Artists Of Cape Ann

Historical account of prominent artists from Cape Ann.

The maritime history of Cape Ann, on the northern coast of Massachusetts, is filled with stories of heroism, adventure, and human endeavor. The lighthouses and lifesaving stations surrounding Cape Ann since the late 18th century have served to protect and safeguard the area's mariners and major industries. Fishing, shipbuilding, and granite quarrying businesses all flourished under their watchful eyes. They provided artists with spectacular subject matter and attracted tourists from around the world to visit them. This book highlights the heroism and dedication of the lighthouse keepers and lifesaving surfmen who served. Cape Ann is famous for being the home of America's oldest seaport in Gloucester and America's most painted building, Motif No. 1, in Rockport.

Dust jacket notes: "Vibrant, fresh, immediate! The direct oil painting technique is an intense reaction to nature, a race with time to capture the color, the light and shadow, the design and the spirit of a subject in a few short hours. And now, Emile Gruppe - master of the direct oil painting technique - shows how you can use the broad strokes and lively colors of this spontaneous approach to infuse your own paintings with vitality, vigor, and on-the-spot freshness. A firm believer in using the best materials for the best results, Gruppe begins with a quick review of his favorite brushes, colors, easels, and painting surfaces. Next, he covers the basics of good design, what to look for and how to orchestrate what you see: masses, lines, values, and relationships. Turning to color, a fundamental element of his painting technique, Gruppe discusses complements, color harmony, color vibration, local color, reflected color, and using color to create atmospheric perspective. He explains how color appears on various kinds of days - foggy, clear, cloudy - and under different lighting conditions - front lighting, backlighting, sidelighting. In subsequent chapters, the author focuses on composing seascapes and landscapes; he explains how to paint rocks, ocean, lighthouses, boats, piers, pilings, roads, trees, streams, snow, mountains, valleys. Then, in full-color step-by-step demonstrations, the author shows how he captures a subject in his unique, exuberant, on-the-spot style.

A fresh look at one of America’s best-known and beloved artists at a pivotal but little-known moment in his life that profoundly shaped both his art and career. Edward Hopper & Cape Ann tells the largely ignored but significant origin story of Edward Hopper’s years in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts—a period and place that imbued Hopper’s paintings with a clarity and purpose that had eluded his earlier work. This volume focuses on summers Hopper spent there in the 1920s, starting in 1923, when he first embraced watercolor during outdoor painting excursions on Cape Ann and discovered one of his favorite subjects: houses and vernacular architecture. The success of Hopper’s Gloucester watercolors transformed his work in all media and set the stage for his monumental career. Accompanying a major retrospective at the Cape Ann Museum, including an unprecedented loan of twenty-eight works from the Whitney Museum of American Art, this highly readable and beautifully illustrated volume reveals in great depth the lesser-known story about the influence of a young painter, Josephine Nivison, who became not only Hopper’s wife but also the most trusted force underlying his artistic confidence. Here she is recast as principal producer of Hopper’s distinctive style and his “brand” visionary from the time of their courtship until his death in 1967.

Throughout his life Peters depicted the ordinary places and people of America. From Rochester to Rockport, Peters made an amazingly coherent group of fascinating, masterful American pictures.