Landscape Paintings
Art appraiser and curator Alissa J. Anderson described Swinnerton's work as a painter after he moved to the Southwest:
- During this time, he began to explore unfamiliar regions of deserts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. It was here where he first became entranced by the beauty of the desert. Like many artists, the sweeping and mysterious qualities of a dry wasteland became alluring to the young artist. Soon, the magnificence of monumental desert bluffs, dramatic shadows and sweeping desert skies became the primary subject matter of his painting. Swinnerton’s early paintings were highly realist, detailed depictions of an endless landscape. His subjects often focused on the exotic contradictions of the desert, a place where the parched land coexisted with thriving beauty.
- Many of Swinnerton’s later paintings took on more minimalist qualities with a monochromatic palette of earthen tones. Often consisting of a single tree, or unadorned sand and brush, he captured the lonely, arid landscape in all its splendor.
He painted desert scenes as a fine artist from about 1920 to 1965. In later years he had a studio in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs, and the locally published Desert Magazine expanded his renown.
A natural arch in Monument Valley, Arizona, was named "Swinnerton Arch" in his honor.
Jimmy Swinnerton died in Palm Springs at the age of 98. Swinnerton canvases are still in demand.
Read more about this topic: Jimmy Swinnerton
Famous quotes containing the words landscape and/or paintings:
“And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child;”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)