George Vranesh's career spanned more than six decades, creating a body of work that chronicled his evolving aesthetic tastes from the American post-war period to his death in 2014. Shortly after completing his master's degree in Anthropology from the University of Iowa, Vranesh enrolled at the Art Students League of New York City in the mid-1950s. There he studied under Will Barnet, who encouraged him to broaden his knowledge of art history and modernist theories. He studied printmaking under Arnold Singer at the Pratt Institute Annex and audited art history classes at the New School in New York City. This exposure to the principals of modernism and art history inspired Vranesh to experiment with his work, persistently reworking compositions and colour combinations, at times revisiting them for several years until he was satisfied. Vranesh categorised his process of creating and revising as 'correction' if something in the painting didn't work or read easily, and 'causation' when making changes of colours and shapes.
Read MoreVranesh was born in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1926 and served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1946. The years following his discharge were spent as an anthropology student and working odd jobs. During the summers between 1959 to 1965, he worked onboard a salmon cannery ship which traveled from Seattle, Washington to the Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea. He later published, Alaskan Horizons, a catalog of sketches, photos, notes and drawings based on his travels. These sketchbooks provided Vranesh with the resource materials and direction for the Alaskan Horizon works created throughout the 1960s—a series of original paintings capturing his tour of the Alaskan landscape.
Many of the paintings in the Alaskan Horizon series were exhibited at the 10/4 Group, an artists' cooperative gallery in New York City co-founded by Vranesh in the early 1960s. Other exhibitions featuring the works were shown in New York, New York; Anchorage, Alaska; and Newport, Rhode Island—including a solo exhibition at the Newport Art Association in 1973. These large landscapes are considered to be some of his strongest work; he often reused existing motifs developed from Alaska in his later paintings. New York Times art critic and Vranesh collector, Hilton Kramer, observed that Vranesh's spatial perspective, which tends to be aerial in character, was an important marker that defines the originality of his work. Kramer wrote: "It is a perspective from 'above' – not from the heavens, but as if from a ship's deck or a bridge or other earthly heights...."
His subjects were rooted in personal experiences: travel and work, but Vranesh found his most important technical revelations in Amédée Ozenfant's Foundation of Modern Art and Hans Hofmann's colour theory. Ozenfant's emphasis on rational ordering of objects provided a basis for arranging shapes. Hofmann believed that a modern artist must remain faithful to the flatness of the canvas. To suggest the illusion of space, depth and movement in a picture, artists should create contrasts of colour, form and texture in a relationship he called the "push and pull" of colours and shapes. The visual structure of Vranesh's work is defined by Hofmann's colour theory and the purist ideas of Ozenfant (and his collaborator, Le Corbusier). In his work, space is determined by colour and colour is asserted by an attention to clarity as defined by the clean-hard edges with no overlapping of forms or concealment through layering of paint.
Vranesh found inspiration from European Modernists as well as American Abstractionists like Stuart Davis. His early work was strongly influenced by his teacher Will Barnet, who was a member of the Indian Space Painters group. They looked to Native American art as a means to explore abstraction and incorporate surrealist elements. Native American art reduced nature to flat linear symbols and created images in which it was nearly impossible to distinguish positive from negative space. Later works expressed progressively more figurative abstract compositions as he matured as an artist.
Vranesh taught various subjects in art and media in both private and public schools. He worked up until his death in 2014 at his studio and home in New York. A true American modernist, he created drama that he described as "both psychological and physical reflecting my beliefs, hopes and tastes, and perhaps those of the viewer. It is communication. It may also be an aesthetic experience."
Coutresy Franklin Bowles Galleries, San Francisco, New York.
