Melville Holmes
Melville Holmes was born in San Francisco in 1950 and has been painting oils since 1959, but it was not until his early twenties that a clear vision for his work came to him: to attempt to do new paintings like those of the Old Masters. The career path he saw laid out before him had two aspects. One was rediscovering the sense of timelessness found in certain Old Master works. The other was to understand what the physical and optical properties of their paint, itself, look so different, so rich and luminous, compared to the paint that nowadays flows out of metal tubes from the art supply store. While Holmes holds a college art degree, there are no living links to the Old Masters tradition, so his training has been largely self-directed. He traveled twice to Europe in order to study the look of Old Master paintings up close. Melville’s own approach derives from the Venetian Renaissance method of applying multiple layers of transparent, colored glazes and opaque enamels and, following the example of Titian, often building up his works over a long period of time. His studies eventually led him deeply into the history, technology, and chemistry of pigments, oils, and varnishes and he has had much practice grinding his own paints, making varnishes, and formulating his own media. Holmes’s subjects include still life, landscape, architecture, portrait, and figure painting.
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| *SOLD* A Jewel in the City |
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| The Old Isabella Room |
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| Mediterranean Fantasy |
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| Old and New Vessels |
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| Three Exotic Vessels |
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| Vanitas |
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| Fritz Bachmeyr
Mr. Bachmeyr was born in Munich Germany and discovered his natural talent for music and drawing after being enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Italy at the age of 12. He studied under the guidance of Italian, German and Austrian old-master painters such as Karl Stutz, Herbert Lieber, and Antonio Brazzo. In his 20's Fritz became fascinated with American painters and spent a decade studying them, focusing on the European influence on their techniques and visa versa. In the 10 year period he produced over a 1000 heirloom paintings which were greatly influenced by the American masters ranging from John Singleton to John Singer Sergeant to Albert Bierstadt, and the Hudson River Valley School.
In his 50's Fritz became fascinated with the French Barbizon period. He visited the county of Barbizon outside of Paris and lived several months in the same environment as his 19th century counterpart painters. Since moving to Spokane, Fritz paints portraits and Idaho, Washington, and Cascade Mountain landscapes, as well as many classical and allegorical academic paintings.
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| Perfect as a Rose |
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| The Afternoon Garden |
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| Victorian Family Outing on Horse |
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| Grizzly Bear |
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| Grizzly Fight |
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| Moose 3 |
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