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This is an absolutely dynamic expressionist painting by American artist, Sterling Strauser (1907-1995)
A bouquet of white flowers in a black vase and set against a black background. Painted in frenzied, expressionist fashion with Strauser's unique impasto work and dry swirls "scratched" onto the paint.
Medium: oil on masonite panel
Signed lower right
11.5 x 9.5 inches
16.25 x 14.25 inches, framed
Condition: very good; a few spots of paint loss at top right corner.
Provenance: Southern California estate.
About the artist, from Askart: Sterling Strauser was born in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania and became a painter in expressionist/impressionist styles who used a heavy impasto technique. He began painting in 1926 in a near impressionist style that later evolved into an assertive Klee-like modernism. Still later his style softened into what one collector, Jim Sittig, of his work termed "romantic American expressionism." He was also an illustrator for "Mademoiselle" magazine and "Unicorn-A Magazine of Poetry".
Fellow artist, Russian David Burliuk, a member of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich, said of Strauser: "It is amazing to find a self-taught artist in a quaint little provincial village painting like the masters in the great art centers of the world."
With his wife, Dorothy, he was a collector and promoter of folk art, and for many years was a teacher, office manager, and supervisor of the boiler works at the Pocono, Pennsylvania public schools. Many of his sketching trips were into the Pocono Mountains.
In 1996, a retrospective show was held at the Lyzon Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. An exhibition of his work, "A Modernist Revisited," was held at the Reading Public Museum in PennsylvaniaNov. 27, 1999-Feb. 27, 2000.
Source:
Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"
