That Wendie Demuth’s Photography Gallery at 77 Rocky Neck is located in the space that once housed the galleries of historically significant painters, Milton Avery and Ward Mann?
Milton Avery was born at Sand Bank, New York, today known as Altmar, on 7 March 1893. After studying for a while at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford under Charles Noel Flagg and at the Art Society School there under Albertus Jones, Avery worked in manufacturing and with an insurance company until 1924. During the early 1920s, Avery spent his summers in Gloucester at Rocky Neck Art Colony, where he met his wife, Sally Michel, also a painter. In 1925, he moved to New York City and married Sally a year later.
He had his first one-man show as early as 1928 at the Opportunity Gallery in New York. The decades that followed saw him show work at numerous exhibitions mounted by New York galleries and American museums. Milton Avery’s preoccupation with French Fauvism and German Expressionism led him to develop a simplified formal idiom distinguished by clarity of line and an expressive palette. Whereas Avery’s early figurative drawings and paintings from the 1930s attest to affinities primarily with the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, by the 1940s he was discernibly close to Henri Matisse.
As the American upholder of Matisse’s colouristic doctrine, Milton Avery developed the French artist’s decorative colour surfaces into subtly toned colour zones, thus breaking the ground for the Colour Field painting of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom were friends of his. Even though his style was close to abstraction, Milton Avery nonetheless clung to representation throughout his entire career. Classical motifs and subject matter in portraits, still lifes and coastal landscapes were his main thematic areas and genres. Prolific as a painter, graphic artist and ceramist, Milton Avery received numerous awards from American art institutions before he died in 1965 although he only really became famous posthumously. Now he is acclaimed as one of the most influential US 20th-century artists.
Ward Mann was born in Detroit on October 3, 1921, Ward Mann was introduced to drawing and painting at the Detroit Institute of Art. Encouraged by his parents and teachers, at age twelve his work was accepted in an open exhibition of the Scarab Club in Detroit.
During WWII, he volunteered and served as a commissioned officer in the US Army Air Corps. After service, he earned his engineering degree from the University of Michigan, College of Engineering. He then had a productive career as an engineer while raising three sons.
His childhood interest in art lingered. In 1963, after relocating to Webster, New York, he made a career change. A self-taught artist, he began achieving recognition in major exhibitions and by various art organizations. In 1974, he joined the historic Rocky Neck Art Colony and opened the Ward Mann Gallery on Rocky Neck at what is now called Madfish Wharf, 77 Rocky Neck. Renowned for his marine paintings, he traveled and painted extensively in Europe, Greece, Norway, South America, and throughout the United States.
His professional, signature memberships include Oil Painters of America (OPA), the Salmagundi Club (SCNYC), the International Society of Marine Painters (ISMP), and many other art organizations. He’s listed in Who’s Who in American Art and in Who’s Who in the East. He died October 13, 2005, in Webster, New York.
Wendie is in the company of some excellent artistic spirit at 77 Rocky Neck, G4. Stop in to see her very unique, Cape Ann and world view photography, and to visit her historically significant space within the Rocky Neck Art Colony.
E.J. Lefavour
www.khanstudiointernational.com
Good Morning Gloucester 