July 2007
Volume 1, Number 7

Inside this issue...

Artist Of The Month: Winslow Homer
Art In The News 
Outside The Lines
Segmation News

Artist Of The Month: Winslow Homer 

Homer was born in Boston, Massachusetts and, when he was 19, was apprenticed to a commercial lithographer. Despite having almost no formal training in art, Homer moved to New York in 1859 and opened his own studio as a painter and illustrator. He took art classes and was a regular freelance illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and other important magazines of the day. They would be his major source of income for the next 17 years.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Harper's sent him to the front lines to document the fighting. He made faithful sketches of the battle scenes and ordinary life in the camps. Although these did not get Homer much artistic recognition at the time the drawings, with their strong draftsmanship and realism, are today considered to be among the best of America’s graphic arts.

After the war, Homer produced a series of paintings influenced by scenes he had witnessed, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty, and Prisoners from the Front, which was exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1866. In the same year he traveled to Paris and stayed there for ten months.

Ten years after the end of the Civil War, Winslow Homer was in his mid-40s and an acclaimed painter and illustrator. Snap the Whip, painted in 1872, was exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and, in the same year, he decided to abandon illustration and devote himself to painting. But perhaps the most significant development in Homer’s artistic career came with his adoption of watercolors. He is quoted as saying "You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors" and, indeed, the success he achieved with these fresh and spontaneous works permitted him to stop working as an illustrator.

At this time, Home never went anywhere without brushes, paper and his pans of watercolors. He started depicting the coast of New England, the Adirondacks, the wild rivers of Quebec, the Florida Keys and the whitewashed walls of Bermuda.

In 1881 Homer returned to Europe and spent the next two years in Cullercoats, a small fishing village on the stormy North Sea coast of England. His subject matter was the sea and the courageous inhabitants of the small struggling community. The watercolors he produced of the village women going about their daily lives or waiting for their menfolk to return from a fishing expedition are some of the most powerful images produced by the artist.

Back in the U.S. he went to live in Prout's Neck, Maine where he built a studio on the rocky sea shore that was to be his home until he died. Winslow Homer lived there alone, isolated and free to devote himself to his art. It is at this time that he began painting the seascapes for which he is best known such as Gulf Stream, Eight Bells, and Mending the Nets. His paintings underwent a fundamental change. He was now concentrating on the force, drama, and wild beauty of the ocean. His style was powerful and self-confident. Homer never spoke about the reasons for this self-imposed seclusion; it’s thought that perhaps an unhappy love affair might have been the cause.

Winslow Homer died on September 29, 1910 in his studio at Prout’s Neck. He was 74 years old. His painting, Shoot the Rapids, remained unfinished.

Art In The News

Monet Masterpiece Almost Beats the Record

Nympheas, considered to be one of the finest works in Monet’s water lily series sold for 18.5 million pounds sterling (US$ 36,938,000) at Sotheby’s in London recently, but failed to break the artist’s auction record of 19.8 million pounds sterling (US$ 39,531,000) achieved in 1998 for another painting from the water lily series. Experts on the London art market had speculated that the painting would break all records due to new money from Russia and China bidding alongside established collectors.

Source: BBC

Technology Thwarts Art Thefts

Advances in gallery security will fulfill a double function: protecting valuable masterpieces and explaining the art work to gallery visitors.

Any art thief who thinks he can waltz into a museum, unscrew the valuable painting from the wall and then spirit himself away with the painting by melting into the crowd of visitors has a surprise in store. New technology enables museum security staff to track the whereabouts of a painting through motion detectors and a radio frequency identifier (RFID) attached to the back of the frame. Unscrewing the painting from the wall will set off the motion detectors and the radio signal, sent every 15 seconds, will pinpoint the painting’s exact location.

The same electronic chips that protect the painting double up as an interactive electronic catalogue: the picture’s unique electronic identifier can be accessed by a PDA and the data displayed can range from basic information to a video interview with the artist or even interactive games for the kids.

Now, if the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, had had such protection then the brazen thieves who stole a 17th century masterpiece by Dutch artist Frans van Mieris would have been caught red-handed. The painting is valued at one million dollars and it’s feared it might end up in the hands of an unscrupulous private collector.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Outside The Lines

Trivia: American Artists

Mary Cassatt was invited to exhibit in Paris with the French Impressionists by her friend, Edgar Degas. Mary was the only American member of the group and she was just 20 years old at the time.

James McNeill Whistler grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia and studied at the Imperial Art Academy there. His father had been invited to Russia by the Czars to build a railroad and the family remained in Russia until Whistler was 15 years old.

Marc Chagall’s painting The Dead Man, served as inspiration for the famous Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. The focal figure of that painting, which portrays a funeral, is a man on a rooftop playing a fiddle.

Hope everyone is enjoying their summers!! Our Windows Mobile version of SegPlay™, SegPlayMobile™ has been released and we're receiving some great comments about it!

Our SegPlayPC pattern collection is growing by leaps and bounds!! We've added some wonderful new pattern sets in the last few weeks including "U.S. President Caricatures", "Paul Gauguin - Post Impressionist Synthetist","Hawaiian Scenes", and "Francisco Goya - First of the Moderns".