Jon Imber

Last updated

Jon Imber (1950–2014) was an American artist.

Known for his plein air landscape paintings, [1] Imber experimented with different influences, styles, and subject matter all his life. [2] Early in his career, he was a figurative painter, but he later fully embraced landscapes and abstraction. [3] The former director of the Danforth Museum called him one of the most important painters of his generation and placed him in the lineage of Boston Expressionists. [4]

Contents

Painting

Imber found early success with figurative paintings that have since been described as “hulking, volumetric figures with tiny strokes... a strange, striking blend of Romanesque art and blocky, cartoonish figures executed with brushy, fastidious mark-making akin to Van Gogh’s.” [5]

Rather than resting on the success of his figurative style, Imber challenged himself and tackled new material and new subject matter. His focus shifted to portraits, then to large, studio landscapes, then to figures in landscapes, then to plein air landscapes, and finally to landscapes on the edge of abstraction. Throughout these changes he maintained a unique style of gestural brush strokes and an intimate sense of knowing his subject that goes beyond observation. [6]

Reviewing a 2013 career survey of Imber's work, the art critic Sebastian Smee said, “Life, in Imber’s paintings, unfurls with wayward force, like a thick, flicked rope. It takes on vital cadences. It laughs at itself, too." [2]

Influences

Imber studied with Philip Guston at Boston University [7] [5] and he often cited Willem de Kooning as one of his influences. [8] Others have noted that Marsden Hartley, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Max Beckmann were among his influences. [9] [10]

Museums and collections

Imber's paintings are held in numerous collections and museums around the U.S., including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, the Farnsworth Museum, the Danforth Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Davis Museum at Wellesley, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis. [11] He was the subject of a 2014 retrospective at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College in New York. [12] [1]

Imber was also the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Massachusetts Artists fellowship, an AVA award, an Engelhard Foundation award, the National Academy Museum's Altman Award, Boston University's Distinguished Alumni Award, two grants from the Massachusetts State Arts Lottery, and a Ballinglen Arts Foundation fellowship. [13] His work has been included in many publications including Paintings of Maine: A New Selection by Carl Little and Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism As Alternative Modernism by Judith Bookbinder.

Biography

Education and career

Imber was born in Baldwin, New York in 1950. He received his BFA from Cornell in 1972 and received his MFA from Boston University in 1977. [13] Imber later taught at Harvard for 26 years and also taught for many years at the Rhode Island School of Design. [9] [1] [14] He lived in Somerville, Massachusetts and Stonington, Maine. He was married to artist Jill Hoy. [15]

ALS

In 2012, Imber was diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. [7] After losing the ability to use his dominant right hand, he taught himself to paint with his left hand. [16] When the muscles in both arms began to fail, he began painting with a brush attached to one of the fingers of his left hand. He also experimented with painting using a brush attached to a metal brace on his forehead. [7] Despite the physical limitations caused by ALS, he was a prolific painter until his death. [17]

Imber was the subject of the feature-length documentary titled Imber’s Left Hand , released in 2014, directed by Richard Kane. [18] [19] [20]

Death

Imber died in Somerville, Massachusetts in 2014. [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

Ernest L. Ipsen (1869-1951) was an American painter specializing in portraiture. He painted hundreds of portraits commissioned by institutions of government, education, religion, and commerce who wanted to commemorate their associates. His subjects include architect Cass Gilbert, General Robert E. Lee, statesman Elihu Root, publisher George Arthur Plimpton, actor Otis Skinner, politician Edith Nourse Rogers, and Chief Justice William Howard Taft. His portrait of Maurice Francis Egan, Minister to Denmark under three U.S. presidents, was presented to the King and Queen of Denmark. He also painted landscapes and seascapes, particularly along the New England coast.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Weston Benson</span> American painter

Frank Weston Benson, frequently referred to as Frank W. Benson, was an American artist from Salem, Massachusetts known for his Realistic portraits, American Impressionist paintings, watercolors and etchings. He began his career painting portraits of distinguished families and murals for the Library of Congress. Some of his best known paintings depict his daughters outdoors at Benson's summer home, Wooster Farm, on the island of North Haven, Maine. He also produced numerous oil, wash and watercolor paintings and etchings of wildfowl and landscapes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Katz</span> American artist (born 1927)

Alex Katz is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Since 1951, Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Polonsky</span> American painter

Arthur Polonsky was a figurative painter, draughtsman and educator, known for his explorations of light, water, flight and similarly lyrical motifs that, in esoteric and unsettling ways, alluded to myth, fantasy, music, the Bible, or the poetry of Symbolist and Modernist poets like Rimbaud and Rilke. "The dialogue between color, texture and subject is always alive" the late artist Barbara Swan Fink says of his work. His drawings, in particular, "have the excitement of a direct response to a subject, a daring use of line or tone, a sense of charged intensity. His portrait drawings not only have likeness but express a mood that is part artist, part model.

Anne Neely is a painter based in Boston, Massachusetts, and Maine. She paints abstract paintings with an emphasis on landscapes and nature. She uses paint to explore imagined landscapes.

John Appleton Brown was an American landscape painter working largely in pastels and oils, born in West Newbury, Massachusetts. He showed talent at an early age and studied under Emile Lambinet in France. For many years he worked and showed in Boston, summering in his native northeastern Massachusetts and painting his best known lyrical landscapes there. In 1891 he and his wife, noted artist Agnes Augusta Bartlett Brown, moved to New York City, where he died on January 18, 1902.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Esther Geller</span> American painter

Esther Geller was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s. She was one of the foremost authorities on encaustic painting techniques.

Susanna J. Coffey is an American artist and educator. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City. She was elected a member the National Academy of Design in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynne Mapp Drexler</span>

Lynne Mapp Drexler was an American abstract and representational artist, painter and photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Figurative Expressionism</span> American art movement

American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it is human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Aronson</span> American painter (1923–2015)

David Aronson was a painter and Professor of Art at Boston University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Aronson</span> American painter

Ben Aronson is an American painter living in Massachusetts. His work is represented by Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, and Alpha Gallery in Boston.

Henry Edison McDaniel was a watercolor artist of landscapes, trout and salmon fishing scenes.

David Campbell is an American realist painter, poet, and faculty member at the Maine College of Art. Many of his oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings feature urban and industrial scenes rendered meticulously over the course of months and even years of plein-air sessions, deftly imbuing quotidian subjects with abstract significance. A large portion of Campbell's work captures the vibrancy and intricacy of urban and suburban vistas, especially around his former residence in Somerville, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Stevovich</span> American painter

Andrew Stevovich is an American painter. He is best known for oil paintings and pastels that combine abstract formalities with a figurative narrative. He has also produced lithographs, etchings, and wood-block prints.

Boston Expressionism is an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that Boston Figurative Expressionism is sometimes used as an alternate term to distinguish it from abstract expressionism, with which it overlapped.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Swan</span> American painter

Barbara Swan (1922–2003), also known by her married name, Barbara Swan Fink, was an American painter, illustrator, and lithographer. Her early work is associated with the Boston Expressionist school; later she became known for her still-life paintings in which light is refracted through glass and water, and for her portraits. She is also known for her collaboration with the poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, and for her archived correspondence with various artists and writers.

Sedrick Ervin Huckaby (1975) is an American artist known for his use of thick, impasto paint to create murals that evoke traditional quilts and his production of large portraits that represent his personal history through images of family members and neighbors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliot O'Hara</span> American painter

Eliot O'Hara was an American artist and educator known for his masterful watercolors, especially his impressionistic landscapes. The Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine has over 120 of his watercolors representing all aspects of his work. His paintings are in the collections of many museums in the USA and have been the subject of exhibitions throughout the United States. He was an influential educator through his nearly 40 years of teaching, writing, and film making.

David Berger (artist) 

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Jon Imber and Jill Hoy: Finding Bedrock". 14 January 2014.
  2. 1 2 "With painter Jon Imber, nimble shifts capture life, in all its forms – The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe .
  3. ↑ "Jon Imber: Tangled Up in Hues". 29 June 2014.
  4. ↑ http://www.gwatsongallery.com/jon-imber.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  5. 1 2 3 "Jon Imber, 63; artist kept painting with exuberance in face of ALS – The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe .
  6. ↑ "Palaemon: A Survey of Paintings by Jon Imber". 20 February 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 "Jon Imber: Creating Art with ALS – The Maine Mag". 25 April 2014.
  8. ↑ "Documentary offers poignant portrait of late Somerville artist Jon Imber – The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe .
  9. 1 2 "In memoriam: Jon Imber (1950–2014)".
  10. ↑ "Jon Imber". Archived from the original on 2015-09-22. Retrieved 2016-08-02.
  11. ↑ "Jon Imber Bio". Alpha Gallery.
  12. ↑ "The Spiral and The Source: Jon Imber's Recent Paintings by Alexander Nemser – BOMB Magazine". bombmagazine.org.
  13. 1 2 "Danforth Art :: Exhibitions :: Jon Imber". www.danforthart.org.
  14. ↑ "Jon Imber Remembered as Attentive Teacher, Energetic Artist – News – The Harvard Crimson". www.thecrimson.com.
  15. ↑ "Painter Jill Hoy captures color, spirit of place – The Ellsworth American". 26 August 2015.
  16. ↑ Gratz, Irwin (31 December 2014). "Remembering Mainers We Lost in 2014".
  17. ↑ "A Rollercoaster Worldview: Jon Imber (1950–2014) – artcritical". 29 April 2014.
  18. ↑ "Imber's Left Hand" – via www.imdb.com.
  19. ↑ Kaplan, Betsy (30 March 2016). "Living Life While Dying of ALS".
  20. ↑ "Film Review: 'Jon Imber's Left Hand' an extraordinary documentary". 30 March 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.