Tag: painter

Designer Desire: Mary Ellen Best

Montage of paintings by Mary Ellen Best

I love going out for a walk around dusk, when people have turned on their lights, but haven’t yet drawn the curtains. You can get a sneaky look inside and see how they’ve furnished and decorated their homes. I think that’s why I was first attracted to the works of this week’s artist.

Mary Ellen Best (1809-1891) was an English watercolour artist, primarily concentrating on English – and later on, German – domestic interior scenes. She was born in York, the daughter of Dr Charles Best, a physician who worked at the York Lunatic Asylum (now Bootham Park Hospital). Her mother was Mary Norcliffe Dalton, the daughter of a Yorkshire landowner. She was brought up, along with her younger sister, Rosamond, in Little Blake Street (now Duncombe Place) near the west end of York Minster.

Best showed artistic promise from a young age, having art lessons at boarding school during her teenage years. As a young woman, she produced and sold many paintings and also exhibited widely.

As well as her own home, Best painted a number of studies of the Norcliffe family’s East Yorkshire home, Langton Park. There are many well-to-do town & country house drawing rooms, sitting rooms, dining rooms, music rooms etc. But it’s the ‘below stairs’ views that I find most interesting; the servant’s quarters, the kitchens and the more modest cottage interiors.

After the death of her parents and grandmother, from whom she inherited handsome sums each time, Best’s artistic output decreased. After she married German schoolmaster, Johann Anton Phillip Sary in 1840, the number of paintings she produced lessened even further until they virtually dried up after giving birth to and raising a son and daughter.

In 1985, a biography entitled The World of Mary Ellen Best was written by Caroline Davidson. In it, she calculated that Best produced over 1,500 paintings in her lifetime. Copies of the book are available at Abe Books and Amazon.

You can also find many more details about life on the Women of York blog and essay, Negotiating Identity: Mary Ellen Best and The Status of Female Victorian Artists.

Self-portrait by Mary Ellen Best, 1839
Self-portrait by Mary Ellen Best, 1839 (credit)

Additional image credits:
Askart

Designer Desire: Alfred Wallis

Montage of Alfred Wallis artworks

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) began his working life as an apprentice basket-maker. He became a trans-Atlantic mariner and later a local fisherman in and around Cornwall. He only began painting at the ripe old age of 67 – ‘for company’ – after the death of his wife. He was completely self-taught and is known for his simplistic representations of boats, ships, bridges and lighthouses. Having little spare money for art supplies, he often painted on scraps of cardboard and wood using marine paint.

After five or so years, he started being championed by the artist, Ben Nicholson who, in 1928 along with Christopher Wood, happened upon Wallis on a visit to St Ives, Cornwall. Wallis’ work was soon purchased and collected by many eminent artists of the time who appreciated and emulated his naturally naive aesthetic; Nicholson, Wood, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Patrick Heron. According to Nicholson, Wallis’ work was:

something that has grown out of the Cornish seas and earth and which will endure

A large selection of his works can be found at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge; the home of Jim Ede, one time Director of the Tate. Examples of his work are in the permanent collections of the Tate and MoMA.

There are numerous books dedicated to his life and works available from Abe Books and Amazon.

Despite finding a measure of success, and his artworks which are now selling for fortunes, Alfred Wallis died in a workhouse in poverty.

Portrait of Alfred Walliscredit

Additional image credits:
Bonhams | Christies

Designer Desire: Eric Drooker

Montage of Eric Drooker artworks
New York city born Eric Drooker (b. 1958) is a magazine illustrator, graphic novelist, animator and painter.

In 1994, he won the American Book Award for his first graphic novel, Flood! A Novel in Pictures (cover artwork, bottom left in the montage above). His second, Blood Song is soon to be released as a feature film.

He has designed dozens of covers for the New Yorker magazine. He collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on both Illuminated Poems and Howl: A Graphic Novel.

Find his graphic novels, books of postcards and other books he’s illustrated on Amazon.

In the film below, Eric Drooker is interviewed about his friendship with Allen Ginsberg and designing the animation for Howl starring James Franco.

Portrait of Eric Drooker by Peter Riede, 2013Peter Riede©

All other credits: Eric Drooker©

Designer Desire: Denys Short

Montage of paintings by Portrait of Denys Short

Born in Bideford in 1927, Denys Short studied painting at Goldsmiths during the 1950s. He won the Gold Medal in the 1958 National Eisteddfod.

He’s primarily known for his sculptures, but it’s his paintings that really resonate with me. I love the ordinariness of the Welsh streets and interiors that he depicts in his works.

He has exhibited widely, including at the Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London; Margam Sculpture Park, Neath Port Talbot; and Bishops Palace, St David’s.

He created a sculpture garden on the two acres around his house which he open to the public each summer. He lives – with his wife Eirian, a quilter – in Dinas Cross, Pembrokeshire where they’re both members of their local Fishguard Arts Society.

Portrait of Denys ShortAt the opening of the ‘Generations’ exhibition at Fishguard Library in 2016 – Denys Short is standing on the far right
credit

Additional image credits:
Art UK