Creeks With Dock.
Nantucket Island.
An original artwork by New England based artist John Austin (1918-2000).
Egg based tempura on artists board.
Signed at the bottom right hand corner.
With sticker on the reverse written in the artists hand.
Undated. I’m not sure when the work was painted. My guess is 1970’s .
John Austin was born in North Carolina. He spent his youth in New Jersey, raised his family in Connecticut and later moved to Nantucket, Massachusetts.
John studied at The Art Students League, New York City under Reginald Marsh. He was mentored by Edward Hopper. As a commercial artist he designed floats for the Macy Parade. During World War II he designed training manuals for troops. He toured in Europe during the war producing many watercolour sketches of troops, the countryside and buildings.
After the war John returned to The Art Students League. By the 1960’s he was working as a full time artist choosing to work in the main with egg tempura on board. His representational paintings of the landscape, of buildings and of abandoned vehicles in Cape Cod, Maine, and New Hampshire rarely include figures or animals. This gives them a quality of great stillness; of something abandoned.
John spent the last years of his life in Nantucket. His paintings were sold at the Lobster Pot Gallery and later Reggie Levine’s Main Street Gallery. They were keenly collected by locals and visitors to the island and are still exhibited in a permanent collection by The Nantucket Historical Association.
Landscape format: 44 x 17 cms or 17 1/2 x 6 3/4 inches.
Condition: Very Good. The edges are rough; my guess the painting was once in a frame. John made his own picture frames. He would create a white surround using hardboard then edge it with black. There are some small superficial marks across the surface of the painting, a faint dark mark in the sky at the top left hand corner and a spot of black paint in the top right hand corner.
