Harold Granucci (b.1916 - 2007)

Harold Granucci (1916-2007) completed his four-year college degree in three years at Quinnipiac College in the 1930s. He worked for Wallace Silversmith's as an accountant and then opened his own accounting practice in the late 1940's. In 1953 he opened a furniture store in Wallingford, Connecticut. His ledgers and journals were like works of art, they were so detailed and meticulously written in pencil. Harold retired in 1979 and acquired a Texas Instruments calculator as a premium from a local bank. He began to use it for various calculations and one thing led to another and soon he was back to his early love of geometry and mathematics. 

The drawings that we see today are the result of the next twenty years of calculation and experimentation. Each one required many mathematical calculations to determine where points should be located on a circle or in relation to other points. Then Harold had to determine how to connect the points. The resulting beautiful patterns that emerged were often surprises to him at the beginning but as his skills improved (in his 70s and 80s!) he began to consider the beauty of the result and also added color to enhance the aesthetics. 

Harold liked to work with classical shapes such as the "golden rectangle" and the "golden triangle" and many of his works were formed by the overlaying of these shapes and others in carefully calculated processes. One of his favorite pieces was the "Planets" in which he used the actual density of the planets of our solar system to determine how to space the lines in the drawing of the same-sized planets around the sun. His logic in this was that the actual comparative sizes of the planets would have made the drawing less interesting from a geometrical perspective. He also became interested in various ancient symbols such as the yin and the yang and the yoga symbols and incorporated these into many of his later works.

Anne Brown (b. 1941 )

Anne Brown's art has been exhibited nationally and illustrated in numerous books and publications. Her art has been described as "agitating a stimulating scrutiny of our systematic values in an unblinking lens of folk wisdom." 

Brown was highly regarded and reviewed by numerous critics in the 70’s and 80’s, including the esteemed Robert Taylor, art critic and Boston Globe art editor. Kyra Montagu, also a critic for the Globe, wrote of her Boston Museum of Science show with "Seven At Large", “Anne Brown is the fascination of the show....they are extraordinary. Some are vile and macabre, others stunningly handsome and occasionally beautiful. At the very best, she transforms the typically tacky pastime of making jewelry from stuff we find on the beach into a powerful and haunting art form.....she demonstrates confidence and dexterity in handling of a very wide group of materials...visceral... more theatrical than wearable...they are not quite fetishes, but glimmer lugubriously on the periphery of the real world." 

A native to Cape Cod and Boston’s North Shore, outsider artist Anne Brown has been widely recognized for her “sculpture to wear” necklaces of the 60’s-70’s. Her work derives from collected natural and manmade discarded materials which she then responds to, creating a sculptural dialogue that a person can exhibit through wearing. These narrative necklaces and artworks became a stepping off point for her later, larger found object sculptures which she continues to work in today. 

Having been brought up on the ocean in Marblehead, MA, she has in recent years returned to her early fascination with the beaches and harbors. A newfound collection of driftwood, shipwreck artifacts and other found objects has provided the inspiration to create driftwood sculpture, wall reliefs and jewelry from this source. 

Read more about Anne's shows here.

John Tweddle (b. 1938 - 2022)

Nationally-known artist John Tweddle was raised in a trucker’s family, and lived on the road for months at a time. He developed early on the rare capability of recording both the romance and the difficulties of the life that sped past him. Tweddle moved about the country, spending time in Missouri, Georgia, New York, Oklahoma, California, and New Mexico. He produced biting, poignant, incisive commentaries on American life.

Tweddle’s narrative paintings often have frames within frames and depict people or animals in repeated, simultaneous activities, challenging the viewer to search and “read” their meanings, much like viewing an early Renaissance mural. John Tweddle moved to New York from his Kentucky hometown in 1969.

Considered by most as an ‘outsider artist’, his works mostly explore ideas of class and his own identity growing up as a Southerner. Drawing a lot from the culture of his era, Tweddle’s paintings often depict naked women, trucks and peace signs. Influential art advocate Robert Scull, among the first to champion artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist avidly collected many of Tweddle’s naive, folkloric paintings and drawings. Strongly coloured and patterned with recurring motifs like dollar signs and crosshatching, Tweddle drew liberally from the “low art” traditions of cartoons and comic books while mounting an intellectually rigorous exploration of capitalism, iconography and the counterculture revolution.

Tweddle’s authentic representation of the American experience far removed from the New York’s cultural establishment highlighted a growing concern with the interplay of art and commerce. By 1980, Tweddle had retreated from New York’s cultural milieu, preferring instead to work in relative isolation. John Tweddle exhibited at many institutions and galleries internationally including MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. He received two NEA grants and his work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Read more about John Twedle's shows here.

Felipe Jesus Consalvos (b. 1891-1960)

A self-appointed “artist, healer, and man,” Felipe Jesus Consalvos (1860-1960) worked for much of his life as a cigar roller, and he extrapolated the vernacular tradition of cigar band collage to a sophisticated practice. The Havana-born artist immigrated to Miami around 1920, eventually settling in New York and then Philadelphia. His obsessive body of work—over 750 surviving collages on paper, found photographs, musical instruments, furniture, and other unexpected surfaces—was discovered in 1980 at a West Philadelphia garage sale. Consalvos' practice parallels and in some cases prefigures certain contemporaneous developments in Surrealist, Dada, and Futurist and Pop collage, and even poetry. His collages share the biting socio-political satire and absurdist impulse of Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst, along with abstruse mysticism.

See more about Felix Consalvo's Exhibitions here!