HenryIsaacs
Announcement
SIXTY-FIVE PERCENT OFF DISCONTINUED and ALL SMALL PRINTS!
This week only!
Processing Times.
Each print is made individually, each canvas is stretched by hand. We print in quantities of only one or two prints at a time. Each print is carefully considered and only made available if the image is sharp and the color is fully saturated.
The very small, limited editions that our shop produces makes this shop unique. Unlike posters or most 'offset' produced prints , our art works are limited to as few as five or ten copies of each. This is done to protect your investment as a collector.
It's also frankly more fun for me to come up with an ever changing variety of pictures to present than to just keep offering the same ones over and over again.
Your special requests? Special orders ? Messages ? I’ll do my best. Just remember , Customer Service , Fulfillment, Packing, Shipping, Driving to FedEx, and to the Village Post Office here in Rural Vermont are all handled by the same aging workforce of one.
Have fun! Keep those cards and letters coming ! and despite all of the above words of caution –
My heartfelt thanks.
Henry Isaacs
Sharon, Vermont
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Any purchase is fully exchangeable or refundable if on receipt, the print or painting is disappointing for any reason whatsoever. The studio will fully refund all costs for return shipping and insurance fees so long as you provide tracking numbers and the print or painting is received back in good condition.
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Reviews
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Libby Manchester on Jan 10, 2023
5 out of 5 starsHenry Isaacs promptly responded to insure the shipping address was correct. Love the little print of a favorite National Park scene.
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kwestfall on Jan 16, 2023
5 out of 5 starsNorthern New Mexico is one of the most beautiful places on earth and this piece really captures the color and feel of it. Love it!
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Terry on Dec 24, 2022
5 out of 5 starsA beautiful painting, shipped very quickly! Still, I wish I’d waited for the sale with a significant reduction.
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Calvin James Larson on Dec 23, 2022
5 out of 5 starsExceptional quality product. Mood sensitivity in every aspect. Thought provoking for one familiar with the place and sensitive to time of day and season.
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Gabrielle on Dec 8, 2022
5 out of 5 starsBeautiful artwork exactly as described. Carefully packaged too!
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Helen on Nov 30, 2022
5 out of 5 starsBeautiful. Hangs on our wall and brings back memories of Casco Bay.
About HenryIsaacs
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Vermont Studio -
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Islesford, Little Cranberry Island Studio -
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Inside the Studio -
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A Very Big Painting, 10 feet x 12 feet -
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Winter Painting
HENRY ISAACS. FINE ART, Paintings and Prints
The art of Henry Isaacs: From place to painting
By Daniel Kany
"Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems."
--Winslow Homer
Henry Isaacs’ painting, Cove, Cranberry Island, Maine, folds along a horizon line. Above is a patchwork sky that starts off butter white and beige; it then reaches into cool cerulean and misty blue gray skeins punctuated by warm pinks blossoming up into the firmament. Below is the same sky reflected in the water but rounded by a cove of verdant land and punctuated by peninsula fingers and some green trees that zigzag past the far middle ground into the quilted sky. The far shore starts solid on the left but while it grows in painted density, its colors dissolve to meld with the sky seen above and reflected below.
It is a painting primarily comprising the immaterial sky and its reflection on the water. Yet the physicality of Isaac’s dappled passages sets the seemingly simple scene dancing between areas of color, the solidity of a few bits of inaccessible land, a lusciously painted surface and a set of questions about place and painting.
These new paintings by Isaacs seem simple but they have the strength to slow your eyes on the crawling edges of the flat forms. They take you along the land but without a path and they bring your eyes and thoughts back and forth between the saturated solidity of the terra firma and the light-inspired color theatrics of excitable skies.
Isaacs’ paintings begin with a conversation between traditional landscape and high Modernism. This seems like an easy-going meeting place, especially since it so often takes place under bright skies with a soft breeze blowing in over the ocean. Isaacs welcomes viewers with his lively flickers of color popping all over the thick and chewy surfaces loaded by a hand that obviously loves to paint.
Despite their easygoing introduction, however, Isaacs’ canvases dig deep through the culture of painting and present themselves – no matter how handsome – with serious intellectual heft.
Like the Impressionists, Isaacs generally doesn’t use black. For the Impressionists, this was theoretical dedication to the idea of emulating human perception in terms of light (rather than color) and that black is the absence of light.
But Isaacs is a colorist – not a painter of atmospheric light.
While he is no Impressionist, Isaacs engages in a visual dialogue with Impressionist painting – and consequently with New England plein-air painting in general.
Reaching to art responding to Impressionism, Isaacs opens the door to Cezanne, Fauvism, Homer and the Modernist moment.
Homer might sound out of place here, but he and the Impressionists were radical – and successful – revolutionaries who led the way to major changes in painting. They discarded prevailing technique (notably glazing) and sought more direct painting.
Isaacs’ paintings are so aesthetically appealing and well-executed that they need no introduction for anyone to enjoy them, but they also converse brilliantly with the history of landscape painting relevant to New England.
There is dialogue all through Isaacs’ paintings – beginning with how they are started en plein-air and then are mostly painted in the studio. In other words, at some point Isaacs shifts from observation to following his sensibilities to make the strongest painting possible. This is a shift much like the denouement in a film: We start with background and place, then there is a major transformation and the priority switches to finding the means of resolution.
This theatrical narrative is the narrative of Modernism: It takes you from fiction to reality – in this case, from a distant place to the actual painting in front of you.
As brisk and quick as they first appear, Isaacs’ paintings are often heavily painted, layered and glazed. It’s counter-intuitive that so much paint can feel so fresh, but it makes sense when we consider the work that emerged in the wake of Impressionism, in particular Van Gogh, Matisse and Abstract Expressionism.
Shop members
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Henry Isaacs
Owner, Artist
Henry Isaacs EDUCATION Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. MFA 1982 Rhode Island School of Design. B.F.A. 1973 TEACHING Islesford Workshops, Islesford, Maine 2008-2016. Professor, Painting, Printmaking,
Production partners
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Daniel Kany
Portland, ME
Author, Art Historian, Curator, Art Critic
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