Blog Standard - Reynolds Gallery

Jul 05

Nell Blaine

By ilnickiap Artists

Blaine was foremost an abstract painter, first a student of Theresa Pollak at the Richmond Professional Institute (now VCU), and later moving to New York in the 1940s to learn under Hans Hofmann. She immersed herself in the post-World War II New York art scene, which embraced color and gesture through Abstract Expressionism. The acute sense of hue, shape, and line apparent in her oil paintings originate in part from her early stages of art making, characteristically unabashed and intuitive. Instinct carried Blaine through her work; in 1959 at the age of 37, she contracted bulbar-spinal polio which paralyzed her from the waist down, forcing her to relearn how to paint. She began painting in oils with her left hand, adding a genuine looseness and determination. This persistence seeped into each scene as Blaine transitioned to a representative style, her hand capturing parks and rivers outside her Gloucester, Massachusetts home, her Upper West Side apartment in New York, and floral studies neatly arranged in her kitchen. Poetic, lyrical, and charmingly clever, Blaine’s oil and ink compositions lure in viewers as their luminous quality carries through to present day.

Blaine was born in 1922 in Richmond, VA. In her lifetime, she exhibited at major galleries including Tibor de Nagy, Jane Street Gallery, and Fischbach, all, New York, NY; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL, among others. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Blaine passed away in 1996 at the age of 74.

Curriculum Vitae

Past Exhibitions
Nell Blaine, 2017
VIEWPOINT

October Bouquet, 1977, oil on canvas, 20 x 18 inches

Round Table Sunset by Window, 1994, watercolor and pastel, 14 x 20 inches

Garden By Valley, 1965, Watercolor on paper, 14.5 x 20 inches

Riverside, Summer, 1962, Watercolor on paper, 13.75 x 19.75 inches

Shell and Wine Bottle, 1967, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

May 13

Richard Crozier and Frank Hobbs

By ilnickiap Exhibitions

VIRGINIA LANDSCAPES
Summer 2006

Apr 14

Julien Binford

By ilnickiap Additional Works

Julien Binford was born in Powhatan County, Virginia in 1908, and later travelled to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and schools in Paris and Spain in the 1930s. He returned to the United States where he was commissioned to paint murals in southern post offices and public buildings as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Programs. Further, during World War II he was commissioned by Life Magazine to depict the wartime happenings in the New York Harbor. Over his lengthy career, he mastered both representative and abstract portrayals of everyday scenes and objects. Exploring several mediums including oil, ink, pastel, and gouache, his sense of material evokes a tactile nature within the work. Pastels smudge into faces and forms, and egg tempura washes over geometric abstractions, conveying transparency through soft yet intentional strokes.

He was a professor of painting at Mary Washington College for 25 years, and many of his works are in the Mary Washington University Galleries’ permanent collection. His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, the Corcoran Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Binford passed away in 1997.

Past Exhibitions
Hot Fun in the Summertime
Summer Solstice

Queen's Offering, c. 1950, egg oil tempera on board, 32 x 47.5 inches

Abstraction, 1962-63, egg oil tempera and acrylic on canvas, 51 x 64 inches

Flower Vendors (Charleston), 1948, graphite and pencil on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches

German Dive Bombers (New York Harbor), 1945, ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches

Binford_56_Untitled_nd_pastel on paper mounted on board_8x11_signed

Apr 14

Richard Carlyon

By ilnickiap Artists

Richard Carlyon (1930-2006) studied painting and dance at Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), earning a BFA in Fine Arts in 1953. After military service and a stint in New York, he returned to RPI in 1958 for his MFA. Joining the faculty shortly thereafter, Carlyon taught in the Departments of Painting and Printmaking, Communication Arts and Design, and Art History at the VCU School of the Arts until his appointment as Professor Emeritus in 1996. He received the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association in 1993 and the Presidential Medallion from VCU in 2005.

The recipient of professional fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Carlyon participated in nearly 100 group exhibitions from the mid-1950s to 2005, including several shows at Siegel Contemporary Art and the Fleischmann Gallery in New York. Among his many solo exhibitions over more than four decades were multiple presentations in Richmond at Reynolds Gallery, 1708 Gallery, and Anderson Gallery, VCU School of the Arts. In 2009, together with the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, these venues organized a city-wide retrospective of Carlyon’s diverse work, accompanied by a major catalogue.

Carlyon’s paintings and drawings are included in numerous private and corporate collections, and held in the permanent collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia; and the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts, Farmville, Virginia.

Past Exhibitions
Early & Late, Eleanor
Vacation Days
Hot Fun in the Summertime
Missed Connections
Summer Solstice
Selected Works 2008

Links
VCU School of Medicine Collection
“Selected Works” at W&L University