The Bishop’s Apricot, 1924, by Gustave Baumann (American, b. Germany, 1881–1971)
Color woodcut, 15.2 x 19.4 cm (6 x 7? in.)
A noted member of the artist colony in Brown County, Indiana, Gustave Baumann (American, b. Germany, 1881–1971) started a new life in 1918 at the center of the Santa Fe art scene, immersing himself in the dramatic landscapes of northern New Mexico. He devised innovative printing techniques that lent his woodcut prints a luminous quality to match the glowing imagery, broad skies, and relentless sun of the Southwest.
Ten 3½ x 5 in. blank notecards with envelopes in an acetate-topped box.
Printed on recycled paper.
Published with the New Mexico Museum of Art.
ISBN 9780764974663
Katie Hofgard’s digital paintings are built on a love of nature, animals, and fantasy. From small, loosely painted icons to grand, finely detailed dreamscapes, Hofgard’s paintings express a character’s personality at any scale. Given a few hours, she can detail whole worlds. These commissioned portraits—fierce and playful—have earned the admiration of fellow artists who turn to her for help with the intricacies of painting digitally, a medium Hofgard defends in the face of those who might not appreciate its form.
Hofgard, who also goes by Eskiworks, trained at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where she received a BFA in Illustration, and transitioned from painting on canvas to painting digitally. She grew up in Colorado, where she still lives and paints.
Contains five each of the following notecards:
Gold and Green
Jassani Portrait
Miu’s Bell
The Highbrow
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box.
Printed on recycled paper.
ISBN 9780764974373
MF Cardamone (American, b. 1958) collaborates with botanical gardens, environmental organizations, and nature preserves around the world, encouraging the public to get involved with plants through her educational and entertaining art. Projects have taken her to the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, the Amazon Basin in Peru, and the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida.
She documents her love of nature in the style of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical illustration, with a contemporary eye on the relationships between plants and people. Her deft touch in scientific presentation has its roots in her studies at the Barnes Foundation Arboretum School in Pennsylvania. Facing the restoration of a large garden at her new home, she enrolled in a three-year horticultural program. While working on the garden, she immersed herself in plants and their histories, studying Chinese medicine as well.
For her artwork, she collects plant specimens and presses them using traditional herbarium techniques, then incorporates regional iconography, including medicinal and spiritual uses of the plant when possible. MF Cardamone lives and works in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania.
Contains five each of the following notecards:
Arborvitae with Teapot
Mint with Boat
Mr. ZZ Pansyman
Sunflower with Clock
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box.
Printed on recycled paper.
ISBN 9780764974335
Chakra is a Sanskrit word used in yoga and meditation practices to refer to swirling wheels of energy within the body. Seven chakras, each corresponding to a different color vibrational frequency and controlling various bodily functions, align along the spine from the base to the crown of the head. The energy that flows through the chakras is called prana. Proper alignment and balance of the chakras is key for physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
Artist Paul Heussenstamm (American, b. 1949), whose artist parents “met at the easel,†grew up in a highly creative, spiritual environment that helped form the pattern of his life and work. He immersed himself in the philosophies of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity and has made it his life’s work to create sacred art that he shares with others. To this end, he has painted more than 2,000 unique artworks. So that others may discover their own paths, he teaches Art as a Spiritual Practice workshops around the world.
Contains five each of the following notecards:
Chakraman Blue
Chakraman Sky
Chakra Master Black
Chakraman Chocolate
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box.
Printed on recycled paper.
ISBN 9780764975684
A pair of white peacocks at the Bronx Zoo inspired Jessie Arms Botke to embark on a lifetime journey of creating sumptuous, dreamy avian portraits such as these. Her peacocks display the utmost of elegance and grandeur, their plumes and crests often framed by lakes of gold leaf and giant, lush blossoms. An ethereal tranquility emanates from the unblemished world her exotic subjects inhabit.
The Chicago-born decorative painter (1883–1971) encountered those first peacocks while on assignment for her employer, a tapestry designer, and went on to travel the world in search and study of birds. Botke also made linocuts, woodcuts, and even murals (some in collaboration with her artist husband) over an artistic career that lasted more than fifty years.
Contains five each of the following notecards:
White Peacock and Magnolia
Peacocks and Hibiscus
White Peacock
Blue and White
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box.
Printed on recycled paper.
ISBN 9780764975790
In his adopted home of Oxford, England, Sergio Cruz-Duran has documented the town’s historic and hallowed architecture. Many will recognize Brasenose College (named after a door knocker), the law library of Oxford University’s Magdalen College, Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (where George Frideric Handel conducted Athalia), and Radcliffe Square at the center of it all.
His intimate views of Oxford’s very public spaces showcase a precision, detail, and creativity earned from an education in art, architecture, and urban design that took him from Michoacán, Mexico, to California and then to Oxford. In each, light develops the atmosphere while rich colors set temperature and tone: a dusky square, backlit pane windows at twilight, golden sun on old stone, and long shadows punctuated by light through a tall arch. While Cruz-Duran aptly draws figures in many of his other works, his Oxford views are nearly devoid of people. These views are quiet. Timeless.
Contains five each of the following notecards:
- Brasenose View, 1994
- Magdalen View, 2001
- Radcliffe View, 1989
- Sheldonian View, 1989
Wolf Kahn Magenta, Green and Yellow, 2000 Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 106.7 cm (36 x 42 in.)
Brilliant in color and conception, Wolf Kahn’s landscapes glow like living jewels. Kahn (American, b. Germany 1927) was at the center of a 1950s movement toward the fusion of abstract and representative art. His genius for capturing the immediacy of nature’s hues has brought him to the forefront of the American colorist school.
Ten 3½ x 5 in. blank notecards with envelopes in an acetate-topped box.
ISBN 9780764976094
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box
Printed on recycled paper
ISBN 9780764976681
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) spent much of his childhood on the Normandy coast near Le Havre, where he observed the sea, the sand, and the ever-changing weather. As a teenager, he drew and sold caricatures, and made pencil sketches of sailing ships. He began painting when he met Eugène Boudin, one of the first French landscape artists to paint outdoors. Monet was profoundly affected by the immediacy of painting in plein air, and thus began his lifelong fascination with light, color, and capturing on canvas the fleeting sensory perception of nature.
After serving in the military in Algeria from 1861–1862, Monet returned to France. He settled for a time in Paris, where he met Renoir, Cézanne, Whistler, and Manet. Despite his prolific period of the late 1860s, Monet struggled to support his family with infrequent sales of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits. But in these early works one can see the emergence of Monet’s genius for capturing the sublime in the everyday, his broken brushstrokes illuminating his impressions of life.
Contains 5 each of the following notecards:
The Beach at Trouville, 1870
Luncheon on the Grass, center panel, 1865–1866
The Landing Stage, 1871
On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868
Ten 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 2 designs) with envelopes in a decorative folio
Printed on recycled paper
Published with the Barnes Foundation
ISBN 9780764978487
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) is one of the best-loved painters in the history of modern art. After exhibiting with the impressionists in the 1870s and early 1880s, Renoir went on to paint for three more decades, focusing on the bucolic landscapes of the south of France, idealized bathing groups, scenes of his family, and portraiture. His paintings are charming and accessible, yet often boldly experimental, with loose brushstrokes and unexpected compositional arrangements. Throughout his career Renoir looked to the past for inspiration and was influenced especially by eighteenth-century French painters and by the artists of the Italian Renaissance. He is known above all for his mastery of color and facility in the handling of paint—qualities that during his own time won him the admiration of his peers, including Henri Matisse, and which continue to astonish us today.
The two paintings reproduced in this notecard set are from the extraordinary collection of The Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania, which houses one of the world’s finest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern art, including 181 paintings by Renoir.
Contains 5 each of the following images:
Portrait of Jeanne Durand-Ruel (Portrait de Mlle. J.), 1876
Promenade (La Promenade), c. 1906
