Description

The color in this painting -- bright green, purple and blues --  are beautiful and so unexpected.  See if you can spot the dog.

Details

• Howard Fussiner (American, 1923-2006 )
• Rock Shore, Low Tide (1980)
• Oil on canvas
  
• Signed and dated in lower right hand corner
  
• 41" x 49" (overall) 40" x 48" (sight)
• Likely original artist frame 
• Condition notes: frame has wear but presents well

About the Artist

Howard Fussiner was born in 1923 and studied art at with some of the most talented teachers and artists of the twentieth century at NYU (where he received a B.S in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952), the Cooper Union School of Art, the Art Students League and the Hans Hofmann School. In addition to the great master Hans Hofmann, Fussiner's art teachers included Carl Nelson, Robert Gwathmey and Hale Woodruff. Fussiner went on to a successful and long-lived career as a teacher himself at Souther Connecticut State University, Colby Sawyer College and Morehouse College in Atlanta.  But he kept us his own painting career, inspired by his summers in Deer Isle, Maine; and exhibited his work nationally. 

In her 1990 review of Fussiner’s show at the Munson Gallery in New Haven, Vivien Raynor of the NYTimes wrote specifically about Fussiner’s movement in the 1980s (when this painting was painted) to a more modern, distinct style: “A painter whose reputation goes back to the Manhattan of the 1960’s, Mr. Fussiner has covered a lot of ground in his career…During the last 10 or so years, however, most of the landscapes have been uninhabited, and this could be a reflection of Mr. Fussiner’s retirement from teaching...Rewarding as the profession is, it can take a fearful toll on the practicing artist. Whether or not his release from academic “stir” is the reason, Mr. Fussiner’s art has become bolder, simpler, and closer to Marsden Hartley’s”. In particular, the reviewer notes the use of color and stark shapes in his pieces from the eighties: …“Two of the best paintings on recent view depict Mount Crescent in Washington State. In one the land mass is green and brown under a yellow sky; in the other it is all orange-red, and the blue sky is dappled with clouds…On the wall filled with acrylics on paper are scenes almost as impressive, including those of red buildings around a yard in New Haven and boulders like dinosaur bones reposing beside the sea in Maine.”  We can definitely see some "dinosaurs" in this painting.

Fussiner passed away in 2006.