15"x18", oil on panel
Graydon Parrish (born April 3, 1970) is a realist painter living in Austin, Texas. He is both trained in and an exponent of the atelier method which emphasizes classical painting techniques.
Graydon Parrish (born April 3, 1970) is a realist painter living in Austin, Texas. He is both trained in and an exponent of the atelier method which emphasizes classical painting techniques.
Graydon Parrish was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but spent the majority of his childhood in East Texas. His parents, collectors of American and European nineteenth-century art, exposed him to painting at a young age and influenced his choice to pursue an academic figurative style.
Parrish attended the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and graduated in 1988. Unable to find further classical art training, he learned of the newly formed New York Academy of Art in the summer of that year created by Andy Warhol and Stuart Pivar. [1] There, Parrish joined other students who have become leading figures in the classical art revival, including Jacob Collins, founder of the Grand Central Academy of Art where Parrish is now an instructor. [2] At the New York Academy, Parrish met his mentor Michael Aviano, a student himself of illustrator and muralist Frank J. Reilly. Since then Parrish has remodeled color theories by Albert Munsell and Josef Albers to fit traditional painting methods. In some ways, he and his colleagues share the reformist attitude of the Stuckist movement in England [3] and are likewise often at odds with mainstream critical taste. [4]
After graduating from the New York Academy with an MFA in painting, [5] Parrish went on to study at Amherst College, earning an additional B.A. and majoring in independent studies. His large thesis painting, Remorse, Despondence and the Acceptance of an Early Death, an allegory of the early AIDS epidemic, helped earn Parrish summa cum laude honors and was purchased by the trustees for the Mead Art Museum. [6] Parrish went on to show both at Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York and Galerie Benamou in Paris, where he still exhibits. His subjects were mainly allegories and nudes. In 2001, the Tyler Museum of Art purchased "Victory", a nude inspired by the antique bronze "An Athlete Crowning Himself" in the J. Paul Getty Museum. [7] Parrish's nudes are also informed by his research in French 19th-century art. With Gerald M. Ackerman, a leading expert in the field, he has revised and annotated the Cours de Dessins by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Charles Bargue. [8]
In 2002, Douglas Hyland, the director of the New Britain Museum of American Art, approached Parrish to create an allegorical tribute to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The completed painting, The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy , is over 18 feet long and is one of the largest realist paintings ever created in America. It has become somewhat controversial, both for its unabashedly academic style inspired by Jacques-Louis David and William Bouguereau and for its highly symbolic content, said to express the cycle of denial and tragedy. [9] It has been compared and contrasted with Pablo Picasso's Guernica and Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa , both also comments on catastrophes. [10] Today it hangs in the Chase Wing of the New Britain Museum of Art next to figurative pieces by Julie Heffernan and Chuck Close. It has become a regular destination and subject of debate for New England residents. [11]
From 1994 to 2008 Parrish maintained a studio in Amherst, Massachusetts, sharing a home with Amherst College professor Donald S. Pitkin, anthropologist and author of The House that Giacomo Built: History of an Italian Family 1898-1978. Pitkin's ideas of community and family influenced Parrish's subsequent works, including his current Freedom Red project, a synthesis of art and activism which donates proceeds to HIV/AIDS charities. [12] In 2008, he relocated to Austin, Texas to be near his family, teach, and contribute to the growing independent Austin art scene, including Arthouse at the Jones Center, the Blanton Museum of Art and the Austin Museum of Art.
Graydon Parrish's style is classical realism. [13] [14] Parrish counts among his contemporary influences realist painters Odd Nerdrum, Jacob Collins, Steven Assael, Christopher Pugliese and Daniel Sprick, as well as Bridget Riley.
Parrish's collectors include Christopher Forbes, Michael Huffington, Diane Sawyer, Robert and Chris Emmons, Rita and David Traff, Vernon and Amy Faulconer, Therèse Garner, Lloyd and Renée Greif, and Paul and Melinda Sullivan. His public collections include the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Austin Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Texas, the Tyler Museum of Art in Tyler, Texas, and the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut.[ citation needed ]
Academic art, or academicism or academism, is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which was practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the art that followed these two movements in the attempt to synthesize both of their styles, and which is best reflected by the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Thomas Couture, and Hans Makart. In this context it is often called "academism," "academicism," "art pompier" (pejoratively), and "eclecticism," and sometimes linked with "historicism" and "syncretism." Academic art is closely related to Beaux-Arts architecture, which developed in the same place and holds to a similar classicizing ideal.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. In his realistic genre paintings, he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body. During his life, he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work. As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde. By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes. In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work. He finished 822 known paintings, but the whereabouts of many are still unknown.
A figure painting is a work of fine art in any of the painting media with the primary subject being the human figure, whether clothed or nude. Figure painting may also refer to the activity of creating such a work. The human figure has been one of the constant subjects of art since the first stone age cave paintings, and has been reinterpreted in various styles throughout history.
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. His career spanned fifty years and was wildly successful: the National Museum of American Illustration deemed his painting Daybreak (1922) to be the most successful art print of the 20th century.
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period. He was also a teacher with a long list of students.
Pollice verso or verso pollice is a Latin phrase, meaning "with a turned thumb", that is used in the context of gladiatorial combat. It refers to a hand gesture or thumb signal used by Ancient Roman crowds to pass judgment on a defeated gladiator.
The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the largest university art museums in the U.S. with 189,340 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions, permanent collection galleries, storage, administrative offices, classrooms, a print study room, an auditorium, shop, and cafe. The Blanton's permanent collection consists of more than 21,000 works, with significant holdings of modern and contemporary art, Latin American art, Old Master paintings, and prints and drawings from Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
The Stuckism art movement was started in London in 1999 to promote figurative painting and oppose conceptual art. This was mentioned in the United States media, but the first Stuckist presence in US was not until the following year, when former installation artist, Susan Constanse, founded a Pittsburgh chapter.
Charles Bargue was a French painter and lithographer noted for devising an influential drawing course.
Rackstraw Downes is a British-born realist painter and author. His oil paintings are notable for their meticulous detail accumulated during months of plein-air sessions, depictions of industry and the environment, and elongated compositions with complex perspective.
The New Britain Museum of American Art is an art museum in New Britain, Connecticut. Founded in 1903, it is the first museum in the country dedicated to American art.
Classical Realism is an artistic movement in the late-20th and early 21st century in which drawing and painting place a high value upon skill and beauty, combining elements of 19th-century neoclassicism and realism.
Jacob Collins is an American realist painter working in New York City. He is a leading figure of the contemporary classical art revival.
The Art Renewal Center (ARC) is a non-profit, educational organization, which hosts an online museum dedicated to realist art. The ARC was founded by New Jersey businessman, author, and art collector Fred Ross.
The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy is a painting by Graydon Parrish.
The Haggin Museum is an art museum and local history museum in Stockton, San Joaquin County, California, located in the city's Victory Park. The museum opened in 1931. Its art collection includes works by European painters Jean Béraud, Rosa Bonheur, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, landscapes by French artists of the Barbizon school, and sculptures by René de Saint-Marceaux, Alfred Barye, and Auguste Rodin. The museum also features a number of works by Hudson River School and California landscape painters, including the largest collection of Albert Bierstadt works in the region, and in 2017 dedicated a gallery to display the largest public collection of original artworks by J. C. Leyendecker.
Première rêverie, also known in English as Whisperings of Love, is a painting by nineteenth-century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The work was completed in 1889 and is held at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Robert Isaacson was a collector, scholar, and art dealer eulogized upon his death as "the Berenson of nineteenth century academic studies."
The Slave Market is an 1866 painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. It depicts an unspecific Middle Eastern or North African setting where a man inspects the teeth of a nude, female slave.
Edith Mitchill Prellwitz (1865–1944) was an American artist who is known for Impressionist and Tonalist studies of Peconic Bay, New York, as well as for figurative paintings with literary or mythical subjects.
