Paintbrushes in a Pitcher - Still Life Etching by Don Weygandt (#20/150)

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Paintbrushes in a Pitcher - Still Life Etching by Don Weygandt (#20/150)

Elegant lithograph of a pitcher holding paintbrushes by … Read more Paintbrushes in a Pitcher - Still Life Etching by Don Weygandt (#20/150)

Elegant lithograph of a pitcher holding paintbrushes by Don Weygandt (American, 1926-2018). This piece has a deceptive simplicity - it is carefully crafted to be balanced, with just the right amount of detail. Several brushes are placed in a pitcher, which has a cherry blossom pattern. Water vessels are a common theme for Weygandt.

Numbered and initialed along the bottom edge: 20/150 DW
Presented in a gold colored frame with a light grey mat.
Frame size: 16.5"H x 12.5W
Print size: 6.5"H x 9"W

Don Weygandt (American, 1926-2018) was a painter and printmaker, originally from Belleville, Illinois. Completing his M.F.A. at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Weygandt became friends with Richard Diebenkorn who was then teaching at Urbana. He later moved to California and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1960s along with Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, and Frank Lobdell. Though Weygandt associated with members of the Bay Area Figurative School, his approach to figurative painting had been established prior to the development of these friendships. A professor at University of California, Santa Cruz for 25 years, Weygandt was a visiting artist at Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Iowa.

Excerpts from catalogue essay by Norman Locks, Art Department Chair at UC Santa Cruz

"Don's prints and paintings appear to be traditional, but they are not. We find them to be beautiful, but there is an underlying tension. There is equilibrium, but we are off balance. They appear to be simple, but we can't figure them out. And if we look closely, they don't look like anything we have seen."

An excerpt from an oral history at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Douglas McClellan (artist) and founding art professor) about Don Weygandt:

McClellan: Well, to watch Don critique a painting is almost like watching a mime. He’s in it. He’s in the painting. He’s doing this. He’s doing that. Students
responded to the tactility of it all, whereas I would tie it to some of their painting and, you know, go off here and off there and off there. But we agreed with each
other very much on most everything.

[An Artist with Shoes On: An Oral History of Founding UC Santa Cruz Professor of Art Douglas McClellan;
Author
Reti, Irene H.
Publication Date
2014-12-19

"(The paintings are) visual experiences rather than narrative communications; they are neither about the namable nor necessarily about the objects they include. They are about the experience of painting, the experience of looking, the experience of discovery and learning, and about creating within a visual language...The paintings don't "say" anything, but they are real experience--the real experience in and of the painting as well as of the ephemeral realities of life."

"Don doesn't need much to begin a print or painting--a pot against a drape, a little light to clarify the form, color, and pattern to create the space. A minor relationship, gesture, or in the case of the pots, the clarity of a single form around which to build, is enough. The event is the process of painting and in the end the event is the painting. The process is a game of chess, with objects, light, and color, the pieces moved according to both prescribed and invented movements, or notation, to create a sensation."

"He continues to seek the simplicity and essential form of objects or spatial relationships, yet he can't resist the challenge of complication, stepping in, marking with precision to challenge form, wreak havoc, and break comfort. Once the possibility of stopping is past, the painting will evolve until he has wrestled the canvas to discover something new, to create the rawness and openness in the end. This is most apparent in the recent paintings. And in the end, colors clash without apology; form is found with an unstable ground. The subject, space, become illusive and the nature of the objects becomes both heightened and inconsequential in the discovery of 'the moment of form'." See less