Resume

Bob Graham was born in Texas.  After college, Graham traveled north to Provincetown, Massachusetts where he studied with the famous Impressionist painter Henry Hensche at the Cape School.  Hensche was the student of Charles Webster Hawthorne, himself the student of William Merritt Chase.  . Hensche gave Graham the city of New Orleans to teach his methodology for seeing and depicting the phenomenon of light.

Graham taught courses in painting “relative color” to students in City Park and Audubon Park in New Orleans. These lessons incorporated a live model and were conducted in the open air.  Knowledge of relative color allows the artist to capture the sunlight better in both studies and finished studio works. In this methodology, the artist learns to compare colors instead of seeing them one at a time. The object of studying oil painting outdoors is to learn how to show the light in a painting using the limit of opaque pigments.

 

Bob has garnered peer approval by winning Best of Show in: The American Artists Professional Grand International Exhibition, the Salmagundi Open, and the Knickerbocker Show all in New York City.  He has many portraits hanging in New Orleans including Alton Ochsner Sr., Collins Diboll, Jo Ann Weinberger, and The Saints Hall of Fame at the Superdome.

His impressions of Mardi Gras parades were published by Pelican Publishing in 2015. These images have evolved to become unique contributions to the heritage of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

 

“I was fortunate as a young man in 1970 to find a teacher who understood and could teach his students how to perceive the relationships of color in a scene. Learning to see relationships between colors required the student to paint with a palette knife and continue to add colors to their study until it had a look of light.

 

Oil paints are made of permanent pigments and linseed oil. Linseed oil dries very hard and forms a strong bond with the canvas. Oil paintings have the advantage of needing no glass to protect them. They also exhibit the texture of the paint in the brush stroke. Oils can be painted thick or thin. Thin paint enables detailed work, although it reduces the visibility of brushstroke texture.  The plein air artist strives to become adept at getting a substantial amount of thick paint onto the canvas while keeping a high degree of descriptiveness.

 

The main obstacle to overcome in painting sunny scenes is the fact that the scene has both light and shade, but the painting being worked on is either all in light or all in shadow. The contrast in the scene is much greater than the pigment’s ability to represent it. The use of brighter colors makes up, to some degree, for the lack of contrast. This is why the Impressionist palette is much brighter than other palettes. The Impressionists of the twenty-first century have rediscovered the beautiful world of the original Impressionists of the 1800’s.”

 

Artist’s Statement:

 Perception is the key to creating art. It is also the key to appreciating it. Impressionism in the late 1900’s brought a new type of perception to the forefront of the world of art. It brought a new type of subject, a new way of painting, and a new way of seeing. Initially overlooked, it was later recognized as a pinnacle of Western Art.  New subjects included landscapes and social scenes made rapidly on location. Brushstrokes blend at a distance to create a more convincing illusion than precise modeling techniques.   And most importantly they introduced a novel approach to perception of color, relative color. The late 1800s saw major breakthroughs in physics, philosophy, and art regarding relationships.  In physics, relativity shows that time and space are interconnected.   Within the field of philosophy, Existentialist scholars have asserted that individuals ought to be interpreted in relation to their surrounding environment.   Impressionist artists demonstrated that correct color perception involves observing and painting multiple colors at once, rather than individually.

 Bob Graham

Graham has garnered peer approval by winning ‘Best of Show’ in: The American Artists Professional League Exhibition, the Salmagundi Open, and the Knickerbocker Show all in New York City.  His pastel painting “Pandora” won the highest award in The American Realism Competition in Parkersburg, W. Virginia.

He has many portraits hanging in New Orleans including Alton Ochsner Sr., Collins Diboll, John LaBorde, Mary Feitel, and The Saints Hall of Fame at the Superdome.

His impressions of Mardi Gras parades were published by Pelican Publishing in 2015. These images have evolved to become unique contributions to the heritage of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

 

 

The Impressionists:

 Edmond Duranty, “La Nouvelle Peinture”, 1876

 “In the matter of coloring they have made a real discovery for which no precedent is to be found anywhere, neither in the Dutch masters, not in the bright tones of fresco painting, nor in the light tonalities of the eighteenth century. They have applied themselves to that free and subtle interplay of colors which results from the observation of the most delicate values in contrasting or interpenetrating tones. The peculiar discovery of these artists consists in having recognized that tones are discolored by intense light, that sunlight reflected by objects tends by its very brightness, to reduce them to that light-unity which merges its seven prismatic rays into a single colorless flash, which is light itself. From intuition to intuition, they have gradually been led to break down sunshine into its rays and elements, and to recompose its unity by the overall harmony of the iridescences which they spread over their canvases.”