Tag: painting

Designer Desire: Gerald French

Portrait of Gerald French paintings | H is for Home

We’ve owned two huge examples of artworks by Gerald French, so it’s surprising that we’ve not featured him on our Designer Desire series before now. You can have a look at one of them here.

French (1927-2001) hailed from Bradford and attended Bradford School of Art part-time where he was a contemporary of David Hockney. We’ve included one of a few sketches he did of Hockney in our collage above.

There’s a small number of French’s works in public collections including The Hepworth Wakefield, Bradford Museums and Abbot Hall in Kendal, Cumbria.

Original examples of his work regularly come up for sale at auction – especially up here in Yorkshire.

Portrait of Gerald Frenchcredit

Additional image credits:

Abbot Hall Art Gallery | Bradford Museums | Calderdale MBC | David Duggleby | The Hepworth Wakefield

Designer Desire: Charles Levier

Mosaic of Charles Levier artworks | H is for Home

We’re on the mailing lists of a few national and international auction houses and receive regular alerts about upcoming sales. This week, an email came through from one of them with an image of a lot that immediately caught our eye. It was a painting by Charles Levier (1920-2004).

Levier was Corsican-born, with a French father and American mother. After serving in the French army during the 2nd World War, he divided his time between France and the USA. Examples of his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Atlanta Museum, the Seattle Museum and the San Diego Museum amongst others. His works were collected by celebrities such as Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Baron Edmond de Rothschild and Dean Martin.

His style reminds us a bit of Geoffrey Key and Peter Stanaway, but mainly Bernard Buffet.

He seems to have been hugely prolific, and his work is easy to acquire. The price of his original oils vary widely, depending on size and subject matter; they’ve sold for anything from $400 to almost $10,000.

If you’re interested, have a look on eBay, Etsy and 1st Dibs for examples currently for sale.

Portrait of Charles Leviercredit

Designer Desire: Bernard Buffet

Mosaic of Bernard Buffet artwork | H is for Home

We’ve highlighted Bernard Buffet before on our blog. We have a few of his lovely prints dotted around our house.

Buffet (1928-1999) was hugely successful and extremely prolific – producing over 8,000 paintings in his lifetime. He was described by one biographer as “The modern Mega-Artist”. As part of his exclusive contract with Galerie Drouant-David, the artist staged a major solo exhibition every year. Suffice to say, there are an awful lot of prints and lithographs on the market; check out eBay and Etsy in the first instance. If you have a spare few tens of thousands of pounds, there are also originals to be had on auction sites such as Christies.

Buffet developed Parkinson’s disease in later years which prevented him from working. The disease was cited as the reason he committed suicide at his home in Tourtour, Provence.

If you’d like further insight into the artist, there’s an extensive essay online about him by The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) who have 3 of his works in their collection. There are numerous books and exhibition catalogues available as well.

Portrait of Bernard Buffet with his wife & muse, Annabelcredit

Additional image credits:

Pinterest

Designer Desire: Colin Ruffell

Mosaic of Colin Ruffell artworks | H is for Home

We’ve mentioned Colin Ruffell, our chosen Designer Desire artist, in the past when we acquired a couple of his original paintings a few years ago. We thought we’d share with you a few more of his artworks.

He has a few, very distinctive styles; abstract modernist, impressionist – however, it’s his naive, Cloisonnism paintings that we love the most – especially the vintage examples. Perhaps because it reminds us of the work of Bernard Buffet.

We couldn’t put it better ourselves, so we thought that we’d allow Ruffell to say a little about himself:

Colin Ruffell was born in 1939, then he was bombed, evacuated, educated, expelled, travelled, repatriated, married, bred, qualified and taught; until in 1965, aged 26, he became a full-time professional artist. Since then he is proud and happy to have survived.

This is the point at which we normally add an image of the artist or designer that we’re featuring. However, we couldn’t resist including the following short film of Ruffell’s cat, Trevor!

His vintage work comes up for auction on occasion; there’s currently a lovely example for sale on Etsy.

Colin Ruffell

Image credits:

Antiques Atlas | Art Publish | Ask Art | Mutual Art