Papoulas e Carvalhos da Califórnia, Estados Unidos (California Poppies and Oaks) - Granville Redmond

Papoulas e Carvalhos da Califórnia, Estados Unidos (California Poppies and Oaks) - Granville Redmond
Estado da Califórnia - Estados Unidos
Coleção privada
OST - 1912

One of California's first resident Impressionist painters, Granville Redmond, is best known for his atmospheric and floral landscapes of California. As a young child, Redmond was stricken with scarlet fever leaving him deaf by age three. After moving with his family to San Jose, California about 1874, he attended the Berkeley School for the Deaf during his formative years from 1879-90. Here, Redmond was greatly influenced by Theophilus D'Estrella who taught him painting, drawing, pantomime, and encouraged him in his art studies. In 1890, Redmond enrolled at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco studying for three years under Arthur Mathews and Amedee Joullin. He won the W. E. Brown medal of excellence, and in 1893 was awarded endowment funds from the California School of the Deaf that enabled him to continue his art studies at the Academie Julian in Paris under Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. Redmond blended the styles of his mentors and the influences of other artists into his own unique vision. As with many painters of the day, Redmond's style was highly influenced by the French and East Coast Impressionists. West Coast critics noted his use of Pointillism and likened his art to that of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. In 1917 Redmond moved back to Southern California, in part to try out his pantomime skills in Hollywood. He became friends with Charlie Chaplin and even assisted him in training for The Little Tramp. Redmond had a studio on Chaplin's lot and eventually appeared in seven of Chaplin's films, most notably as the white-haired sculptor in City Lights. As his friend Chaplin said in an interview: 'Redmond paints solitude, and yet by some strange paradox the solitude is never loneliness...sometimes I think that the silence in which he lives has developed in him some great capacity for happiness in which we others are lacking.'
In this painting, California Poppies and Oaks, 1912, we see Redmond's quintessential subject. The painting captures the solitude that Chaplin so admired. The composition invites the viewer into quiet contemplation of a lovely interplay of color and form. Drawing on the rounded contours of the oaks, Redmond echoes these forms in the puffy clouds, which enlivens the blue sky. The viewers' eye is centered within the green of the foreground and mid-ground by the concentrated orange and yellow splashes of the painter's brush. The flowers nestle just beneath the stand of oaks, ostensibly the focus of the picture. Redmond enables the viewer to take small journeys into the landscape: in the foreground a modest area of saturated blue water beneath the shadow of a bush draws attention and above and to the left on the horizon is the one break in the trees which affords a distant view of purple hills. California Poppies and Oaks demonstrates Redmond's mastery of his subject and the subtle technique which cemented his fame.