Having lived in the Philadelphia area for most of my life, I’ve long been acquainted with two of the oldest independent artists’ organizations in the U.S., The Plastic Club and the Philadelphia Sketch Club. I know them both from attending drawing workshops and participating in exhibits at each of the clubs.

The Philadelphia Sketch Club is, as far as I know, the oldest continuing arts club in the country; started in 1860 by students from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation’s oldest art school.

I know those in Europe will look at Americans quizzically when we act as though things from a century and a half ago are “old”; but bear in mind that we are a young country, and age is a matter of perspective.

There are other American arts organizations that trace their origins to the latter part of the 19th Century, the Salmagundi Art Club in New York for example; and many of them have had some of the country’s finest painters and illustrators among their membership.

They often have colorful histories and origins that delineate patterns of dissatisfaction among artists with the artistic establishment of the time, or the desire to practice life drawing from the nude when such practices were frowned upon.

I was delighted to find out recently about another such artists’ organization, which dates as the second oldest in the U.S., The Charcoal Club of Baltimore.

Organized around classes nude figure drawing, and for 20 years the only institution in Baltimore offering life drawing sessions, the club was intended to encourage art appreciation, the sharing of techniques and the promotion of local artists.

The club also became a bastion of civic pride as the sponsor of at least two Salon des Refuses in the 1920’s and 30’s when the Baltimore Museum of Art bypassed Baltimore artists in its juried exhibitions of Maryland artists.

The club, like the other arts clubs I mention, carries on its traditions of promoting life drawing sessions, the sharing of information, techniques and resources among members and the promotion of local artists.

There is a gallery on the club’s site, from which I’ve picked a few member artists whose work struck me and who happen to have web sites displaying more of their work.

(Images above: Lee Alban, David Buckley Good, Rita Curtis)

[Suggestion courtesy of Ray Ridenour]

The rich, vibrant colors; the loose, confident brushstrokes; the painterly surface and broken color, the translucent sparkle of water on the skin of swimming children; the brilliant wash of sunlight defining a billowing sail; the sparkling daubs of suggested wavelets; the dappled corners of a summer garden; the saturated shadows of sun bathed cloth and the physical feeling of light, pouring through his paintings like a mist of illumination, may give you the… um, impression that Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida is an impressionist. He has more in common, though, with painters like his friends John Singer Sargent or William Merritt Chase, and some of the other so-called “American Impressionists”, than with the French “painters of light”.

Yes, Sorolla too is certainly a painter of light; light in all of its dazzling brilliance, light that acts like its own prism, breaking up into sparkling shards of intense color, but with a touch and an intention that is all his own. Veláquez was as much an influence Sargent or Chase, and his early exposure to the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage, and some of the Orientalist painters, along with his extensive classical training and study of the masters, lent his work an underlying classical solidity that the French rebels (with the notable exception of Degas) deliberately obscured with their own kaleidoscopic explosions of color.

Sorolla received attention and honors in Europe. With a dramatic show at the Hispanic Society of New York in 1909, and subsequent shows in New York, he entered a number of collections here in the U.S., including the Getty Museum.

It is at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, where the young Sorolla spent countless hours studying the work of the masters, and Veláquez in particular, that there is now a major exhibition of Sorolla’s paintings.

Simply called Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923), the exhibition runs until September 6, 2009. There is a catalogue accompanying the exhibition.

The pages of the exhibition listing include reproductions of some of the pieces in the show, including the images above.

The Prado also has other paintings by Sorolla that you can search for here (hint, click into the zoomable image, then control-click or right-click on the zoomable image and choose “View in another window” to see the entire high-res image).

There are excellent sources for Sorolla’s work online, including Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida – The complete works, and the collection of Museo Sorolla, as well as others I’ll list below.

For more, see my previous post on Joaquín Sorolla. Sorolla was also friends with Aureliano Beruete, another independently minded painter who gets labeled as s “Spanish Impressionist”, and painted his portrait.

Pastel is one of those interesting areas where definitions of media show their limitations.

Pastel is a dry medium and is applied in may ways like a drawing medium, and of course can be used for drawing; but pastel is often used in applications that are more like painting, and “pastel painting” is a accepted term to a degree, though pastel doesn’t employ the liquid mediums and binders that are associated with paint.

I mention this because if there is one word that I want to use in describing the work of pastel artist Kim Fancher Lordier, it’s “painterly”.

Her passages of rich, textural color, woven together in luscious slabs and chunks into atmospheric wholes, are vibrant with the kind of feeling for the physical nature of the medium that ordinarily prompts the use the word painterly to refer to visible brushstrokes.

Lordier is a California artist who takes inspiration from the turn of the 20th Century California Impressionist painters (see my posts on Granville Redmond, Guy Rose – also here, Hanson Puthuff and George Gardner Symons).

She uses the painterly qualities of pastel to explore the light and atmosphere of the California countryside, her images evocative of time and season as well as place. She juxtaposes bright, high chroma passages with more muted colors, misty atmospheric perspective and subtle, color saturated darks.

Lordier’s website showcases and extensive array of her work. (Click to view the larger image and then use the arrows to click through.) There are also works visible on the sites of the galleries listed below.

Lordier conducts pastel workshops; one is coming up July 10-13 in Mt Vernon, Washington, and anther July 27-28 in San Mateo County, California.