Historical Excerpt – Thomas Moses, “The Brook,” part 4

“At this season of the year there is little bird song to be heard, the scream of the jay, delightful to me for some obscure reason in spite of its harshness is heard now and then. Chickadees are saying their own names over and overs in the pine grove, changing now and then to the whistled minor interval they have taken from the phoebe and improved upon. The blue birds and robins are convening for their long flight and their restless chirping notes express in the same breath both reluctance and eagerness to be gone. Far up above a crow is cawing as he flaps heavily over with a whole dome of the sky for his sounding board. On a dry bough of a nearby tree a woodpecker is drumming, not interrupting but seeming to deepen and intensify the stillness of the woods. Under the songs of leaves, insect and birds, there lives another sound far more tenuous and ethereal to which a trained intensely listening ear can sometimes pierce. That is
 
Little noiseless noise among the leaves
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves – Keats
 
A woodchuck is scurrying along the top of a low stone wall, growling at me, for my intrusion. Of all wild animal life that I meet in the woods, a woodchuck or ground hog is the only one that I am not interested in. They are repulsive to me. I love to hear the chatter of the squirrels, especially when I invade their special domain. I love to lingering the woods until the sun has set, so I can study the wonderful lace effect of the foliage silhouetted against the brilliant sky. Leaving the woods behind and making my way across the fields to the country road to meet the boys, or afoot or horseback, driving their cattle home from the rich pastures, brings one out of his day dream, back to the realism of life that is filled with grief and disappointment in our inability to convey to nature our sketch block and feel satisfied with the result.”

Historical Excerpt – Thomas Moses, “The Brook,” part 3

 

This is a perfect description of how time stands still when you paint out of doors.  The music of the nature around you takes over – especially the trees.

Like most scenic artists, I gained experience in a variety of shops where music played in the background and your mind is occupied by the lyrics when you paint. Classical music was always my my preferred selection as I could listen, solve the world’s problems, and instinctively apply paint to the canvas.  When I thought too hard about what I was painting, I overworked it. I needed to mentally multitask to get the best results – at least that is what I have told myself for years.

After reading another section Moses’ text, however, I remembered teaching plein air painting on our Cambridge property for a few years for community education.  It was so peaceful as we painted in those early spring and fall days, setting up our easels next to the Rum River.

This is one of the few times since moving to the cities in 2015 that I truly miss living the middle of the woods, far away from the concrete and noise of civilization.

“Every other voice was shut away by the voice of the stream as by a closed door, so that I sat in a little solitude of sound. The brook and I were alone, together. By the side of running water my thoughts, if I think at all, are born away on the waves, leaving me with no measure of time. The minutes grown into hours so that when I come to leave I take with me no definitive memories, no deepened wisdom, only a vague sense that I have been happy and nothing could have been added to make it a more perfect day. A thunderstorm in the woods crushes out of recognition all the separate language of the trees sweeping them into a wild confusion of leafy tongues. I find I can distinguish the deep base tone of the pine grow behind me from the whistle of the beeches in front. One can hardly mistake a pine tree at midnight. The wind is imprisoned among its thickest needles and issues from then in a sound always likened to that of ocean surf. In the beech, however, it clashes and rasps its way across flat hard, almost metallic surfaces. The beach is like a beautiful woman with an unpleasant voice. The oak would give little trouble in the darkest night, for the flapping of oak leaves again the twigs is the driest sound in nature.”

 

Our home in Cambridge, MN

Historical Excerpt – Thomas Moses, “The Brook,” part 2

“The Brook” written by Thomas Gibbs Moses (1856-1934), August 1932 at the age of 76 yrs. old.

Here is the second installment:

“The impressionistic painter would be quite justified in attending chiefly to more obvious aspects of the brook scenery, not only because these are all that he can hope to represent, but also because the effects of running water almost infinitely vary as a close examination finds them to be, are composed of a few fundamental forms, the attending pool, slow water, the slide, the rapid, the eddy, the curve, and the full, which is alphabet of the brook in which all their endless literature is written. No two pools are exactly alike and no two eddies or waterfalls. Like my own life the brooks says the same thing over and over without ever representing itself, and I think I could listen to it forever. The brook is the oldest thing we know and the youngest as well. It has no age. It is time racing down forever through the channels of eternity. Waves of the sea and of rivers constantly shift from place to place because they are not controlled by solid bodies of earth or rock, but the ridge and hollows of the brook surface are stable without being rigid. I am always happy near running water, which I discover by always going to the bottom of every little valley where a brook is flowing.

The brook moves in rhythm, like music and poetry and dance, and it recalls these arts that we have devised to express the inexpressible. I know how gladly it would linger in the sunny pool, but I know also that it is drawn downward to the great sea by a deeper fascination. As the day wanes and the lengthening shadows and sunlight was striking upwards among the leaves and from the ripples of the brook I sat in a happy mood as water slipped swiftly by. Upon the current were sailing here a yellow leaf of alder and there a curled gray leaf of willow, and the waves that sustained these tiny skiffs were topaz, amber or maroon, according to how the rocks over which they ran varied in hue or as the sunlight struck them.”

And here are some detail images from a Moses’ painting:

 

 

Historical Excerpt – Thomas Moses, “The Brook,” part 1

I am taking a break from Andrew Geis to share some lovely text from Thomas Gibbs Moses (1856-1934). He was a scenic artist for theatre, opera, world fair exhibits, midway amusement, circus spectacles, fraternal degree productions and other artforms.
 
“The Brook” written by Thomas Gibbs Moses (1856-1934), August 1932 at the age of 76 yrs. old. Moses was a member of the Salmagundi Club (NY, sponsored by R. M. Shurtleff), Chicago Palette and Chisel Club (Chicago), and the Laguna Beach Art Association (California).
I decided to share as the first paragraph just about brought me to tears this evening. I not only sympathized with his personal situation, but a shift of aesthetic in the art world around him.
 
Here is the first installment of his writing:
“For the first time in my life I have succeeded in stealing enough time away from my business to do some real honest painting. One reason that I have had time is because there is no business. In digging out some of my old canvases that I did thirty years ago, which were only in the sketch stage, I find plenty of good material to advance the sketch to picture quality. Too bad that I was not able to do that process of advancement out of doors. I certainly lose a lot of real honest technique that out of doors always gave me. I have been quite fortunate in being able to collect a great many pencil sketches that has given me a lot of subjects, so I am not apt to fake any picture. As I have the truth and a story with each sketch. In giving these old and new canvases a final touch I find I have a great variety of sizes and subjects that ought to fit any one’s purse and wall space. My painting is of the old school, which to me is what I see in nature, my honest impression, which I have been honest in expressing the same – while some of the young artists just starting in the art world are being convinced that the radical modern idea is one big school to follow. I will cling to the Hudson River School of Painting that made George Innes, R. M. Shurtleff, A. H. Wyant, Robert Minor and many more.
There are too many so-called “Moderns” that know very little of the rudiments of art, faulty in drawing and color, they use the term “Modern” and in some galleries they are welcomed as such, and receive good notice from a few critics. My love for the deep forests led me to the Studio of R. M. Shurtleff in New York, whom I considered a wonderful painter of the woods. I was very happy when he consented to take me on as a pupil. When he suggested my joining the famous Salmagundi Club I was doubtful if I could make it. As the picture I gave the club for my initiation fee was sold to one of the club members, this alone placed me in a good position and had I remained in New York instead of coming to Chicago I feel that I would have forged ahead in the higher art, and would have succeeded. I might not have been so successful financially as I have been in Scenic Painting but am sure that I could have gone to nature each summer and made by studies of a little stream… six or seven feet in width, once not more than ten inches deep in most places, flows down before me through a glade of pines, coming out of a clearing just visible through the dark stems above and going down into another. There is a deep shadow, of the peculiarly lustrous and richly colored kind that only pines can throw. The banks on either side are purple with pine needles. The forest brook provides the best possible education for the eye. There is always more to be seen in it than any one has seen. A man may gaze at a small patch of stream until he thinks he has exhausted every trait of motion shape, and hue, then he looks again and finds that he has just begun to spell out its primer. Not that a brook ever tries to hide anything for is nothing more frank and generous in self-revelation, but its carvings are so many and its nuances of color so fine, its endless dance is so full of what looks like pure whim and caprice, that it daunts and finally eludes the most patient skill of the eye. One who has learned to see a brook can see anything.
A painter of the modern schools would represent the brook as simply as possible, noting down first of all the supple bending of the banks and recording the vivid contrasts of gleam and gloom. But he would actually see far more than this, finding between the extreme of shade and shine a whole gamut of lighting of steely and soft translucence, of colors nameless and numberless reflected from the sky and the boughs of striking upwards from the pebbled bed. One begins to see the brook accurately and so to discover the true beauty of running water only when he learns that it is wonderfully varies, that it is scored with minute and even minuter subdivisions that finally go beyond the power of any eye and one seen by the fancy only, by an imagination half poetical and half scientific.
 
I’ll do another installment some other day. There will be about four total.
 
His historical context for his text:
Moses’ painting career spanned from 1873-1934. He primarily worked for Sosman & Landis, a scenic studio in Chicago. However, he often departed from the business in the early years to strike it out on his own or with a few fellow artists to form a studio. From 1900-1904, he worked in New York on Broadway and for Luna Park at Coney Island.
 
My personal reason for sharing: I fell in love with this man’s writing when I first indexed his typed manuscript and scrapbook for Prof. Emeritus C. Lance Brockman in the early 90s. At that same time, I was fortunate enough to receive a Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program Grant to process the Great Western Stage Equipment Company and the Holak Collection (Sosman & Landis and New York Studios) for the University of Minnesota Libraries Performing Arts Archives – both Masonic design collections that are now available online (with the Twin City Scenic Studio and Northwestern Studio collections).
Studying these small Masonic designs (watercolor and gouache paintings), cleaning, processing, and replicating them (large-scale with dry pigments) forever shaped my future. I traced the career of Moses and his artwork, primarily restoring collections that he supervised or painted a few landscapes. At that point I fell in love with his painting for the stage.
 
One of the greatest highlights of my career was discovering some of his personal artifacts left high above the stage at the Fort Scott Scottish Rite in November 2015 – they are now at the Minnesota Masonic Heritage Center, along with his scenery collection painted in 1924. This collection not the best example of scenic art; he was aging and ill, but it is innovative and shows a culmination of experience gained throughout the duration of his career. It also provides great artistic provenance for this significant collection. An overall use of brighter colors mirrors the shifting aesthetics in the scenic art trade.
 
Moses’ writing gives a personal touch to his artwork that is displayed some Scottish Rite theaters. Just like all artists that leave memoirs, you have a sense of who they were, what they loved, and how they lived life. He was a romantic, yearning for more time to paint outside of a studio.
 
Attached are some examples of his fine art and his personal artifacts left onsite in Fort Scott, KS.
Painting from online source
Painting from online source
Painting from online source
Painting from my collection, 1925
Moses’ paint brush from Fort Scott, Kansas
Moses’ paint sweater left on site in Fort Scott, Kansas
Note the petals found in his pocket!
Moses’ paint cap
The charcoal used to draw compositions on the stage drops in Fort Scott, Kansas

Andrew Geis Source Book – Russell Patterson Image

I encountered an image by Russell Patterson in Andrew Geis’ Source Book. Compelled by the image, I decided to see who this artist was and when he worked. He is one fascinating guy! A contemporary of Geis’ and possible colleague in Chicago. They certainly travelled in the same circles!

       

I have included an image of the actual location that he was illustrating (Garnier Opera in Paris) – luckily, I took a similar photo in Paris last summer! Almost like I knew that I would need it…

Russell Patterson (1893-1977) was an American cartoonist, illustrator, costume designer, prop builder, scenic designer, and many other things!

Born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised in Montreal, Patterson moved to Chicago during WWI to become a catalogue illustrator. Early work includes department store designs for Carson Pirie Scott & Company and Marshal Field. Side note: Many free lance scenic artists and studios sought these same store designs as part of their business. Patterson also attended the Art Institute of Chicago – as did most scenic artists at the time. His path would have constantly crossed a variety of scenic artists in Chicago! Another business venture that he was engaged in from 1922-1925 was a mail order art instruction course!

His art deco magazine illustrations helped promote the 1920s “flapper” image – known as the Patterson Girl. Similar to the Gibson Girl, his work really defined the 1920s and 30s fun-loving female in fabulous attire.

In 1925, he moved to New York and worked as an illustrator and designer for the theatre – both costumes and sets. On Broadway, Patterson’s productions included The Gang’s All Here” (Costume Design, 1931), “Ballyhoo of 1932” (Costume designer, director, and scenic designer); “Hold Your Horses” (Costume designer, 1933); “Fools Rush In” (Scenic designer, 1934); “Ziegfield Follies of 1934” (Costume designer); “The Illustrator’s Show” (Curtain design, 1936)“and “George White’s Scandals” (Scenic Design, 1936). For more information about these shows, go to the Broadway Database at https://www.ibdb.com/

From the 1920s through 1950s, Patterson continued to draw for a variety of publications, including Sunday newspaper magazine covers and comic strips. “Mamie,” a Sunday page for United Features Syndicate was one such example. Art historians note that he was one of the key artists who brought the “dumb blond” back into vogue in comic strips with her small waist and long legs (Really?!?! I have to wonder when this character was ever absent from our culture or printed history…). Patterson later became the President of the National Cartoonist Society.

His sporadic visits to Hollywood during the 1930s, involved him in a variety of interesting projects, including the creation of life-like dolls that he called, “Personettes.” These props appeared in the film “Artists and Models,” starring Jack Benny. He also designed Shirley Temple’s wardrobe “Baby, Take a Bow” in 1934 and a whole host of other projects for film.

Frequently traveling from one end of the country to the other, Patterson even judged the Miss America Swimsuit Competition in Atlantic City in 1933 with Gladys Glad (Ziegfield Follies Girl)?!?! He obviously enjoyed the female form…

For more information on Patterson, see “Top Hats and Flappers: The Art of Russell Patterson,” (Fantagraphics, 2006).

I am so glad that I followed my curiosity to see who was behind the signature!

Twin City Scenic Company – Hades Scene

I am back to one of my favorite Masonic scenes – Hell, Hades, Dante, Inferno, or “you name that that favorite underworld scene.”

It is for the 18th degree. Main message for this particular scene– don’t fall prey to temptation or you will suffer great torments. I know it is an extremely simplified version of the degree, but I hate to put up any Masonic image that could possibly make people think “devil worshippers.” They are not.

I have been compiling a North American database of Masonic installations (primarily on Scottish Rite scenery, but also with a smattering of Shrines, Commanderies, Grottos, and Blue Lodge paintings). While cross referencing my list with images that I remember from the U of MN scenery database I stumbled across the following sketches by Twin City Scenic.

I remembered seeing the same composition in Grand Forks. It was rolled up with a shrine cut drop and not in use. Neither of the drops are from the original 1914 Sosman & Landis collection (Chicago, Illinois). They were from the Twin City Scenic Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota

These two renderings are from the Twin City Scenic Company Collection (PA43). Unfortunately, they are not in the same box. M160 is in Box 11 and M161 (one with spatter) is in Box 12.

Again, here is the link for the scenery collection search: http://umedia.lib.umn.edu/scenicsearch

Here are the sketches:

Here is the drop in Grand Forks:

Andrew Geis Source Book – Color Illustrations, part 1

I have returned to Andrew Geis’ designer book. Over the course of their careers, artists carefully clipped and pasted images from magazines and art journals – placing them in binders for future reference and inspiration.
 
Attached is a page from his book with and image that called to Geis at some point.
 
It called to me too this morning.