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Bubba VonMax Art, 1322 Hackney Street, Winfield, KS (2026)

08/23/2026

"Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1" - (1932) - Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986)

Georgia O'Keeffe was known as the "Mother of American Modernism". She is famous for her bold paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico desert landscapes. Her long career spanned seven decades, and she stayed true to her own unique style. Born on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe decided to become an artist when she was a young child. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where she learned new abstract ideas from her teacher, Arthur Wesley Dow. Those ideas changed her style.

Georgia attention when photographer Alfred Stieglitz showed her work in New York in 1916. She and Stieglitz married in 1924.

Georgia became famous for her macro views of flowers. She once said that she painted them large "so people would stop and notice them." When she moved to New Mexico in 1929, she found a lifelong inspiration in the desert landscape, rocks, and animal bones. After Stieglitz died in 1946, Georgia remained in New Mexico and continued to create art until her eyesight failed in her later years. Her works are still celebrated today with many housed at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

08/22/2026

"Daedyl" (1948) - Manierre Dawson

This 9-foot-tall abstract bronze sculpture was finally unveiled after being posthumously dedicated by the artist's estate to the West Shore Community College in September 2019.

Now, I will admit to the fact hat it has been 40 plus, plus years since I opened a book on Greek Mythology. However, from what I do remember, and with a bit of help from Google, I found that the word was derived from the mythological inventor Daedalus. Its use in more modern times is with regards to artistry, intricate design, or cleverness, which would sum up Mr. Dawson's sculpture rather well. Don't you think?

08/21/2026

"Loft" - (1920) - Manierre Dawson - (1887 - 1969)

Dawson was one of the earliest American artists to explore non-objective painting. An engineer by training, Dawson’s foray into non-objective art happened concurrently and without his knowledge of Wassily Kandinsky’s contributions to Modernism. After graduating from the Armour Institute with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1909, Dawson went to work for the esteemed architecture firm Holabird and Roche as a draftsman. During this period Dawson’s engineering background provided the inspiration for many of his ground-breaking abstractions. Specifically, he was interested in the relationships of forms in space. In addition, he wrote that his work meant to “express spiritual truth through pure form.” His works from between 1909 and 1914 are thought to be among the earliest examples of abstraction made by an American artist.

Dawson first encountered the avant-garde in Paris during his trip there in 1910. Through his acquaintance with American ex-patriot author and collector Gertrude Stein, whose home functioned as a salon for the who's who of leading artists and intellectuals. Dawson was exposed to Fauvism and Cubism. Stein provided Dawson with his first sale and sought to encourage his talent.

After his return to the United States, Dawson continued to paint and was selected to exhibit work at the 1913 Armory Show during its stay at the Art Institute of Chicago. Discouraged by a subsequent lack of support for Modernism in Chicago and the extreme difficulty he found in making a living through sales of his work, however, Dawson moved his family to Ludington, Michigan, where he became a fruit farmer.

His paintings have been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and a host of others.

Gang, I apologize for me absence the past couple of weeks as I have been under the weather, so to say. But I am back and although I might not yet be 100%, I've got a couple of bottles of 100 proof that are working out just fine.

08/16/2026

Untitled Abstract #2 (ca. 1960's) - Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)

Born in New York City, Helen was the third and youngest daughter of a noted justice of the New York Supreme Court and his German born wife. She attended the Brearley School in Manhattan and the Dalton School where her art teacher was Rufino Tamayo. She studied painting at Bennington College. She graduated from Bennington College in 1949 and studied with Hans Hofmann in 1950.

In 1958 she married the leading Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell. Their honeymoon was spent traveling in France and Spain and they returned to a brownstone in New York. They divorced in 1970.

She was influenced by the works of Jackson Po***ck at an exhibit in 1951. She loved their scale, free graphic rhythms, and colors; but above all she was struck by Po***ck's method of dripping paint directly onto the raw canvas, emphasizing both the flatness of the painting and the physical actuality of the support. Carrying this technique still further, Frankenthaler thins her pigment with large amounts of turpentine so that they would soak directly through the unprimed cloth and stain it. The resultant image no longer lies on top of the picture plane but is embedded within; the transparent mat colors of varying intensity modulate from light to dark without creating any illusion that they exist in a space other than that of the woven textural surface.

In the early 1960s Frankenthaler switched from oils to acrylics, with which she could achieve a watercolor effect by thinning the paint even further. She experimented with the use of sponges, heavier brushes, thicker globs of paint, etc., influencing a whole generation of color-field painters..

08/15/2026

"The Harp" (ca. 1936 - 38) - Augusta Savage (1892 - 1962)

Savage was an American sculptor and educator who battled racism to secure a place for African American women in the art world. As a child, she began modeling figures from the red-clay soil of her native Florida.

Savage thrived artistically in West Palm Beach, receiving local encouragement and prizes. She moved to Jacksonville, Florida, hoping to make a living by executing commissioned busts of the city’s well-to-do African Americans. When that plan failed, she moved to New York City to study art. In 1921 she enrolled at Cooper Union in the four-year sculpture course, but her instructors quickly waived many of the classes in light of her talent. She graduated in three years.

In 1923 Savage became the focus of a racial scandal involving the French government and the American arts community. She was among some 100 young American women selected to attend a summer program at Fontainebleau, outside Paris, but her application was subsequently refused by the French on the basis of her race. American sculptor Hermon A. MacNeil was the only member of the committee to denounce the decision, and he invited Savage to study with him in an attempt to make amends.

In the 1920s Savage received commissions to sculpt portrait busts of W.E.B. Du Bois and Black nationalist Marcus Garvey; both pieces were hailed for their power and dynamism. On the strength of these works she received a fellowship that enabled her finally to study in Paris in 1929–31.

She founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem in 1932. In 1934 Savage became the first African American elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. In 1937 became director at the Harlem Community Art Center. The Center played a crucial role in the development of many young Black artists. In the late 1930s Savage was commissioned to create a sculpture for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. "The Harp" was inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” became one of her best known works. Unfortunately, it and many other works by Savage were never cast in durable materials and were later lost or destroyed.

08/14/2026

“Nighthawks,” (1942) - Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967)

From the grit and dust of the wild west to a diner in New York, today we look at Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks."

Hopper was a prominent American realist artist best known for his intimate oil paintings of city life in America. Born and raised in New York, he demonstrated proficiency in art from an early age and worked as a commercial illustrator for over 20 years to support himself while he practiced his painting. His initial success came from his etchings in the 1920s, all of which feature his interest in solitude and urban living.

Like most of Hopper's oil paintings, Nighthawks offers a glimpse into the artist's perceptions of modern American life, particularly in New York City. Unlike his contemporaries who opted to capture the city's bright lights, buzzing atmosphere, and booming industry, Hopper instead focused on the underrepresented loneliness of its residents.

Unlike many of his other depictions dealing with isolation, Nighthawks stars a group of subjects. Although the primary subject is not a lone figure, the scene still evokes a sense of solitude. Set late at night, the composition quietly presents a look at an unassuming neighborhood diner. The painting's ordinary stillness makes it easy for the viewer to place themselves into the scene; one can almost hear the hum of its harsh fluorescent lights and the clink of the customers' coffee mugs.

The iconography of Nighthawks is seemingly straightforward. Seen from outside the casual restaurant's large, wrap-around window, it shows three customers; two males and one female, seated at the counter. A single server interacts with two of the figures as he works behind the bar. Outside, the streets appear abandoned, implying the scene is set well into the night.

There is an old saying that, "Imitation is the highest form of flattery." Well, that is true with Hopper's "Nighthawks" as similar setting have been used by others in numerous movies. Tom Waits used it for an album cover. Even the notorious graffiti artist, Bansky, did his own take on Hopper's painting.

08/13/2026

“The Cowboy,” (1902) - Frederic Sackrider Re*****on (1861-1909)

I think that I commented earlier about growing up with C. M. Russell and Frederick Re*****on. I was drawn to them because of the fact that few artists shaped the visual mythology of the American West as decisively as these two artists.

Re*****on was a New York-born painter and sculptor who rode out from Yale to sketch cavalry patrols, Apache scouts, and frontier riders firsthand. His command of horses in motion is the giveaway: muscle, dust, and momentum rendered with anatomical precision that owed as much to his Eastern academic training as to his time in the saddle. Working in oil, gouache, and bronze, he illustrated for Harper's Weekly before moving toward looser, more atmospheric night scenes late in his career. For collectors drawn to narrative, action, and the open country, his work still carries genuine weight.

For Re*****on, the cowboy was not simply a subject but a witness to disappearance. He worked to document a world he felt slipping away even as he painted it. For me, "The Cowboy" sits at the center of his mission: to preserve the silhouette of a man and way of life that the closing of the frontier threatened to erase. By the 1890s, when Re*****on's prolific output was reshaping American visual culture through magazines, the working rider of the West was already becoming myth. His brushwork here merges observation with elegy.

This print belongs on the wall of anyone drawn to American history with unflinching eyes. It speaks to a room that values authenticity over sentimentality, narrative over decoration.

You can see some of both, Re*****on and Russell's art at The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

08/12/2026

"Independence and the Opening of the West" (1960) Thomas Hart Benton

Yesterday, I mentioned Benton's murals. Today, I wanted to show you this beautiful mural is one that I have actually seen. It is located in Independence, Missouri, home of the Truman Library.

Founded in the early nineteenth century, Independence found its way into American folklore by being known as the last city before the frontier. By the 1830's, it was a bustling center of trade for the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails. The 1849 Gold Rush in California only confirmed its place in history as an icon of the American West. Independence was no stranger to the blood, sweat, and tears that Benton often painted. When confronted with the idea of painting a mural in the Truman Library, Benton immediately began to conceptualize an idea for "Independence and the Opening of the West" that would focus on the history of Independence. Benton hoped to generalize the history by depicting no particular events or people, except Truman himself. However, Harry Truman would have nothing to do with a project that would glorify him personally and requested that he not be put in the picture.

Benton began work on the mural in early 1960, three years after the founding of the Truman Library. Out of the mural, a deep and lasting friendship emerged between two of Missouri's most famous sons. In one account, Benton, high on the scaffolding, was listening to the comments of his chief critic and patron below, President Truman. Finally Benton called down, "If you want to help paint, come up here." "By golly, I will," Truman replied and then proceeded to climb up to the platform, seized a brush and began dabbing blue on the sky. Occasions like this, made the President and the artist lifelong friends.

I have had the pleasure of seeing a number of Benton's works, but few impressed me as much as this painting and the story behind it.

08/11/2026

"Threshing Wheat" - (1938 - 39) - Thomas Hart Benton (1889 - 1975)

Thomas Hart Benton has been considered as one of the foremost painters and muralists associated with the American Regionalists of the 1930s. The son of Colonel Maecenas Benton, a member of Congress, Benton worked as a cartoonist for the 'Joplin American in' 1906 and then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He studied at the Academie Julian during a three-year stay in Paris and was briefly influenced by such modern movements as Synchronism and Cubism. Upon his return to the United States he moved in avant-garde art circles, but he abandoned modernism about 1920, and in 1924 he began traveling through the rural American South and Midwest, sketching the scenes and people he encountered.

Benton was considered to be a spokesman for the American Regionalist painters. His portrayals of Midwestern people and landscapes are done in an original style marked by rhythmically undulating forms and plasticity of movement, stylized features, cartoonlike figures, and brilliant color. Like his fellow Regionalists, Benton was impatient with the domination of French art and believed that the rural areas of the South and Midwest were the source and strength of American art.

In the 1930s Benton painted a number of notable murals for the New School for Social Research in New York City and the “Arts of the West.”

Benton taught at the Art Students League in New York City, where Jackson Po***ck was one of his pupils, and from 1935 to 1941 at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, Kansas City, Mo.

08/10/2026

"Self Portrait" (1996) David Robert Jones aka David Bowie (1947 - 2016)

We all know David Bowie as a singer, songwriter, and actor who was known for his shifting persona and musical genre hopping. Bowie was notably prolific, having recorded 26 studio albums over the course of his nearly five-decade-long career.

Bowie a transitional figure in rock history.

After changing his name to avoid confusion with the Davy Jones from the Monkees, in the 1960s, Bowie fronted various bands from whose shadow he emerged as a solo singer-songwriter with songs like “Space Oddity,” "The Man Who Sold the World" and so much more.

Although we are more familiar with his music, Bowie longed to be considered as a valid artist, but at the same time, he wasn’t very sure what he was doing. When exhibiting in The Gallery, he stood in the back and watched people standing in front of his work and coming up with their own explanations for what it was. He enjoyed the attention but was also confronted with a lack in his technical skills. In fact, it wasn't well known until he used a self-portrait on the cover of his album "Outside" in 1995. It wasn't long afterwards that Bowie has his first exhibition at the at The Gallery in London. A year later, he featured in an art gallery in Basel, Switzerland.

Bowie was friends with Andy Warhol who introduced him to Jean-Michel Basquiat. NOTE: in 1996, Bowie he starred as Andy Warhol in the movie Basquiat directed by Julian Schnabel.

Suffice it to say that David Bowie was indeed a man of many talents.

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