Born in 1899, Theresa Pollak soon became a major fixture in Richmond art scene and beyond. In 1928, she founded the art department at the Richmond Professional Institute, which grew into Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, now ranked as the number one public art school in America. A past student of Hans Hofmann, she showed at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among many others. Mastering a unique abstract expressionist tone, Pollak’s hand moves fluidly through figures, landscapes, and street scenes. Scratchy black ink and billowy pastels capture a liveliness characteristic of her work. Pollak passed away in 2002, though her impact on the Richmond arts community lives on.
Untitled, 1964, acrylic on paper, 18.5 x 23 inches
The Red House, 1964, ink on paper, 23.25 x 18.5 inches
Capturing scenes of Charlottesville, Virginia through the passenger seat window of his car, Richard Crozier embraces the impermanence of landscapes through painting. Rendering stray houses, construction sites, and quiet highways with loose, thick strokes, he imparts a contemplative, passionate nature within quotidian scenes. His casual approach lends to an abstract perspective, imparting an emotive quality heightened by color and light. The Hawaii native received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Washington in Seattle, and later his Master of Fine Arts from University of California, Davis alongside artists Wayne Thiebaud and William T Wiley (1974). His work has been exhibited widely at Tatistcheff & Co., New York; College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia; The Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Long Beach Art Museum, California; and Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, Virginia. Several public collections hold his work, including Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; Davis Art Center, Davis, California; the Medical College of Virginia, Richmond; School of Law, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; and the Sturgis-Young Art Center, Sturgis, MI. He currently lives in Charlottesville, where he retired as a professor at University of Virginia in 2011, having taught there for 37 years.
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.
