Month: July 2013

by

Jay Hutchinson

Jay Hutchinson Title:Circes Sources, 1989 59" x 36" x 17" (149.86cm x 91.44cm x 43.18cm) Created: 1989 welded steel sculpture Signed Initials Farhat Art Museum Collection

Jay Hutchinson
Title:Circes Sources, 1989
59″ x 36″ x 17″
(149.86cm x 91.44cm x 43.18cm)
Created: 1989
welded steel sculpture
Signed Initials
Farhat Art Museum Collection

 

 

Title:Ensemble, c. 1978-1979 54" x 45" x 25 (137.16cm x 114.30cm x 63.50cm) Created: c. 1978-1979 welded steel sculpture Signed Initials Farhat Art Museum Collection

Title:Ensemble, c. 1978-1979
54″ x 45″ x 25
(137.16cm x 114.30cm x 63.50cm)
Created: c. 1978-1979
welded steel sculpture
Signed Initials
Farhat Art Museum Collection

 

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Richard Marshall Merkin (1938 – 2009)

 

Title:Brochure: A Romance (for Miss Connie Bates)..., Artist: Richard Marshall Merkin 47.75" x 71.75" (121.29cm x 182.25cm) Created: 1969 Mixed Media/Paper on board Signed and Dated Farhat Art Museum Collection

Title:Brochure: A Romance (for Miss Connie Bates)…,
Artist: Richard Marshall Merkin
47.75″ x 71.75″
(121.29cm x 182.25cm)
Created: 1969
Mixed Media/Paper on board
Signed and Dated
Farhat Art Museum Collection

Richard Marshall Merkin (1938 – 2009)RICHARD MERKIN
RISD Connection: MFA in Painting, 1963; Professor Emeritus, Department of Painting; taught at RISD 1963-2005

About the artist: Merging his role as flaneur (connoisseur of city life) with his role as painter and social historian, Richard Merkin retrieves lost cultural artifacts – a Turkish cigarette, a gangster, a bowler and generally “things most people don’t know about” – and reconstitutes their Jazz Age virtues on canvas in cubist, comic-laced landscapes of tropical color.
Road to RISD: Often described as Rhode Island’s most famous New York artist, Merkin followed a post-undergrad stint as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art with a year at Michigan State, then a full graduate scholarship to RISD. He accepted a teaching fellowship at RISD the year he graduated, in part because he was intent on building his reputation outside of New York. Two years later, after a solo show in Boston, he settled in New York and continued his love affair with Rhode Island and RISD for over 40 years via a weekly teaching commute.

 

Richard Marshall Merkin (1938 - 2009).

Richard Marshall Merkin (1938 – 2009).

Other Roles: Novelist and best friend Tom Wolfe shares Merkin’s fashion fanaticism and also admires his anecdotal aplomb – “somehow it is always Havana con mucho color and thrombotic marimbas in a room full of Merkin’s work.” The artist himself prefers to be considered a “literary painter,” perhaps because his cartoonish canvases are often short stories in themselves, praising “the pioneers, the people from the past who paved the way,” such as a Miami Beach comedienne or a Moroccan photographer. Merkin is also a contributing writer for GQ and Vanity Fair, and his paintings have appeared in The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. They are featured in collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

Discoveries: (1) “Inventing yourself is a very American thing to do.” (2) He rarely works from life, but often from travel brochures. (3) “There is a degree of creative violence to my dress. I was not to the manner born, so to simply appropriate the manner would not have been satisfactory.”

Education
Syracuse University, BFA, 1961
Rhode Island School of Design, MFA, Painting, 1963″

Source:

Rhode Island School of Design alumni biography section

by

Donald Lipski (1947 – )

Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee Title:Untitled (Broken wing #20), 1986 55" x 52" x 9.50" (139.70cm x 132.08cm x 24.13cm) Created: 1986 Electrical wire and leather belts mounted to steel frame Farhat Art Museum Collection

Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
Title:Untitled (Broken wing #20), 1986
55″ x 52″ x 9.50″
(139.70cm x 132.08cm x 24.13cm)
Created: 1986
Electrical wire and leather belts mounted to steel frame
Farhat Art Museum Collection

Biography from Butler Institute of American Art:
American sculptor. He received a BA from University of Wisconsin in 1970, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, in 1973. From 1973 to 1977 he was Assistant Professor of Art at The University of Oklahoma in Tulsa. While his first interests were in the video and behavioural art of the 1970s, he became known in the early 1980s for large installations of sculptures made from objects found discarded in the street.

In “Passing Time”, exhibited in 1980 at The Butler Institute, he employed various large and small objects to produce an installation with abstract formal concerns, but a light, comical air. In the mid-1980s Lipski’s work was increasingly marked by the iconography of Surrealism, and he began to exhibit sculpture concentrated more on the impact of single objects.

The series “Building Steam”, employed such motifs as books and devices such as wrapping, along with incongruous surfaces and strange appendages. For example, “Building Steam #383”, exhibited in 1985 at The Butler Institute, is a fire bucket encased in a bandage with a shiny metallic curved surface occluding the bottom of the bucket.

The “Waxmusic and Candelabracadabra” (c 1992) series continued to mine Surrealist effects with a series of sculptures employing white candles and the empty boxes of musical instruments. The series “Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue?” brought this approach into conjunction with the motif of the American flag, which was combined in various ways with often old, rusty found objects redolent of Americana. The frequent use of circular motifs in this series suggests the continuance of his initial formal interests alongside his later figurative approach.