Charles Harris ( Beni Kosh )

untitled (Reclining Female Nude)

1950

Plum Branches and Flowers watercolor on wove paper, 1985 Signed and dated in pencil lower right corner From the artist's 1985 sketchbook Inspired by O'Sickey's love of Japanese and Chinese art and calligraphy. Provenance: Estate of the artist Condition: Excellent Image/Sheet size: 13 5/8 x 17 inches Joseph B. O’Sickey, Painter 1974 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS The title conferred on him by Plain Dealer art critic Steve Litt in a 1994 article, “the dean of painting in northeast Ohio,” must have pleased Joseph O'Sickey. It was more than 30 years since he had burst onto the local (and national) art scene. O’Sickey was already in his 40s in that spring of 1962 when he had his first one-man show at the Akron Art Museum and was signed by New York’s prestigious Seligmann Galleries, founded in 1888. In the decade and a half that followed, he would have seven one-man shows at Seligmann, which had showed the work of such trailblazing figures as Seurat, Vuilliard, Bonnard, Leger and Picasso, and appear in all of the group shows. O’Sickey took the Best Painting award in the 1962 May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). He and would capture the same honor in back-to-back May Shows in 1964 and ’65, and again in 1967. The remarkable thing, noted the Plain Dealer’s Helen Borsick, was that he accomplished this sweep in a variety of painterly styles, even using that most hackneyed of subjects, flowers. “The subject doesn’t matter,” he told her, “what the artist brings to it is the important thing.” O’Sickey’s garden and landscape paintings were big and bold, eschewing delicate detail in favor of vitality and impact. The great art collector and CMA benefactor Katherine C. White, standing before one of O’Sickey’s vivid garden paintings, compared the sensation to “being pelted with flowers.” Though he might represent an entire blossom with one or two smudged brush strokes or a stem with a simple sweep of green, O’Sickey rejected the moniker of Impressionist—or Pointillist or Abstract painter or Expressionist. “My work,” he said, “is a direct response to the subject. I believe in fervor and poetic metaphor. I try to make each color and shape visible and identifiable within the context of surrounding colors and shapes. A yellow must hold its unique quality from any another yellow or surrounding color, and yet read as a lemon or an object, by inference. It does not require shading or modeling—the poetic evocation is part of the whole.” “The subject,” O’Sickey used to tell his students at Kent State University, where he taught painting from 1964 to 1989, “has to be seen as a whole and the painting has to be structured to be seen as a whole.” He liked to think of it as “a process of controlled rapture.” When, in the 1960s, fond childhood memories drew him to the zoo, he found himself responding to the caged animals in their lonely dignity (or indignity) with sharp-edged, almost silhouette-like forms that evoked Matisse’s paintings and cut-paper assemblages. One observer was left with the impression that the artist had “looked at these animals, past daylight and into dusk when they lose their details in shadow and become pure shapes, with eyes that are seeing the viewer rather than the other way around. This is a world of shape and essence,” wrote Helen Borsick. “All is simplification.” O’Sickey attributed his ability to capture his subjects with just a few strokes—in an almost iconographic way—to a rigorous exercise he had imposed upon himself over a period of several months. Limiting his tools to a large No. 6 bristle brush and black ink, he set himself the task of drawing his pet parakeet and the other small objects in its cage (cuttlebone, feeding dish, tinkling bell) hundreds of times. The exercise gave him “invaluable insights into painting. . . . Because of the crudity of the medium, every part of these drawings had to be an invention and every mark had to have its room and clarity.” Then he began adding one color at a time—“still with the same brush and striving for the same clarity”—and headed off to the zoo where “the world opened up to me. I learned how little it took to express the subject.” Born in Detroit at the close of the First World War, O’Sickey grew up in St. Stanislaus parish near East 65th and Fleet on Cleveland’s southeast side. (The apostrophe was inserted into the family’s proud Polish name by a clerk at Ellis Island.) An early interest in drawing and painting may have been kindled by the presence on the walls of Charles Dickens Elementary School, one of only three grade schools in the district with a special focus on the arts, of masterful watercolors by such Cleveland masters as Paul Travis, Frank N. Wilcox and Bill Coombes. As a youngster O’Sickey took drawing classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and he and his brother spent hours copying famous paintings; while a student at East Tech High School in the mid-’30s, he attended free evening classes in life drawing with Travis and Ralph Stoll at the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Institute, and Saturday classes at the Cleveland School (later the Cleveland Institute) of Art, where he earned his degree in 1940 under the tutelage of Travis, Stoll and such other legendary figures as Henry Keller, Carl Gaertner, William Eastman, Kenneth Bates...

Created in 2017 this series, Baggage Claim, speaks to the symbolic emotional weight one accumulates through life and how the accumulations weigh down the spirit. The artist used handbags...

Homage to Morandi Watercolor, c. 1990 Signed lower right: Sloane An important exhibition size watercolor by the artist. Acquired by the Cleveland Clinic, de-accessed in 2021 Conditio...

Signed "Rhonda V" in memory of the artist's mother From the series: Baggage Claim, inspired by the death of the artist's mother. The reference to "Baggage" is symbolic to all the emotion and hurt one accumulates through life and how the accumulations weights down on the spirit. Watercolor on Yupo paper...

Trompe-l'Oeil Study Watercolor on heavy wove paper, 1943 Signed with the artists initials, lower center of image; Dated 1943, lower center of image Provenance: Swann Galleries, 2007, realized $2,640 Condition: Excellent. Fresh colors. Framed with conservation glass. Sheet: 14 3/4 x 11 1/4" Frame size: 20 3/4 x 17 Berman brothers (painters) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Eugene Berman in Italy in the 1960s Eugène Berman (Russian: Евгений Густавович Берман; 4 November 1899, Saint Petersburg, Russia – 14 December 1972, Rome) and his brother Leonid Berman...

Surrealist landscape with skull and red daisy Watercolor on paper, 1960-1970 Unsigned Stamped with the artist's estate stamp verso (see photo) Provenance: Estate of the artist Refere...

Jewel Heads in Darkness [2021] Original Flowers Gouache, watercolour ink and gesso. Image size: H:53 cm x W:64 cm Paper Size: H:56 cm x W:67.5 cm x D:0.01cm Sold Unframed Please note that insitu images are purely an indication of how a piece may look 'Jewel Heads in Darkness' is an original painting by Jo Haran. "I wanted to try and capture the frailty of anemones nestled in darkness. I used jewel colours....strong pink, yellow, hints of ultramarine and neon green as a contrast to the moody foliage backdrop." 'There are always flowers for those who want to see them" - Henri Matisse. "I have been painting flowers for over 20 years as an artist and as a senior textile designer selling prints to clients internationally including Valentino, Leonard, Paul and Joe and high street brands such as Topshop and Marks and Spencer...

In her 1980s series of 'Wasserzeichnungen' (Water Drawings), Heidi Bucher used gestural marks in gouache on paper to create what can be described as "wate...

In her 1980s series of 'Wasserzeichnungen' (Water Drawings), Heidi Bucher used gestural marks in gouache on paper to create what can be described as "wate...

In her 1980s series of 'Wasserzeichnungen' (Water Drawings), Heidi Bucher used gestural marks in gouache on paper to create what can be described as "wate...

A small purple vase floats on a dreamy background of pale blues fading into a warm beige. The artist achieves a remarkable delicate quality by multip...

In her 1980s series of 'Wasserzeichnungen' (Water Drawings), Heidi Bucher used gestural marks in gouache on paper to create what can be described as "wate...