TAMPA, Fla. – On Friday, Nov 29, ArtFaire.us will present a no-reserve Black Friday sale titled Works On Paper ~ Holiday Auction, a holiday art fair of festive collectible works on paper including watercolors, charcoal drawings, pastels, photography and mixed media. This is a masterful collection with appeal to both accomplished and beginning collectors. Bid absentee or live online through LiveAuctioneers.
Among the featured works in this auction is artist Charlene Ashley’s self-portrait in the medium of charcoal (above). Charcoal is one of the world’s oldest art media. Its first ever recorded use was 12,000 years ago in the Niaux cave in France during the Upper Paleolithic age in Western Europe. Ashley uses the medium as a tool for inventive portraiture in a style and imagination that remains fresh and unadulterated – rather than attempting to adopt the photo-realistic penchant of other well-known charcoal artists such as Robert Longo or Dan Pyle. The manner in which she incorporates “chiaroscuro” into her charcoals is in a manner uniquely suited to her own vision, rather than renditioning Caravaggio.
Subsequent to the Paleolithic Age, watercolor painting was found in Egyptian art after the discovery of papyrus paper, and in Asia around 4000 B.C. as a decorative medium of Chinese painters. The luster and transparency of colors on 100% cotton paper is alluring to many artists, such as Donna Friedson, another featured artist of the auction, whose contemporary art is known for its expressionistic tone.
Professor Friedson was a former program director and curator of the African art collection at the Museum of Archeology in Staten Island, as well as an educator at the Queens Museum and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. For the past 30 years she has taught and lectured in art history, drawing, design and painting in universities and institutions throughout the Northeast.
Albert Worcester was a painter and etcher who was born in West Compton, New Hampshiure, in 1878. He studied in Detroit under Maud Mathewson in whose studio he exhibited in 1894. He also studied in New York City, in Italy and in Paris under L.O. Merson and Jean Paul Laurens. He spent considerable time in Holland and finally returned to Detroit. He is also known to have spent two years in New Orleans, exhibiting with the Art Association of New Orleans and at the Delgado Museum of Art. He later embarked on a tour of the Mediterranean and died as a result of a fall in Barcelona, Spain, Dec. 18, 1935. Worcester’s paintings sell between $1,500 and $2,500 at auction.
Best known for painstakingly planned and printed images of English and French cathedral interiors, Frederick H. Evans was a friend of F. Holland Day and a member of the Linked Ring, an English society of art photographers. His work is a bridge between the British Pictorialist photographers and the Photo-Secession. Evans began his career as a bookseller but retired from that to become a full-time photographer in 1898, when he adopted the platinotype technique for his photography. Platinotype images have an extensive and subtle tonal range and are nonglossy-images with better resistance to deterioration than other methods available at the time. Almost as soon as he began, however, the cost of platinum – and consequently, the cost of platinum paper for his images – began to rise. Because of this cost and because he was reluctant to adopt alternate methodologies, Evans retired from photography altogether by 1915.
Evans’ ideal of straightforward, “perfect” photographic rendering – unretouched or modified in any way – was an ideal well-suited to the architectural foci of his work; the ancient, historic, ornate cathedrals, cloisters and other buildings of the English and French countryside. This perfectionism, along with his tendency to exhibit and write about his work frequently, earned for him international respect and much imitation. He ultimately became regarded as perhaps the finest architectural photographer of his or any era – though some professionals privately felt that the Evans’ philosophy favoring extremely literal images was restrictive of the creative expression rapidly becoming available within the growing technology of the photographic field. Evans was also an able photographer of landscapes and portraits, and among the many notable friends and acquaintances he photographed was George Bernard Shaw, with whom he also often corresponded.
The ArtFaire.us Works On Paper ~ Holiday Auction will be held Friday, Nov. 29, starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
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