I got this book in 2019 when I was still buying art monographs to watch during football games. Since then, we’ve given up DirecTV which we mostly used on Sunday afternoons through the winter, and the Sunday Ticket package has gone to YouTubeTV, and I’m loath to buy that package. But I’ve still bought art books from time-to-time since.
It took me a while to pick this book up because it’s kind of an art book, but it’s put out by a gallery doing a show of the artist. It includes a price list of works in the front, and they’re not bad, I guess; a couple thousand dollars per, but it’s for an artist whose work was shown in New York. So.
At any rate, it took me a while and a couple of attempts to get into the book because it is mostly a text book, not an art book. It has two essays in it about the significance of the artist and his role in the American Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements. Originally from Ohio, he ended up in a couple of towns / artists colonies in Massachussetts and knew a number of other regional artists.
Most of the book is given over to the text, with some black-and-white small reproductions of his work alongside the text (and a portrait of the artist done by another artist), and after the essay we get 14 color reproductions of his work which are not too greatly reduced–the fellow worked in pastels and in oils on fairly small canvases, and…. Well, Impressionist scenes of Ohio winters and seascapes with boats, docks, and shacks. The Impressionism and probably work with pastels leads to long, broad strokes piled upon one another to make the scenes, which tends to make the look very primitive and indistinct.
Too much so for my taste. But looking at the works, one can see how the primitivism of various early 20th century artists like Frido Kahlo or the country craft styles of Grandma Moses became the new hotness, and from then onto the real madness.
So I won’t be spending the $6,000 for Rocky Coast. Well, that’s what it went for thirty-five years ago. I’m almost afraid to see what it would go for today.
