Oil on Panel

Al Gury’s Latest work will be available for viewing at FAN Gallery in Old City Philadelphia until Late February or Early March.

Please contact the gallery for the official time and dates, for they might be extended.

221 ARCH STREET PHILADELPHIA PA 19106 : (215) 922 5155

My artist friend and mentor, Eleanor Arnett, once told me that really good art was neither male nor female-it was just good.

She had been born during the reign of Queen Victoria, educated in the Edwardian era, came of age during WWI, and painted ferociously until her death in 1985. Her career as a painter had spanned nearly the whole 20^th century.

It was from Eleanor that I began to see and hear what life and education had been for a woman artist. She also taught me a history of women artist ancestors and role models like Violet Oakley, Alice Kent Stoddard and Ethel Ashton. I learned that there was a world of pioneer women painters that predated the feminist art of the 1960’s and the Guerilla Girls.

These women and their stories, in the words of Carl Davis, Director of David David Gallery in Philadelphia were “for too many years way understated, undervalued and underestimated”.

While I was being educated in the formal studies of painting and drawing in school, she told me stories of the early years of the twentieth century and the struggles she had to become and remain an artist.

Landscape Oil Painting by Artist Al Gury

Many of the struggles went with the turf of being an artist of any kind and any gender, but some were particular to her as a woman, a woman with a strong will. She had flaming red hair, a sharp and cutting sense of humor and a running ability that out did any of the boys her age. Eleanor was in for a wild ride.

She told me of the dances she was expected to attend where a young woman’s chief duty was to attract a potential husband. If you wanted to go to college or peruse a career, you had two options: to play dumb and be charming, or give up the idea of marriage and family. To want to be an artist meant not only running the gauntlet of the art world, but also being disapproved of by your family and friends for choosing an impractical and grubby way of life for a lady.

Violet Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jesse Wilcox Smith, dubbed the Red Rose Girls by the Illustrator Howard Pyle, were examples of women engaged in this struggle. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, they came under the tutelage of Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute, now Drexel University. Pyle gave great encouragement to his women students. Not all of the male instructors were supportive. Carl David tells of the painter William Merrit Chase pulling a work of his student Martha Walter from an exhibition when the painting might seemingly overshadow his own. Chase later apologized to Walter by doing her portrait. Oakley, Shippen and Smith, now famous illustrators and painters, remained artists the best way they could, by sharing a house together and giving up the idea of marriage and family.

Following much the same path and making similar difficult choices was Cecilia Beaux. This renowned portrait painter was the first woman faculty member at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Pursuing her path with great flair and toughness, Beaux built a career equal to her contemporaries and colleagues William Merrit Chase and Thomas Anshutz.

Lynn Marsden-Atlass, Senior Curator at the Pennsylvania Academy Museum, speaks of Cecilia Beaux as a “pioneer female professor”, and a “great inspiration to subsequent generations of artists”.

A famous gilded age photo of Beaux shows her in a grand white Edwardian dress and hat walking her dogs in collars and leashes. It just so happens that the “dogs” are two handsome young men in equally elegant white suits.

During WWI, Eleanor joined the “camouflage corps”. Painting green and brown splotches on canvas was a way for women artists to be involved on the home front.

After a year of solid study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Eleanor fled the still very 19^th century art world of East Coast America to study with Hans Hoffman in Munich. It was here that she found the freedom of invention and the flow between nature and abstraction that became her life long inspiration.

Back home in Philadelphia, women artists had gathered together in other groups like the Red Rose Girls. The Philadelphia 10, who worked and exhibited together from 1917-1945, included such well-known landscape painters as Fern Coppedge and Isabel Fenton.

The education of women in the arts is a spotty and mysterious thing until the 20^th century. The general restrictions placed on women in the culture applied especially to the arts.

Few women are recorded prior to the 16^th century in Europe, and only in the 19^th century do we see a great number of practicing women artists.

The cultural context of education for women, and their roles in society in general, sheds much light on the development of women artists and their education.

Rare women working as book illuminators, goldsmiths, icon painters and embroideries prior to the 16^th century were largely trained at home by their fathers, brothers and husbands. These women assisted in and sometimes ran workshops and small businesses. Nuns were often trained in book illumination and other fine painting and decoration.

The fashion of sending wealthy girls to convents for their education gave rise to the convention of well-educated young ladies being trained in drawing and watercolor that continued well through the 19^th century.

This tradition is largely responsible for the stereotype of women being dilettantes in the arts.

With the opening of the formal Academies in the 16^th century, we hear of an individual woman now and then being admitted to these male enclaves of knowledge and debate. The emergence of women as professional artists comes during this time.

Sofonisba Anguissola, having been trained by her father was considered to be one of the finest painters of her era. In 1616, Artemisia Gentileschi was the first woman to be admitted to the Academia del Designo. one of the important Academies of Italy.

Largly still, women were trained at home and in workshops as were most their male counterparts.

While there is an increase of practicing, documented women painters from the 16^th –18^th centuries, it’s not until the 19^th century, and only very late, that real change comes for women who wanted to be professional artists.

In Europe, women were not admitted to the professional schools of study, the Academies, until after the 1870’s.

In America, women students were admitted from the beginning to the first and oldest art Academy, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, founded in 1805. The women students followed a course of studies very like that of their male counterparts-drawing from plaster casts of Greek and Roman figures, studying proportion from classical prototypes and attending lectures on anatomy. When nude life drawing classes were begun at the Pennsylvania Academy shortly after it’s founding, women students, according to convention, were placed in classes separate from the men. The men drew from nude male and female models, while the women drew female models or costumed portrait models. The general idea in Victorian America was that exposing women to nudity, whether it was a Greek stature or a nude male model was bad for their futures and reputations, not to mention their psyches. Even so, The Pennsylvania Academy produced and still produces, some of the finest women painters in America: Cecilia Beaux, Mary Cassatt , Violet Oakley and Alice Neel to name just a few alums.

The Pennsylvania Art Conservatory in Philadelphia recently presented an exhibition entitled “Philadelphia Women Artists of the 20^th Century”. Many of the women painters discussed above are represented in the exhibition and continue to be featured by the Conservatory on a regular basis.

In the 1880’s, Thomas Eakins, in his dramatic statement of impatience with Victorian restrictions, undraped a young male model during his anatomy lecture for a mixed audience. The young ladies may have been thrilled, but their mothers were not. They were being ruined for marriage! In spite of an attempt at modernizing art education for women, and men, poor Tom was fired.

Later generations at the Academy and in America see him as a hero of art education.

Even though a few years later his effort paid off in women students being able to draw, paint and sculpt from men wearing a “modeling strap”, it was not until the 1960’s that women art students were able to draw from a fully nude male in any American Art school. The last jock strap was dropped in the late nineteen sixties.

After WWI, women in America entered colleges and art schools in ever-greater numbers. American art education, under the inspiration of the Bauhaus school in Germany, prepared women for careers not just in fine arts but also in design, architecture and public works. The difficulty was not so much the older form of restrictions, which kept women from education at all, but the cultural expectations for “a normal Life”. These included, and still include, marriage, children and a “practical” career that earns real money. Even worse for the contemporary “super woman”, pervasive sexism in the art world and the culture at large had taken strange new twists and turns.

Philadelphia artist and educator, Susan Rodriguez, speaks of Elaine Dubrow, her aunt and inspiration. Dubrow grew up during the Depression and WWII. She held fast to the life of the artist during very hard times, making the same difficult choices made by women artists earlier in the century. Women were now expected to be able to do it all. Dubrow’s contemporary Alice Neel struggled to paint, have jobs, maintain a marriage and bear children. These modern women often didn’t see their careers take off until later in life when they had more personal freedom. Whereas Dubrow sadly died at the age of 60 just when her career might have flowered, Neel, at the same age, finally achieved recognition. Her portrait of feminist Kate Millett on the cover of Newsweek thrust her into the limelight.

When we sit around coffee and donuts in my classroom and have “art chats”, students ask what it takes to become an artist.  Van Gogh said it takes ‘patience, hard work and courage”. I encourage them to make wise choices, choose partners and friends who support their dreams and follow the advice of strong role models and artist ancestors.

I think Eleanor would say the same thing. So would our ancestors the Red Rose Girls, the Philadelphia 10, Elaine Dubrow, and Alice Neel.

These under-recognized role models for contemporary women, and men, had fewer options than we do today. Even so, they followed their dream-to make a life out of art. They could not do otherwise.

By Jerry Hames, March 27, 2009

Click image for detail

[Episcopal Life] When visitors come to Philadelphia’s historic Christ Church — and more than 250,000 of them did last year, according to parish Tourism Director Anne McLaughlin – many want to sit in the pew where George Washington worshiped or visit the Colonialand Revolutionary-era graveyard, the final resting place for many early American leaders, including seven signers of the Declaration of Independence and five who signed the U.S. Constitution.

Others just want to sit quietly in what is known as the “nation’s church,” founded in 1695 as the first parish of the Church of England in Pennsylvania and later the birthplace of the American Episcopal Church.

Now there is yet another reason to visit: to see a portrait of Alice of Dunk’s Ferry displayed in the reception area of Neighborhood House, the adjacent parish hall.

Artist Al Gury, professor and chair of the painting program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, said he was inspired to paint Alice when he and his students heard her story. Christ Church guides now discuss Alice and other slaves in order to follow a mandate to all churches from the last General Convention to “give a full, faithful and informed accounting” of the Episcopal Church’s history with slavery.

A remarkable subject
According to historians, Alice of Dunk’s Ferry was the daughter of slaves brought from Barbados on the Isabella, the first slave ship to dock in Philadelphia.

Alice spent her life gathering stories about the city and its people and became known in her time as an oral historian. At Christ Church, 25 percent of Philadelphia’s free and enslaved Africans were baptized, a school was created to educate slaves and the first black priest, Absalom Jones, was ordained.

Oil painting by Al Gury

Alice, Christ Church’s longest-lived parishioner to date, was a remarkable woman, said Rector Timothy Safford. “According to historical accounts, Alice was 116 years old when she died, still telling stories from Philadelphia’s early days. We are proud to honor her through this powerful artistic rendering.”

Gury takes his art history students from the Academy and Cabrini College on field trips to galleries in Philadelphia’s Old City. “We often stop at Christ Church and other historic sites to introduce them to the history of the city and its cultural roots,” he said. “Neil Ronk [senior guide/historian] gives wonderful stories about the early women, members of the community, at that time. His story of Alice struck me as sad because there was no real image of her, considering that she was thought to be such a vibrant character in early Christ Church history.”

Gury, who paints portraits and is familiar with 17th- and 18th-century painting techniques, decided to do a rendering of Alice. “My goal was to make a vibrant, lively portrait of this personality as I understood her to be. There wasn’t much to go on, just a few snippets about Alice that I read in historic accounts. I went with the inspiration from Neil’s stories and my personal feeling of the importance of the role of African-American women in our history and how it’s unsung.

“It was touching to me that Alice had no last name. I envisioned her as strong, steady and hardworking, intelligent in a way that wasn’t recognized in her time.”

Gury, a Roman Catholic and neighbor of Christ Church who often stops to “sit quietly and meditate,” said the only extant visual image of Alice was an engraving of a toothless, ancient woman.

“I wanted to paint the woman in the peak of her life,” he said. He researched what a working woman of the 18th century would have worn and chose a model at the academy, Susan Robinson, who, he said, exhibited qualities of intelligence, grace and humor that would represent Alice very well.

“What we want to do is to explain the more difficult aspects of an institution’s history as honestly as we can,” said McLaughlin. “That’s where the portrait of Alice comes in. She lived in an era in which her story can easily get lost in the midst of great work, yet her story is in some ways as dramatic as the founding fathers.

“To lose that would be a historical tragedy and a tragedy for the parish. She is one of our people, a member of our church community. Alice has an amazingly compelling story, one that the visitors pick up on.”

The finished work is a marvelous portrait, said Ronk, a tour guide for 18 years. “When we first saw it, it took my breath away. It fleshes out a woman who is an important part of our history and, by extension, a whole class of people.

“Whether the portrait is spot-on accurate is irrelevant to me,” Ronk said. “It is a loving attempt to give a woman, who was anonymous for much of her life, a face to her own congregation. We all have a footprint in the sand … we wanted Alice to have a physical footprint both to students and to members of Christ Church. Here is a woman who thought of Christ Church as her beloved church, who rode on horseback at the age of 95 to attend services here.

“How could we not celebrate that?”

– Jerry Hames is past editor of Episcopal Life.

FAN can be reached at: phone #: 215.922.5155 | email : fangallery@verizon.net

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Recent Paintings,  February 6-28, 2009

Opening Reception, Friday February 6, 5-9PM

F.A.N. Gallery

221 Arch street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

215-922-5155

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Interview with Miriam N. Kotzin

Alla Prima
A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Direct Painting
Al Gury 
ISBN: 978-0-8230-9834-7 9 [...]

From the artist’s mind . . . direct to the canvas Legendary alla prima artist Arthur DaCosta was author Al Gury’s mentor—now readers everywhere can learn from a master! Fully illustrated step-by-step lessons in the four genres of painting—portraiture, figure, still life, and landscape Features copious examples of the work of the greatest alla prima artists This comprehensive guide explores one of the great traditions of Western painting: alla prima, or direct, painting. Bold brushwork and a painterly surface are the hallmarks of this renowned technique, and one of the great masters of alla prima was Arthur DaCosta, the legendary Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts teacher. In Alla Prima, author Al Gury reveals the step-by-step lessons he learned in his years of study with DaCosta. From start to finish, with clear explanations of color mixing, palettes, drawing and layering, structure, brushwork, and more, Gury guides readers through the full alla prima process. Portraiture, still life, figure, and landscapes are explored, all illustrated with the work of the greats, from Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velazquez, through Degas, Manet, and Cezanne, to Sargent and Whistler. Today alla prima is the ideal choice for artists who want to return to skill-based training yet retain a contemporary style—and Alla Prima is the perfect guide to the technique. Targeted marketing campaign to art media Author appearances (Philadelphia) Advertising and excerpt in American Artist magazine Academic marketing campaign to art schools Book Sense promotion Promotion at CAA (College Art Association) and NAMTA (National Art Materials Trade Association) shows Al Gury chairs the painting department at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His work is exhibited at the F.A.N. Gallery in Philadelphia, where he lives. World Distribution. All Rights: Watson-Guptill. 39.00 Canadian dollars