American impressionist Edward Henry Potthast was born on June 10th, 1857 in Cincinnati, Ohio.  He first showed his artistic side when he was very young and would mix his watercolors to come up with some of the most beautiful, vibrant colors.  At an early age his family sent him off to design school.  It was there that he met Thomas Satterwhite Noble, a portrait painter who helped Potthast develop his passion for oil painting.

When Edward turned 16 he began an apprenticeship at a lithographic firm. Lithography was the perfect job to further nurture his passion for mixing paints and inks and he continued lithography until he was 39.

In his late twenties, Edward went off to Munich to study painting.  Like many artist before him, it was his time in Europe that he was able to develop his own style and establish a name for himself.  When he returned to the United States in 1895, he settled down in New York and opened a studio.

By this time, Edward Potthast had become a full-time artist and no longer needed the lithography job to survive.  He was living comfortably in his New York studio and was able to paint all day, everyday.  Because he lived in the city, many of his subjects were picnics in Central Park and sunny beach days on Long Island.

He especially enjoyed painting children being children, for he had never married or had children of his own.  He would depict them swimming in the summer surf on a New England beach or rolling down a grassy hill. Paintings like this were what brought the impressionist era to life.

When Edward Potthast died on March 9th, 1927 he had an established career as an artist and had paintings hanging in museums all over the United States.

About the author:
Crizza
For more information, or if you have an Edward Potthast piece of artwork you would like to sell, please visit our web site http://www.newportart.com

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Image information: Long Beach, 1921, Edward Henry Potthast

Eartha Kitt, 1952 portrait by Carl Van Vechten

“The river is constantly turning and bending and you never know where it’s going to go and where you’ll wind up.  Following the bend in the river and staying on your own path means that you are on the right track.  Don’t let anyone deter you from that.“
– Eartha Kitt

When Eartha Mae Kitt was born in rural South Carolina in 1927, no one could have predicted that the unwanted daughter of a black Cherokee sharecropper and a white man — abused by the family with whom she lived as a child because of her “yella” complexion — would become an artist whose unmistakable voice, straight talk and intoxicating beauty would make the world swoon for generations to come. 

Although she later became known as a diva, Kitt spent the early years of her life in a pattern of abuse and extreme poverty.   She became an advocate for homeless children and she retained the strength of self-reliance that she had to build as an abused child throughout her life.  In her own words, “I was given away.  If your mother gives you away, you think everybody who comes into your life is going to give you away.”

Eartha Kitt grew up without many of the things that most people take for granted — a family, a home, a safe place to sleep, a birthday (she finally learned the date of her birth in 1997) — and yet she found joy in the arts and managed to see opportunity around each corner from a young age.  She lived the spirit of Artistic Lemonade, and she found those things that were missing from her childhood later in her life.  She often referred to the public as her family, and she built a family of her own as a mother and a grandmother.

She followed the path of her life without hesitation and without regret or fear.  As an artist and as a person, she refused to be defined by others or to be limited to any one style or form.  In the role of Catwoman on the Batman television series, Kitt once spoke the lines, “I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma. “  The words fit the actress as well as the character — so much so that the quote is often attributed to Kitt herself.  She was a student of living who soaked up every moment of life and learning she could find on this earth.  In her passing the world has lost an irrepressible spirit, an adventurous artist, and a lady who was all about the lemonade.

“My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself,
afraid of what I think or of my opinions. “
– Eartha Kitt

Links:

• Official web site
• Obituary in the New York Times
• Wil Haygood’s tribute from the Washington Post
• IMDB entry

Kurt Vonnegut

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

Article by Ulla Kelly, Artistic Lemonade Contributing Writer

Born on Armistice Day, 1922, Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most easily recognizable names in science fiction literature, and his work is often characterized by his own unique sense of humor.   His best known book is probably Slaughterhouse-Five, which was also one of the films made from his books. He was also a graphic artist, providing illustrations for some of his novels and became well-known for simple ink drawings of abstractions of faces.

There is speculation that his frequently dark humor and perspective on the world stemmed from the suicide of his mother and the death of his sister and his own experiences as a prisoner of war during World War 2 (see the vonnegutweb.com critical bibliography for some of these sources).

Vonnegut was not a fan of the internet, saying, “The Internet stuff is spooky.”  He created an alter ego called Kilgore Trout who appears in several novels and short stories. Several bands were inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, for example, The Grateful Dead and Joe Satriani used his title Ice Nine. One of his funniest and most repeated quotes is, “why don’t you take a flying f*** at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying f*** at the mooooooooooooon?”

He died on April 21, 2007.  His official website contains moving tributes from his children and others as well as rare or previously-unseen works and a gallery of his visual art work.

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand
– Kurt Vonnegut

– Melody Daniel, Artistic Lemonade Editor

“I don’t know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.”

– Al Jarreau

Editor’s note: At Artistic Lemonade, we often profile artists who have overcome great struggles through art. Sometimes, though, we have the privilege of profiling an artist like Al Jarreau who embraces the many gifts of his own life and finds joy in touching the lives of others and helping them make Artistic Lemonade through his music. As you read the following profile of Jarreau’s work, please think of the positive influence it has had on the millions who appreciate his music.

The world came to know of him and has been entranced by his rich, soothing vocals since 1975. Long before that, though, the spark had been ignited in one of America’s most tantalizing soulful vocal jazz artists: Al Jarreau. He began singing early in life, and by the age of four was already performing for awe struck audiences within his hometown of Milwaukee WI. Music, while playing an important role in his upbringing, did not become the driving force or passion in Jarreau’s life until much further down the road.

His educational endeavors set Jarreau out on a path seemingly headed for a career in rehabilitation counseling. Though that path eventually led him to San Francisco California, it was there that Jarreau found himself drawn back into the world of music, as he began performing with a trio headed by George Duke at a local hole in the wall Jazz club. Here is where it became overwhelmingly clear that music was to be the mark that Al would leave on this earth.

Performing at such esteemed venues as Dino’s and Bitter End West, Jarreau then set his sights on New York City. After gaining national television exposure from such hosts as Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin, he then went on to perform at the famed Improv comedy club, serving as the intermittent entertainment between such acts as Bette Midler, John Belushi and Jimmie Walker. Jarreau to released his first full album, We Got By, in 1975; this critically acclaimed debut spread far and wide, and later that year earned a German Grammy award.

This set the stage for Al to embark on a 1977 whirlwind world tour, and earned him his first US Grammy for best Jazz vocal performance, followed up by a second US Grammy for the same, in 1978. He didn’t stop there, though; with his 1980 album release of Breakin’ Away, Jarreau found the door opened to a much broader audience, earning him two more Grammys.

After more time spent touring the globe, Jarreau headed back to the studio and went on to create Heaven and Earth in 1992 with the help of Narada Michael Walden. This album not only earned him his fifth Grammy (this time for best R&B vocal performance) but also put Jarreau into the rare category of having won Grammys in three separate categories of music: R&B, jazz, and pop. From here he went on to release 3 more albums, appear on several televisions shows, and even had a stint on Broadway in the hit musical Grease! In 2001, he received his own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame: literally cementing Al Jarreau into history as one of the greatest Jazz performers of our time.

The photograph featured with this article was taken at a US Department of Education book drive event held in 2004. The photo was taken by a US federal government employee and the image is in the public domain.

Links:

• Official Biography on AlJarreau.com
• SmoothViews.com Interview
• Google Music Search
• Wikipedia Article
• Jarreau’s department in our Artistic Lemonade Shop

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(article by Carolyn Osborne, Artistic Lemonade Contributing Writer)

“It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.”
– Paul Gauguin

Before the invention of photography, the only way you could preserve your mother-in-law’s image for posterity was to get someone to draw or paint her. People also did death masks where they put plaster on the face of the dead person, but that’s a little grotesque. Painting, then, had a very important function—it was one of the chief ways of preserving an image.

Over four or five hundred years, western European painters had created some effective means for translating a three-dimensional landscape, still life, or face into the two dimensions of the canvas. This function ended as soon as the first photograph was taken. Now one’s second cousin twice-removed could be photographed and her image retained forever.

Over the last part of the nineteenth century and well into the early twentieth century, painters began to explore the nature of light, of paint, and of representation. Paul Gauguin’s art was a footstep along this path. He was considered post-Impressionist—his art came after that of Monet who explored light and color through hazy patches of paint. Gauguin’s art explores color and his way of painting anticipates Matisse and the other Fauve (“wild beast”) painters of the modernist period. He also explored nontraditional subjects for his painting, particularly when he moved to Tahiti to get away from the problematic western culture in France.

Like many artists, Gauguin paid an emotional price for his art and he also made his art despite emotional and financial struggles. Gauguin suffered from depression and anyone who has ever had this condition knows that it is extremely difficult to motivate oneself to do something while feeling depressed. So the fact that he actually did a lot of painting is a personal triumph. To top it off, they didn’t exactly have effective medications for depression at the end of the nineteenth century (although they did have some interesting legal choices for recreational drinking and drugs such as cocaine and absinthe).

Being a depressed artist is not easy on a family, and Gauguin eventually left his wife and kids in Denmark and returned to France to paint. Two of his children died in his lifetime and he had many struggles trying to support his wife and children financially. Although the Romantic idea of giving everything up for one’s art was likely still the watchword of the day, it is also likely there were times when Gauguin felt guilty for the sacrifices he demanded of family members.

Gauguin died at a young age — 54 —from the effects of syphilis, which was incurable in those days before antibiotics, and also from the effects of alcoholism. Yet he left an incredible oeuvre behind, paintings that guided the modernist movement in its exploration of the properties of image, dimensionality, and paint.

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”
– Gauguin

Links:

• http://www.expo-gauguin.net
• http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/gauguin_paul.html
• http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gauguin/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gauguin
• Gauguin’s department at our Artistic Lemonade Shop

The image featured with this article is Paul Gauguin’s 1896 painting Poor Fisherman. The painting is in the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil.

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Maya Angelou could easily have surrendered to despondency and despair given the countless obstacles life placed in her way. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in Saint Louis, Missouri, she was sent to live with her Arkansas grandmother at the age of three when her parents divorced. There she was exposed to the cruelty of southern bigotry and prejudice at first hand.

When she was seven, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and kept the horrific secret from all but her brother, Bailey. After the man was killed by her uncle, she blamed herself for telling anybody and entered a world of self-imposed silence for five years. Becoming pregnant in her senior year, she dropped out of school at age sixteen and gave birth to her son, Guy, and then set off on her own to raise him as a single mother. She worked at a wide variety of jobs to support herself and Guy, at times being a Creole cook, a cocktail waitress, a streetcar conductor and, reportedly, even a madam. Her first marriage ended in divorce.

She became friends with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and took part in the civil rights movement; his assassination, which occurred on her birthday, provided additional trauma. She gathered up these appalling experiences and combined them with the deep religious faith imparted by her grandmother and her own indomitable thirst for knowledge.

Writing her first autobiographical book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, provided her with solace while helping her deal with her grief over King’s death. The alchemy of her resilient personality and talent miraculously served to transmute the lead of loss into the gold of triumph and she soon found herself a figure on the national stage. She studied dance with Martha Graham, acted in Jean Genet’s The Blacks and toured with the opera, Porgy and Bess. She became conversant in Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish. Several United States Presidents tapped her for service; President Clinton asked her to compose and read a poem (“On the pulse of the Morning”) especially for his inauguration. She has written more than thirty books and several screenplays, yet still found time to serve as the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Her wide range of accomplishments and intellectual interests has truly made her America’s Renaissance Woman and an inspiration to all.

Links:

• Dr. Angelou’s profile from the University of Minnesota Voices from the Gaps project
• Biography at the National Women’s Hall of Fame
• PBS African American Lives profile
• Information from the African American Literature Book Club
• Maya Angelou’s official web site
• Dr. Angelou’s department at our Lemonade Stand

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No artist before Pablo Picasso, and arguably no artist since, has seen the level of notoriety in his or her lifetime that Picasso did. Pablo Picasso, born October 25, 1881 in Spain, was said to be a child prodigy. Though he is most famous for cubism, Picasso painted in a number of styles, such as realism, caricature classicism, and surrealism.

The Blue Period is the most famous of Picasso’s periods; it dates from 1901 to 1904 and is characterized by a predominantly blue palette and subjects focusing on outcasts, beggars, and prostitutes. Perhaps the most famous painting from the Blue Period is The Blind Man’s Meal. Already launched into fame by his various styles, Picasso’s Cubism quickly shook up the art world. Cubism is essentially trying to capture the subject from all possible vantage points at the same time by turning 3 dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining. The style was created by Picasso along with his great friend Georges Braques.

Picasso discovered ancient Iberian sculpture from Spain and Africa and began to incorporate the simplified forms he found in these sculptures into his most famous and infamous piece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. Although he spent many years in France, Picasso was in Spain during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The Republican government asked him to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the world exposition in Paris, for which he painted the renowned oil Guernica in 1937. Picasso was undoubtedly influenced by the total destruction by bombs of the town of Guernica in the Basque country.

Much is overlooked when it comes to Picasso. Many people do not realize that he was also a sculptor (see the photo with this article) and a printmaker. A noted womanizer and sexist, he had contempt for women artists and women as a whole referring to them as “goddesses or doormats”. He has rarely received any criticism for this, save for some ardent feminists in obscure texts. Despite his all too human frailties, prodigy or not, Picasso was one of the greatest painters of his time.

This Lemonade Profile was written by baya620,
an Artistic Lemonade contributing writer.

Links:

• The Online Picasso Project
• Picasso’s profile in the Time 100
• Search Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Picasso’s department at our Lemonade Stand

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Clara Smith was born in 1894 in Spartanburg, SC. Growing up in the south was not easy for an African American in that time. She faced much racism and endured economic struggles. To escape these conditions, Clara Smith became a part of The Great Migration in which 7 million African Americans fled the south and moved to the north, mid-west and west between 1910 and 1970. She carried memories of her life in the south with her when she left, and her earlier life experiences always informed her music. Her years of personal struggle are reflected in her emotionally raw performances, certainly an example of “artistic lemonade.” In 1935, at the young age of 40, Clara Smith died of heart failure. She had been actively performing up until her death.

Links:

• Smith’s profile on the University of South Carolina’s Center for Southern African-American Music
• Clara Smith on Red Hot Jazz
• Smith’s song “Don’t Advertise Your Man” on Archive.org
• Clara Smith’s department at our Lemonade Stand

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