Edwin Deakin Exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento CA

Celebrated painter Edwin Deakin's beautiful works depicting picturesque scenes of California and European landscape, architecture and still life were incredibly moving.  Fortunately, I got to view the exhibition before it closed on 20 April 2008.  

While looking at Edwin Deakin's paintings and sketches in the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento CA, one could appreciate this amassed collection of his work as the true gift it was, that the Crocker pulled this exhibition together.  To follow is a description from the Crocker, with a Deakin quote.

Deakin knew the Crocker Art Gallery (as it was formerly called) well and thought highly of it. He visited in 1888, three years after Margaret Crocker donated the gallery building and collection to the citizens of Sacramento. Impressed, Deakin spoke warmly of his visit:

He says he doubts if in the Louvre the doors are finer than in this gallery. Of the paintings Mr. Deakin gives a frank and critical opinion, commending most in comparison with similar works abroad, and . . . thinks the city possessed of a great treasure in such a property. The artists agree that the School of Design is situated in rooms not surpassed, if equaled by any.  For more information about the artist

Deakin's imagined and real worlds came through his brush.   I stood in front of his Grapes and Architecture paintings for several minutes, and then sat in a chair looking directly at the painting again and again, quickly jotting notes.  (I'm sorry to say I couldn't find an image of these paintings to show here.)  My notes follow:

Deakin's "Grapes and Architecture" have a musky, grayed atmosphere, out of which finely rendered grapes extend toward the viewer, as if they are welcome to be picked, plucked, and popped into one's mouth for a succulent squirt of sweet sugar from this ripened fruit of the vine.  As a painter and one who has painted grapes, bunches and bunches of them, these Deakin grapes are iconic and one can see the relationship to one of his endeavors of Japanning.  The atmosphere Deakin creates fills the canvas background's outer regions with a hazy, smoky quality, muting the subject.  There seems to be little transition from the gray phthalo blue/green with tinges of turquoise to the foreground grapes in robust purple, dark and full, rounded and transparent. 

It's an amazing accomplishment, achieving contrast that doesn't have to be grounded in reality, yet the realism is so ultimately satisfying that even one like myself who prefers abstract expressionism, can drool and dream of having the control to paint like Deakin.

The conversation between viewer and the artwork itself rambles through so many realities that for a painter like myself, while looking closely at perspective, use of color, atmosphere and image placement on the canvases,  questions came up of how did he do that?   Beyond that a desire to explore realism was evoked.

                                                                —Viktorya is an art appreciator and art maker who lives in Sacramento.