Computer Animation Arts

  "During the turbulent 1940s, artist George Ault (1891-1948) created precise yet eerie picture works of art that have come to be seen, following his death, as some of the most original paintings made in America in those years. The beautiful geometries of Ault’s paintings make personal worlds of clarity and composure to offset a real world he felt was in crisis." http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2011/ault/

Danny Heller is a contemporary American artist whose work I thought the First Year would find interesting. Perhaps not because of any uncanny effect his paintings have -though certainly they have a strange, empty aura about them, life is suggested yet rarely present - but his work perfectly evokes a mournful nostalgia and romanticism of a by-gone era -in this case 1950-60's Los Angeles. We begin to wonder what stories these empty scenes hold. You should recognise the clear influence of Edward Hopper or other great American Scene and Social Realist painters in his work: Norman Rockwell, Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood and J.C Leyendecker to name but a few.