Johnathan Singer Abstract Oil Painting Homage to Ilya Bolotowskiy Hard Edged Abstraction, 1972

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This work takes its cues from Ilya Bolotowsky and Piet Mondrian. A fine example of 1970's hard edged geometric abstraction. … Read more This work takes its cues from Ilya Bolotowsky and Piet Mondrian. A fine example of 1970's hard edged geometric abstraction.
Artist, painter & master photographer Jonathan Singer was born in 1948. As a young man, Singer, a native New Yorker took art classes at the Museum of Modern Ar. As the protégé of Ilya Bolotowski, the painter (a member of "The Ten," a group that included Louis Schanker, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Joseph Solman), Singer dreamed of becoming an artist, but his Jewish mother got her wish and Singer became a doctor instead but always kept a hand in the realm of art and photography. His two favorite subjects were flowers and graffiti. He’d spent many hours with graffiti writers (some of them famous, such as Lady Pink). In Fort Apache, the Bronx, on Sundays, the cops would marvel at this one tall white man blithely wandering the streets with his camera, a Hasselblad with a price tag of $40,000. This is the push that eventually led Singer to the doors of the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C., and its chair of botany, Dr. John Kress. Using novel digital camera techniques that did not exist ten years ago, Singer has created masterpieces of photographic art. Inspired by the work of the great botanical artists that came before him, Dr. Singer has developed a style of modern digital photography that possesses both the clarity and the artistry of traditional botanical illustration. Revealing the delicate structures of the plants at a level of detail unachievable with brush and paint. He compiled 250 floral images into a five-volume, hand-pressed, double elephant folio—a printing method not used since Audubon’s Birds of America in the 1840s—and Botanica Magnifica, as it is called, earned a spot in Natural History’s rare book room. work is featured in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. Singer takes pictures of endangered flowers. His extraordinary photographs have impressed Eileen Ford, the Smithsonian, and a Japanese collector with very deep pockets. Singer’s masterpiece, Botanica Magnifica, was displayed at the National Museum of Natural History at the Center for Botanical Art and Illustration. Singer’s photographs have been compared, at least in style, to the works of Brueghel, Vermeer and Rembrandt—all artists that Singer says Bolotowsky advised him to study because “they handle light better than anyone else ever did.” Somehow every part of Singer’s flowers are properly lit and in focus. Of course, Singer has upgraded from the Polaroid he had as a child, to a $40,000 color-perfect H2D-39 Hasselblad digital camera. He has shown at Elga Wimmer Gallery in New York.
Singer has won the Hasselblad Laureate Award and the 2009 Carl Linnaeus Silver Medal. See less