Returns To Painting
Shane's first new oil was painted towards the end of World War II. He called it "Exodus". It depicts a large rowboat full of people (refugees). It represents the movement of the Danish Jews to Sweden or just the plight of the Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi extermination. He made a number of studies and paintings of this subject in various formats, impressionist to abstract. After the war he slowly started to paint again and continued to draw many pictures in pastel, gouache and charcoal. He didn’t exhibit again and kept most of his work or gave or sold them to friends and family.
During the war and after Shane would go out on weekends with the family and paint, usually water colors of the Hudson Valley towns and landscapes. He considered his paintings his children. He couldn’t bear to be parted from his family or art work. He began working in pastels which for many years was his favorite medium, fast and colorful.
He and Belle were devoted folk dancers and later square dancers. He made many pastels and sketches of folk and square dancing. Their younger two children, Joanne and Mathew, were jazz musicians. Jazz bands and scenes became another favorite subject for his art. The family also loved the ballet which was another subject of his art. In later years he included klezmer bands and other Jewish subjects. Although he never became religious he moved from ignoring Jewish subjects to including them in many of his works as he grew older. Trips to Mexico, Puerto Rico and Israel provided subject matter for his painting in later years.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Lewis Shane
Famous quotes containing the words returns to, returns and/or painting:
“To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace!
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
Owes nothing to thy blasts.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon; they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compass to direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel; for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“This is the essential distinction—even opposition—between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, the film objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer—in actual practice it is rated very low—we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)