🔥 Vintage Old Mid Century Modern Abstract Portrait Oil Painting

Description: This is an outstanding and expressive Vintage Old Mid Century Modern Abstract Portrait Oil Painting on Masonite, by the esteemed Colorado female Mid Century Modernist painter, Mina Conant (1910 - 1999.) This artwork depicts the Modernist portraits of two young children, presumably an older sister and her younger brother. Their facial expressions exude both peaceful bliss and childlike innocence, and they both wear fashionable late 1950's attire. Signed and dated: "Mina Conant 1958." in the lower right corner. Approximately 28 3/4 x 34 1/2 inches (including frame.) Actual artwork is approximately 22 x 28 inches. Very good condition for age, with some light scuffing and edge wear to the original period vintage wood frame (please see photos.) Acquired in Pasadena, California. Priced to Sell. Conant's original artworks are in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, Rockford Art Museum, Illinois, and the Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut, among many others. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About the Artist: Mina Conant Born: 1910 - Fort Collins, ColoradoDied: 1999Known for: Symbolic, whimsical modernist paintingName variants: Mina Billmyer Mina Conant (1910 - 1999) was active/lived in Colorado, Ohio. Mina Conant is known for Symbolic, whimsical modernist painting. Biography from the Archives of askARTSource: Denver Post newspaper article 12/1/69As a student at East High School, Mina Conant was enough of an artist to execute professional commissions. She has been painting ever since, in Cleveland, Ohio, where she was married in 1933, and in Denver after 1947.Mina Conant is the wife of John Billmyer, a professor of art at Denver University. She also has taught at Denver University at the Denver Art Museum and in the Denver Public schools. Biography from Savageau GalleryBorn in Fort Collins, Colorado, on November 3, 1910, Mina Conant was making artwork by the age of five. During that creative childhood, her family moved to Denver, and she grew up here, eventually graduating from East High School. While beginning her BFA at Denver University, Conant met John Billmyer. The young couple worked together for a time as janitors at Chappell House in the 1930s, scrubbing in exchange for studies with Chappell teachers: Vance Kirkland, John Thompson, Frank Mechau and Margaret Tee. Living for a time in Ohio, while Billmyer completed his ceramics studies, the couple married in Cleveland in 1933.John Billmyer and Mina Conant (who worked under her own name with few exceptions) moved back to Denver in 1947, bringing along their two young daughters; another was born the next year. Billmyer took a teaching position at Denver University. While raising the children, Conant clearly continued to pursue her own art career, and she must have spent the Cleveland years well in terms of honing both her artistic skills and her professionalism.Both Billmyer and Conant established themselves rapidly in Denver, showing at the Denver Art Museum in 1948. In 1953, her wood-block print, "Dreaming Cat," was offered as a DAM membership premium ; in 1954 she won First Place oil painting honors at a Canon City annual show ; two years later she was creating a mural for Boettcher School. Her 1964 exhibit at the Neusteters Gallery of Fine Arts was that venue's second show; the first had been Emil Bistram's.Playfulness and color infuse Conant's paintings, as do symbolism and visual puns. A symbol-laden painting called The Tree was explained by the artist as follows:"The pear is because I like things to come in pairs …The match is because I like things to match… The rose in the glass is the rose spectre. You've heard about that? It dates all the way back to medieval times - it indicates magic. I've always been fascinated with magic, since I was a little girl. I learned how to call up the devil. I felt he was there, but by the time I turned around, he was gone… Do you like the winged lion? That's my husband."This type of layering - whimsical and spiritual - is a unique component in Conant's work. Childhood is an obvious theme, frequently noted in Conant's press coverage, but spirituality is present just as often - and often in the same paintings. It's no accident that many of Conant's mural commissions were for Denver-area churches. She was a devout and involved Episcopalian, a woman of conscience who obviously thought deeply about life.Around her fiftieth birthday, Conant had a life-threatening bout of pneumonia. The Last Rites were administered. As she drifted in and out of wakefulness, so ill she was unsure of seeing another day, Conant made a vow to herself: If she survived, she'd paint one-thousand new pictures to celebrate her survival. Against all odds, Conant made it through the night. Recovered and painting again, she commemorated her vow with a new addition to her signature. The paintings that post-date her health crisis are signed with a small butterfly, which she considered a symbol of rebirth, and, if you look closely at the insect's wings, a nearly-disguised number can be found, enumerating her main paintings from that time forward. By 1993 she was up to 850.While she'd had mural commissions and other community-project involvement prior to her illness, after that occurrence Conant emerged as a vocal activist for peace and environmental concerns. She protested the Vietnam War (sometimes anonymously, out of concern for her husband's teaching position). Her daughter, Joanna, recalls helping her bake oatmeal cookies for protesters camped along the railroad tracks leading into Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. Conant actively opposed billboards in the Denver metro area, calling them an "aesthetic blight."In 1977, after the national Episcopalian Church voted to ordain women, Conant's congregation at St. Mary's voted to secede from the denomination. Supporting female ordination, Conant opposed the St. Mary's secession. She left the congregation and a local controversy ignited when she attempted to take back artwork - a tabernacle and 14 Stations of the Cross - she'd created for and donated to the church, saying loyalist Episcopalian churches should have the pieces. The church balked and police were called. The works eventually became the property of the Colorado Episcopal Diocese, and are now in St. Elizabeth's Church in Brighton.Shortly after the church controversy, Billmyer retired from teaching and the couple moved to Tucson. Through the 1990s, Conant's social activism was transferred to air and water issues in that community. These concerns were present in Conant's subject matter for many years, soft-spoken but evident under the whimsical surface.For example, in the 1962 painting Rainbow Ribbons, a graceful man holds a multi-strand ribbon garland. A knot in the center allows him to fan the ribbons out like wings - pretty, ethereal. In Conant's symbolism, however, God placed the rainbow in the sky after the Flood "as a symbol of His promise that the earth would not again be destroyed by water." But humans have created their own potential destruction through the power of the atom: this is the knot we've tied in the rainbow, snarling that promise for the future. By speaking in symbols, Conant packed an innocent-looking, charming painting with additional, very serious undercurrents.Text by the Savageau Gallery MINA CONANT[1910-1991] Conant’s work was known as playful and colorful with symbolism and visual puns. Childhood is a constant theme in her work. She taught at Denver University, at the Denver Art Museum and in the Denver Public schools. ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:Mina Conant, who worked in a variety of media – oils, watercolors, pastels, prints, sculpture, ceramics, textile wall hangings and stained glass -- reportedly began making art by age five. She grew up in Denver where she graduated from East High School. While a student there she took art courses with Estelle Stinchfield, who had studied with André Lhote and Otton Friesz in Paris and Percyval Tudor-Hart in London. In 1929 as a project for the American Association of University Women Conant drew a pictorial map of Colorado’s history which Denver Municipal Facts described as being of “genuine esthetic value.”After high school she pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Denver where she met her future husband, John E. Billmyer, an aspiring architectural student who changed his course of study to become a master potter. For a brief time in the early 1930s they worked together as janitors at Chappell House in exchange for the opportunity to study there with faculty members of the University of Denver School of Art, including Vance Kirkland, John Thompson and Margaret Tee. In 1933 Billmyer and Conant moved to Cleveland where they married that same year and later had three daughters. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in education (1935) from the Case Western Reserve University School of Education and his Master of Arts degree two years later from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She continued her art studies in Cleveland from which she sent her block-printed textiles to Denver for a solo show at the ChappelI House in 1934. The previous year she won an award from the Cleveland Print Club and in March 1935 her wood engraving, Rite of Spring, was in the Print-A-Month Series of the Print Club of Cleveland, the oldest print club in the United States. Incorporated in 1919, its dual purpose was "to assist the Cleveland Museum of Art to acquire a print collection of high excellence" and "to stimulate interest in prints and print collecting." While in Cleveland Conant did another wood engraving, Pampas Deer. Both are in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.In 1946 she and her husband returned to Denver where he became head of the ceramics department at the University of Denver and where she also taught figure drawing and crafts until 1950. Over the years she also taught at the Denver Art Museum, Denver Public High Schools (1950s), and the Children’s Museum in Denver. In 1948 she and her husband became founding members of the 15 Colorado Artists, a group of Denver modernists who seceded from the older and more traditional Denver Artists Guild to form their own advocacy group, pursuing more progressive art styles and laying the groundwork for the city’s modern art scene over the next few decades.This helped Conant re-establish herself in the Mile High City. In addition to showing with the 15 Colorado Artists she also participated in exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum and its Own-Your-Own Shows, as well as the annual Blossom Festival in Canon City, Colorado, where she received 1st Place in oil painting in 1954. A year earlier the Denver Art Museum offered her woodblock print, Dreaming Cat, as a membership premium. During the 1960s she was included in the 6th Midwest Biennial Exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. She also had two one-person shows at the Neusteter’s Gallery of Fine Arts in downtown Denver. Her first one in 1964 was the second show at the gallery after that of Taos artist, Emil Bisttram.Mina Conant is best known for her imaginative paintings of children and animals, as well as fantastical creatures like angels or mermaids painted in a bright and whimsical style with underlying layers of visual puns, allegory, symbolism and spirituality. She felt that “a picture should be a communication—the more you look at a picture the more insights you should get.” She loved animals and preferred to paint symbolic children because, “A child is the human being at the most innocent without all the layers and veneers we get as we grow older." She was fond of Persian miniatures and the graceful figures depicted by Italian Renaissance artist, Sandro Botticelli.She incorporated these various elements in her watercolor, Moonrise. The centrally-placed nude female figure crowned with a Corinthian capital alludes to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The tulip she holds symbolizes both perfect love and rebirth, as it is the first flower to bloom in the Spring. The upright cat, one of Conant’s favorite subjects, wears a fur coat and high-heeled shoes and holds a child’s doll recalling childhood, while the owl, a symbol of wisdom, carries a lantern like the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes looking for an honest man. Her untitled painting of bulls shows the animals at different times of the day suggested by the different background colors and the stars in the sky. The compositional style is a modernist interpretation of the Palaeolithic paintings in the Lascaux caves in the Dordogne region in southwestern France and possibly the petroglyphs in various parts of Colorado and neighboring New Mexico.At the time of her fiftieth birthday in 1960, she had a life-threatening bout with pneumonia and received the Last Rites. She vowed to celebrate her recovery by painting 1,000 new pictures, adding to her signature a small butterfly with a number worked into its wing markings symbolizing the Resurrection. The butterfly also had an autobiographical component as a “symbol of joy and freedom that somehow manages to survive.” She said, “Artists are something like butterflies—painting the ideas that we enjoy, creating pictures only to be looked at, almost in spite of ourselves.” By age eighty-three she finished 850 paintings.Along with her work in oil and watercolor and the print medium, she received mural commissions for the Boettcher School (Denver, 1956), and worked with the volunteers at Colorado General Hospital for input on the designs of her mosaics, tapestries, and paintings for the Pediatrics Outpatients Clinic (1963-5). A life-long Episcopalian, she also created mosaic panels and murals for the St. Francis Children’s Chapel at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver (1956, 1993), Calvary Temple Church, and Stations of the Cross for St. Mary’s Episcopal Church and for St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Brighton, Colorado. In 1977 Conant had a run-in with the Rev. James O. Mote, pastor at the time of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in South Denver of which she had been a member for thirty years. Protesting the congregation’s secession at his persuasion from the National Episcopal Church on account of its decision to ordain women, she and her daughter removed her 14 Stations of the Cross from the church. Eventually, they became the property of the Colorado Episcopal Diocese and later were given to Johanna Billmyer who donated them to St. Elizabeth’s Brighton, Colorado.In addition to her art career pursued while raising three daughters, she and her husband were active in the Colorado chapter of Artists Equity Association of which she was president from 1964 to 1966. In the late 1950s she also served as vice president of the Community Art Gallery in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood. Protesting against things she disliked as a woman of conscience, she joined picketers at the University of Denver in “Woodstock West” during the Vietnam War, took cookies with her daughter Johanna to protesters at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver, and campaigned against billboards in the Denver Metro area which she considered an “aesthetic blight.” After she and her husband relocated to Tucson following his retirement from the University of Denver in 1977, she continued her social activism in her new home, posting flyers in the 1990s throughout Tucson protesting Arizona’s polluted air and water. On the occasion of her donation of paintings to the St. Francis Children’s Chapel at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver in 1993 in memory of Helen, Arndt, a long-time patroness of Denver artists, Conant explained in a Denver Post interview why she did not have a gallery in her later years: “It’s so much blood, sweat and tears getting stuff back and forth to a gallery…I don’t want to fool with it. I just want to paint. I would like to have one big bang-up show though.” She unfortunately did not live to see it before her death six years later in Tucson.Exhibitions: Solo: Denver Art Museum-Chappell House, Denver (1934); The Gallery, Denver (1960, with her husband, John Billmyer); Neusteters Gallery of Fine Arts, Denver (1964, 1969); Colorado Bank, Sterling, Colorado (1967).Group: Denver Art Museum (1953, 1955, 1958-59, 1963); Annual Blossom Festival, Canyon City, Colorado (1954); Living Arts Center, Denver (1959); 6th Midwest Biennial Exhibition, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska (1960); “Eight Painters & Sculptors at the University of Denver 1930-1985,” Victoria H. Myhren Gallery-University of Denver (2010); “15 Colorado Artists--Breaking with Tradition,” Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver (2011).Collections: Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Charles Marvin Fairchild Gallery-Georgetown University, Washington, DC; Rockford Art Museum, Illinois; Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Colorado State University; Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver, Colorado; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Mina Conant Billmyer (nee Mina Conant), painter, printmaker, mosaic artist, and activist, was born in Fort Collins, Colorado on November 3, 1910. She grew up in Denver where she graduated from East High School. She attended the University of Denver where she met her future husband John Edward Billmyer. As students they conspired to work as janitors at Chappell House in exchange for studying there with faculty members of the University of Denver School of Art. Conant earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Denver. She married Billmyer, craftsman and educator, in 1933 and they moved to Cleveland so that he could attend architecture school. They returned to Denver in 1947 and resided there until 1977, when they moved to Tucson, Arizona.In 1948, Constant and Billmyer were founding members of the modernist group 15 Colorado Artists that broke away from the traditional Denver Artists Guild. The other members were Don F. Allen, Marion Buchan, Jean Charlot, Angelo Di Benedetto, EO Kirchner, Vivian Kirkland, Moritz Krieg, Duard Marshall, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, William Sanderson, Paul Smith, Richard Sorby and Frank Vavra. The Kirkland Museum mounted a well-received exhibition of their work in May 1948.Mina Conant was commissioned for various art projects and taught classes at the Denver Art Museum and in the Denver Public School system. She created liturgical mosaics and her fourteen stations of the cross can be viewed at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Brighton, Colorado. Conant participated in exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, and the annual Blossom Festival in Canon City, Colorado. In 1953 the Denver Art Museum offered her woodcut, Dreaming Cat, as a membership gift, and she had two solo exhibitions of her work at the Neusteter’s Gallery of Fine Arts in Denver.She was also an activist and picketed the University of Denver in protest of the Vietnam War, and joined the protest against the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. She often wore a paper sack over her head during protests to shield her husband from any backlash as he headed the ceramics department at the University of Denver.Her work is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Charles Marvin Fairchild Gallery-Georgetown University; the Rockford Art Museum, Illinois, the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, Denver.Mina Conant Billmyer died in Tucson, Arizona on 12 June 1999. Mina ConantAmerican 20th CenturyAmerican, (November 3, 1910–June 12, 1999)Mina Conant is best known for her imaginative paintings of children and animals, as well as fantastical creatures like angels or mermaids painted in a bright and whimsical style with underlying layers of visual puns, allegory, symbolism and spirituality. She felt that “a picture should be a communication—the more you look at a picture the more insights you should get.” She loved animals and preferred to paint symbolic children because, “A child is the human being at the most innocent without all the layers and veneers we get as we grow older.”[i] She was fond of Persian miniatures and the graceful figures depicted by Italian Renaissance artist, Sandro Botticelli. OBITUARYMina Conant Billmyer Artist, activist 88Mina Conant Billmyer, longtime Denver artist and social activist, died June 12 at her home in Tucson. She was 88.Known in the art world as Mina Conant, she was well-known in Denver for her imaginative Billmyer in 1962 paintings, liturgical mosaics and graceful drawings, but was also known for her community activism.She often picketed and protested against things she disliked. During the Vietnam War, she joined picketers at the University of Denver in a protest called "Woodstock West.'' Her daughter, Johanna Billmyer of Denver, can remember baking oatmeal cookies with her mother and the two of them taking the cookies to protesters at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. Other times, Conant protested against billboards in the metro area, which she considered an "aesthetic blight,'' said Billmyer, who lives in Denver.Conant often enlisted one or more of her three daughters in protests, but usually hid her own identity by wearing a paper sack over her head. Her husband, John Billmyer, was an art professor at the University of Denver and she didn't want to get him in trouble.A lifelong and dedicated Episcopalian, Conant had a run-in with the police and her priest, the Rev. James O. Mote, who, at the time, was pastor of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in south Denver. Mote, unhappy that the national Episcopal Church had voted to ordain women, persuaded his congregation to secede from the denomination. Conant didn't care for his stand and dropped out of the congregation.But Conant had made 14 stations of the cross that hung in St. Mary's and she wanted them back when she left the congregation. Mote refused to give her the artwork."So, with one of my sisters as the "wheels moll,' Mother went to the church one day and began removing the stations,'' Johanna Billmyer said.Conant had removed about seven of the stations when the police arrived. The police didn't want to arrest Conant, who agreed to leave. Eventually, all 14 stations became the property of the Colorado Episcopal Diocese, and later were given to Johanna Billmyer. They now hang in St. Elizabeth's Church in Brighton, where Billmyer is a member."Mother had a lot of drive,'' recalls Billmyer. "She was a pretty spicy women.'' A few years ago, Conant had fliers printed about air and water pollution in Arizona. She posted them throughout Tucson. She did many art shows in Denver and taught art classes. She numbered each painting with a small number on the wing of a butterfly in the corner. She chose the butterfly because it is a symbol of the Resurrection.Conant once pledged once to do 1,000 paintings, and by the age of 83 had painted 850. Many paintings and mosaics were given to churches, including St. John's Episcopal Cathedral. Mina Conant was born in Fort Collins on Nov. 3, 1910, and began doing artwork at age 5. Her family moved to Denver when she was young. She graduated from East High School and later earned her bachelor of fine arts degree at DU.She married John Billmyer in 1933; they lived in Denver until 1977, then moved to Tucson.In addition to her husband and daughter, Johanna, she is survived by two other daughters - Jennifer Rizzo of Syracuse, N.Y., and Margaret Spector of Oswego, N.Y.; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Contributions may be made to the Denver Art Museum. A memorial service may be scheduled later in Tucson.Posted 22-Jun-99

Price: 1350 USD

Location: Orange, California

End Time: 2024-10-02T01:35:29.000Z

Shipping Cost: 45 USD