Susan Headley van Campen

Yellow Sky, Southern Island

July 25, Casco Bay Watercolor on paper, 4 x 12 inches (10.2 x 30.5 cm) Framed dimensions: 11 x 18 1/2 inches Susan Van Campen’s plein-air oil paintin...

Initialed lower left Framed dimensions: 16 x 18 7/8 inches Provenance The artist; Collection of Henry Dubin, Philadelphia until 2018 Exhibitions Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Living Color Modern Life: Hugh Henry Breckenridge and Arthur B. Carles, October 5-November 2, 2018. The Philadelphia modernist Arthur B. Carles was a brilliant colorist and an extraordinarily innovative painter. Though Carles trained initially at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, soaking up the more conservative teaching of William Merritt Chase and Thomas Anshutz, he was deeply influenced by the avant-garde art scene in Paris during his first trip there in 1905. In 1907, Carles won the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to return to Paris for several more years. This experience had a profound impact on Carles as an artist; he was extremely affected by modern French painting, especially the work of Cezanne and Matisse, and by the time Carles returned home to Philadelphia in 1912, he was a confirmed modernist. This small landscape sketch was probably painted early during Carles's career, and yet, it already reveals his strong interest in abstraction. Indeed, Landscape Abstraction demonstrates both his daring exploration of lyrical color harmonies as well as his interest in two-dimensional surface design. Painted loosely in the spontaneous medium of watercolor, Carles used thin washes and delicate pools of paint to suggest the foreground area and surrounding trees. His color palette is rich and expressive, ranging from pale greens and blues to deep red, yellow, and even purple. In addition to his remarkable career as an artist, Carles was also an incredibly gifted teacher. He taught at PAFA from 1917 to 1925 and had a very deep impact on a number of his students such as Morris Blackburn, Quita Brodhead, and Jane Piper...

Willard Dixon is celebrated for contemporary landscapes that offer viewers a place of quiet reflection. Known for his luminous depictions of the American West, he captures space, lig...

Aeling’s fascination with atmospheric drama—rooted in his childhood in the American West, where weather dominates the horizon—finds powerful expression in this seascape. The low line of the ocean reinforces the artist’s signature device: vast, open skies that dwarf the land below. Yet the work also reflects a more personal history: Aeling’s enduring love of Hawaii, where he spent many winters surfing and studying the Pacific’s shifting moods. Those days on the water deepened his awareness of how ocean and sky interact, how storms gather, dissolve, and re-form with astonishing rapidity. The painting captures that moment when light changes direction and the boundary between calm and impending weather becomes charged with meaning. His precise modulation of color and temperature recalls his study of 19th-century luminists, yet the lived experience of Hawaiian surf breaks gives the scene an immediacy and authenticity that is distinctly his own. Jeff Aeling Sunset Aliomanu Bay, Kauai oil on panel 28h x 48w in 71.12h x 121.92w cm JAE040 Jeff Aeling (1958–2025): The Sky Remembers Through Jeff Aeling’s eyes, the landscape becomes a world shaped as much by air as by earth. In works such as North of Las Vegas, NM and Pond Near St. Cloud, MN, he balances the quiet structure of plains and wetlands with skies alive in constant motion. His mastery of atmosphere is unmistakable in Light Pillars (2023) and Light Pillar (2023), where rare optical events turn night into architecture. Even intimate scenes like Crabapple, Dogwoods, and Red Bud find their emotional power under skies that lend the land its shifting character. Aeling’s winters in Hawaii deepened his sensitivity to movement and weather. Surfing taught him to read the rhythm of the ocean, a knowledge reflected in Wave, Kauai (2018), where a breaking wave becomes a luminous wall of force. In Volcano (2023), he channels the islands’ elemental drama, linking fire, vapor, and sky through the same atmospheric vocabulary found in his plains paintings...