalgamation of temple to and prison of the arts. Yet those years in the Academy were the best years of his life. Nearly all Georgy’s friends and colleagues date from those years.

The circles he moved in were intellectual, talented, young – which meant free, with the exception of the one or two informers that were simply an obligatory element of life in those years and did little to alter the overall picture.

It was then that Georgy met his wonderful Zina, who was later to occupy nearly all his space, both physical, in his life, and creative, in his works.

Almost immediately after his diploma Georgy Kurasov was called up for army service, but even there he was armed not with a rifle but with paints, since he was lucky enough to be appointed Court Artist to his general.

In 1984 Georgy Kurasov was at last demoted. He was free.

That same year, he married Zinaida (Zina), a Russian ice ballerina, who became the model for many of his works. In 1982, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture and Painting and was invited to join the exclusive Russian Union of Artists. He was allocated his tiny studio, and thought he was at the very peak of happiness. All around him the country was in turmoil, at the very heights of Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’, people passionately quenching their thirst for information whilst battling with a hunger of somewhat more concrete physical nature caused by food shortages.

Things were now rather difficult for artists, particularly as far as sculpture was concerned. Sculpture, as is well known, is an art form for either rich or totalitarian states. The totalitarian state had ceased to exist but it had not become rich.

Georgy Kurasov started to paint, but it soon became clear that selling his pictures for any acceptable price was going to be impossible, and so he had to feed his family by producing small pastels which Georgy sold through small galleries dealing mainly in souvenirs for foreign tourists.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. By that time Kurasov had put together a large body of paintings, but had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with them. The future looked bleak.

Then in 1993 his works were first exhibited in the USA. Since then, Georgy Kurasov have exhibited and sold his paintings exclusively in North America.

It is many years since he dropped out of the world of sculpture in Russia, and he never formed part of the world of painting there. Kurasov knows there are plenty of people who, noting the absence of his works at Russian exhibitions, think he has emigrated.

Americans see Georgy Kurasov as a Russian artist, Russians as an American artist. Painters think he is a sculptor. Sculptors are sure he is a painter.

And when Georgy Kurasov thinks of it, he rather like this borderline existence. Perhaps it what makes it possible to be himself, to be unlike anyone else.

© 2021. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Georgy Kurasov or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only