Tom Bostelle, painter and sculptor
deb...@comcast.net
POCOPSON, Pa.(AP) A Chester County artist, Tom Bostelle, has died.
Bostelle died Thursday night at his home in Pocopson. He was 83.
Bostelle's works are in the permanent collections of the Delaware Art
Museum, the Chester County Historical Society, West Chester University
and hundreds of private collections around the world.
His portrait of famed American artist Horace Pippin hangs in the
National Portrait Gallery.
Bostelle quit school at 17 to paint and sculpt full time. In 1947, the
self-taught artist completed the first of his "shadow" paintings that
distorted shadows of people to express emotions, a technique he
explored the rest of his life.
Bostelle started his own gallery and studio on the Brandywine Creek in
the late 1960s.
Hyfler/Rosner
<deb...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:1108847889.8...@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Tom Bostelle, painter and sculptor, dies at 83
>
A very interesting painter
http://uk.artring.net/painting/00,44534,00.html
http://www.gbgfineart.com/artists/artist_ins.php3?artist=8
Hyfler/Rosner
>
> A very interesting painter
>
> http://uk.artring.net/painting/00,44534,00.html
> http://www.gbgfineart.com/artists/artist_ins.php3?artist=8
>
Tom Bostelle, 83, artist, sculptor
BYLINE: By JOHN F. MORRISON; mor...@phillynews.com
TOM BOSTELLE was just up the creek from Andrew Wyeth, but
the art the two men produced couldn't have been more
different.
While the legendary Wyeth is world famous for landscapes and
figures that leap at the viewer with dramatic realism,
Bostelle worked in a more impressionistic and often darker
mode.
Although his early work was lyrical and more traditional,
his later paintings were darkly impressionistic, the figures
distorted, sometimes only shadows; there are menacing crowds
and stark landscapes. The impact on the viewer can be
puzzling and disturbing.
In other words, despite working in the same milieu on the
Brandywine Creek in Chester County, where Wyeth is a looming
figure and other members of the Wyeth family carried on the
artistic tradition associated with that region, Bostelle did
his own thing.
As a result, he was an object of controversy, never embraced
the way the Wyeths were by art lovers and critics, although
his work has been widely shown at important galleries here
and abroad and is in many private collections.
He was called a crank, an egomaniac, a maverick - but he was
also called a genius.
Bostelle, painter, sculptor, teacher and author, died
Thursday in his home and studio in Pocopson, Chester County.
He was 83.
His early work ranged from tender paintings of his daughter,
Mary, whom the family called "Miss Boo," to more formal and
stylized portraits, proving he could be a traditionalist if
he wanted to.
But as he aged, his work grew darker, especially after the
death of his wife, Mary, whom he had nursed through a long
period of Alzheimer's disease.
A 2002 biography of Bostelle by Tania Boucher described him
as "arrogant, egocentric and charismatic."
"He has the personal magnetism of a guru," she wrote. "His
fierce dedication to his work has made him an artist's
artist among his circle of peers, and an admired teacher and
critic. He has been able to maintain complete autonomy in
every aspect of his life's work."
Bostelle was born in West Chester, the youngest of eight
children. He knew from childhood that he would be an artist
and dropped out of West Chester High School as soon as he
could to pursue his dream.
At the age of 17, he met the famed American artist Horace
Pippin and talked him into sitting for his portrait. The
picture now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, in
Washington, D.C.
When he was just 14, he copied Rembrandt's "Nightwatch,"
which still hangs in his studio.
His studio was a converted 1920s dance hall, which he called
the "Aeolian Palace." It also once was a canoe rental
facility for the old Lenape Park, which boasted a scenic
railway and a famous merry-go-round.
In fact, one of Bostelle's impressionist paintings shows a
Jesus figure on a merry-go-round being menaced by a dark
crowd.
His vision of the "dark crowd," a recurring theme in his
work, originated with the sight of Japanese soldiers being
dismissed from the army after World War II. He was in the
Army serving in the Pacific at the time, and he saw the
former enemy soldiers as a "poor wretched mass of humanity"
without hope or purpose.
Although he studied briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he was largely self-taught.
Of his work, he once said, "My art concerns the human
condition in my time - the paradox of life. I see people
theatrically, as on a stage - fractured and distorted by the
times, politics, technology, loss of individuality. Life is
at the same time more beautiful and more terrible than it
has ever been."
He described his heartbreaking experience with his wife's
Alzheimer's in his book, "Hob House."
His sculpture included small bronze figures as well as the
life-size shadow constructions of both people and animals
that stand in the garden of his studio.
Besides his daughter, Mary Heath, he is survived by two
sons, James and Jonathan; six grandchildren and three
great-grandchildren.
Services:A private memorial service will be scheduled.