Herman Maril

http://www.art.umd.edu/hmgallery/about.html

accessed 14 sep 09

MARIL BIO FOR THE WEBSITE: Herman Maril (1908-1986), a native of Baltimore, received his early training as an artist at the Maryland Art Institute and worked during the Great Depression years on federal projects. Maril also attracted the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who displayed Maril's sketch of the Baltimore harbor in the White House, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, who showed a Maril canvas in his Washington, D.C. mansion.

After the War, Maril began a long-time association with the University of Maryland as a Professor in the school’s Art/Art History Department. He joined the Department in its earliest years, when it was located in the attic of Francis Scott Key Hall. Over the next four decades, as the Department moved to Tawes Hall and ultimately to its current home in the Art/Sociology Building, Maril taught painting to thousands of undergrads and graduates and oversaw the management of the Art program within the Department. Along with graduate level courses in painting, he particularly enjoyed – and consistently taught – the Department’s Painting I courses, a basic requirement for all undergrad Art students.

Maril received ample critical praise and accolades throughout his career, including 50-plus solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the country. The shores of Cape Cod were a particular inspiration for him; it was on Cape Cod that Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection, discovered Maril and began championing his work. Today, the Phillips currently holds 13 Maril paintings in its collection. Along with the Phillips, over 70 museum collections hold Maril artwork, including the Whitney, the Corcoran, the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Walters Art Museum.

Beginning in 2008, a three-year series of Maril exhibitions – including shows at the Provincetown Art Association Museum, the Walters Art Museum, the Ward Museum in Salisbury MD and the University of Maryland's Art Gallery – will commemorate the artist's 100th birthday.

University of Maryland University College- Herman Maril Gallery:

http://www.umuc.edu/art/maril/index.shtml

David Findlay Jr. Inc - Herman Maril Gallery:

http://www.davidfindlayjr.com/indiv_artist.php?id=58

ACME Fine Art - Herman Maril Gallery:

http://www.acmefineart.com/maril/

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Herman Maril (1908-1986)

Herman Maril knew from an early age that he wanted to be a painter. He was born in 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. He did two degrees, one from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and one from Maryland Institute of Art, in order to satisfy his father. During the Depression he took part in the WPA program, where he painted a mural for the US Post Office in Alta Vista, Virginia. Like many of the other artists enrolled in the WPA, Maril adopted Social Realism. However, in his characteristic manner, he still simplified and refined his subject matter. He taught painting at the University of Maryland for forty years, until his death in 1986.

In 1934, Maril moved to Cape Cod, which greatly influenced his painting. He primarily painted the weather and elemental landscapes. Figures and objects were simplified to the least number of lines and colors. With this characteristic, he showed the influence two diverse painters, Pierro della Francesca and Mark Rothko, both artists whose work he admired. While ostensibly he was still painting from nature, the simplicity of his forms, and the abstract way in which these forms were organized, make Maril's work feel fairly abstract. Part of the abstraction may be due to his method of working. While working on the Reclamation commission, he made only occasional sketches in heavy felt pen. For the most part, he was content to look and ask questions; storing up impressions to work on in the studio. While the compositions are abstract, they are by no means uncomposed. Maril took great pains to ensure that all of his paintings were in equilibrium, and that all of the pieces "locked" together; no one object could be taken away.

Maril's paintings and drawings for the Bureau of Reclamation show this tendency to reduction and composition. His ink drawings use the minimum number of lines to define a contour or figure. A sense of space is conveyed with the least information. It is not always easy to identify an individual mark as descriptive of a particular feature, but somehow the marks together describe a scene. The paintings are similar to the drawings in terms of simplicity, but instead of lines, Maril uses color fields. Depth is indicated through atmospheric perspective and layering. In Blanco Diversion Dam, the intense brown and red on the right middle mountain makes it feel closer to the viewer than the mountains above it, in the painting, appear to be further back in the distance because they are painted in cooler colors which are also less intense. The blue patches tie the painting together, as well as drawing the eye through the composition. In his drawings, long lines serve the same purpose.

Source:

US Dept. of Interior , Bureau of Reclamation, Art Collection

by Leslie Stinger, Yale University School of Architecture.