The Ozols Collection: A Museum of American Painting and Pedagogy

Happy Summer Solstice ☀️🌙

https://ozolscollection.org/happy-summer-and-longest-moment-of-light-light-that-first-phenomenon-reveals-to-us-the-spirit-and-the-living-soul-of-the-wo/?fbclid=IwAR0mr3twkMgKfuLx1RK6zyYp_-GBbJ0k0YQmXlQVh2c-eF3JsWNCZDKarjU

Happy Summer and Longest Moment of Light from The Ozols Collection! “Light, that first phenomenon, reveals to us the spirit and the living soul of the world…” (Johannes Itten) – The Ozols Collection Happy Summer and Longest Moment of Light from The Ozols Collection! “Light, that first phenomenon, reveals to us the spirit and the living soul of the world…” (Johannes Itten) Auseklis Ozols Toward the Light. Oil on Linen. Private Collection All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the ...

Happy Father’s Day from the Ozols Collection ! We are taking this day to honor the artist Auseklis Ozols, President of the Ozols Collection as well as Father and Founder of the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts.

With the greatest gratitude for all that this father of the arts has created, shared, given, and taught to our community over the past five decades we offer our deepest and most heartfelt thanks.

We have listened and learned about history, about truth, beauty, the relationships of past and present, the importance of vision, of structure, proportion, relationships, observation, and perception. We have been inspired by the unique manner, means, and methods of historical painting techniques passed down from teacher to student for centuries and then translated and demonstrated for all of us.

Thank you AO for a unique vision and legacy of teaching, of sharing sacred ideologies, of patience and of giving. Thank you for your selflessness and for offering your wisdom and experience with every student invited toward the threshold of your vision.

Following are a selection of portraits of A. O. in celebration of his work as a visionary artist, teacher, and influence. There are many more waiting in the wings for discussion and unveiling: both self portraits and paintings or sculpture by other artists that admired or learned from him. We look forward to the opportunity to share them all with you !

Auseklis Ozols
Auseklis Ozols Fine Art
Saskia Ozols
Aija Gibson
Indra Ozols
Indra Botanica



https://ozolscollection.org/happy-fathers-day-from-the-ozols-collection/

Happy Father’s Day from The Ozols Collection ! – The Ozols Collection Happy Father’s Day from The Ozols Collection ! Self Portrait (Head Study) by Auseklis Ozols. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection Happy Father’s Day from the Ozols Collection ! We are taking this day to honor the artist Auseklis Ozols, President of the Ozols Collection as well as Father and Founder...

Thank you from all of us at the Ozols Collection for your unbridled support and good will toward our preservation efforts !!

Our first GiveNOLA day was a success thanks to your generosity and care. We are so grateful, and look forward to being in touch with each of you individually.

Sincerely, The Ozols Collection

Please support our mission, developed by Auseklis Ozols in 1978. At 80 years old, he has been put in a position to compete with his own life's work by the daughter of his late business partner. The painting tells it all.

https://ozolscollection.org/self-portrait-as-a-tree-stump/

Self Portrait as a Tree Stump – The Ozols Collection Self Portrait as a Tree Stump Auseklis Ozols. Self Portrait as Oak Tree Stump. 2021, Collection of the Ozols Family This painting created by Auseklis Ozols in 2021 represents his feelings after being extricated from the Academy he founded by the daughter of his former business partner. Tags: Ausekli...

Today is the day! Thank you for your help in preserving these historical methods of teaching art!

https://www.givenola.org/ozolscollection

GiveNOLA Day! GiveNOLA Day, an initiative of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, is a one-day online giving event. For 24 hours, everyone who loves our region can support their favorite local causes by donating to one or more of 700+ participating nonprofit organizations.

With your help, we can honor, share, and preserve this legacy of knowledge for future generations.

GiveNOLA Day (May 3rd) is a 24-hour event hosted by the Greater New Orleans Foundation to inspire people to give generously to nonprofits, making our region stronger, creating a thriving community for all. Please consider the Ozols Collection in this online fundraising event

https://www.givenola.org/ozolscollection

https://ozolscollection.org/1642-2/

“The Collection was born as a result of my untoward expulsion from the school, the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, that I founded in 1978, and which I still retain the name to. It was my life’s work, 42 years maintaining aesthetic disciplines which had been abandoned by other local art schools. I was rejected as Director Emeritus by the owner of the building that housed the Academy.” (Auseklis Ozols )

Auseklis Ozols on Founding the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, Retiring, and the Ozols Collection. – The Ozols Collection Auseklis Ozols on Founding the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, Retiring, and the Ozols Collection. Founding Document of the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts provided by the Louisiana Secretary of State to Auseklis Ozols in 1978. A precious paper, listing Auseklis Ozols with his home adress as the....

https://mailchi.mp/749845a432b2/honor-preserve-and-share-an-artistic-legacy-givenola-day-has-begun

Honor, preserve, and share an artistic legacy: giveNOLA day has begun !    Auseklis Ozols, Self Portrait, 2003. Oil on Linen. Private collection. https://ozolscollection.org/artifact-analysis-self-portrait-by-auseklis-ozols-2003/

With your help, we can honor, share, and preserve this legacy future generations. giveNOLA day starts today !!

https://www.givenola.org/ozolscollection

Make a difference by joining us for 24 hours of giving to benefit our regional nonprofits. Now in its 9th year, GiveNOLA Day is a 24-hour event hosted by the Greater New Orleans Foundation. Together, let’s inspire people to give generously so that we can make our region stronger and create a thriving community for all.

Please consider the Ozols Collection in this online fundraising event created by the Greater New Orleans Foundation ! GiveNOLA day is May 3rd.

Early giving starts today, April 18th. The above link goes directly to our donation page on the GNOF website.

We will be grateful for any help ! The tasks that lay ahead are challenging, and with your help we hope to secure a storage and exhibition space for the preservation and conservation of artwork in our collection.

The Ozols Collection is a a federally recognized 501c3 organization dedicated to preservation, research, practice, and education in historical painting techniques. At the Collection we simultaneously look to history and the future with the understanding that one can not exist without the other. Our unique and irreplaceable archive is foremost a teaching collection which documents the pedagogy of painting while inviting scholarship on the diverse language, practice, and history of visual literacy.

GiveNOLA Day! GiveNOLA Day, an initiative of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, is a one-day online giving event. For 24 hours, everyone who loves our region can support their favorite local causes by donating to one or more of 700+ participating nonprofit organizations.

The Ozols Collection is an organization dedicated to the preservation, research, practice, and education of historical painting techniques. It is a federally recognized non profit 501(c)(3) organization.

At the Collection we simultaneously look to history and the future with the understanding that one can not exist without the other. Our unique and irreplaceable archive is foremost a teaching collection which documents the pedagogy of painting while inviting scholarship on the diverse language, practice, and history of visual literacy.

The Collection was born during the height and silence of the coronavirus pandemic. Since 2020, we have been working to archive, document, and preserve a unique legacy of art and teaching; now with all of the paperwork in order, we will be reaching out in the near future with important announcements.

Please keep us in mind for future workshops, lectures, learning and giving opportunities, and visit our website for more information on our work and mission.

We are trying to rebuild AO's mailing list (when he retired he left without it !) If you are interested in staying up to date with our preservation efforts and upcoming events please email [email protected] to add your contact information.

https://ozolscollection.org/join-our-mailing-list/

https://ozolscollection.org/happy-pi-day-from-the-ozols-collection/

Happy Pi day from the Ozols Collection ! We thought this masterpiece of painting and geometry entitled "Disciples," by Auseklis Ozols, might be fitting as we consider celebrating numbers and their relationship to aesthetics and beauty.

“Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. Pi Day is an annual opportunity for math enthusiasts to celebrate…”

During his 50 years of teaching, Ozols offered regular bi-annual lectures on sacred geometry and its influence on the history of art. He demonstrated and drew the relationships by hand on a wall in front of an audience of students, patrons, collectors and peers.

These events have always been packed and filled with excitement as AO carefully begin his enormous drawings with a hand carved mahogany compass about the length of his own arm.

Ozols continues to offer these lectures by special arrangement and invitation on an annual basis. Please contact us for more information.

https://ozolscollection.org/our-new-logo-did-you-know-ozols-means-oak/

The Ozols Collection has a new logo ! We are thrilled with this original drawing by Auseklis Ozols which celebrates our native Louisiana Live Oak, or Quercus Virginiana. An iconic image in the Gulf South, this tree is known for its endurance, strength, stability, and beauty.

Did you know that the name Ozols also means Oak in Latvian? It is no wonder Auseklis Ozols has been so drawn to painting this tree en plein air for the past 50 years. The little acorn below is a reminder to nurture the future with integrity.

https://ozolscollection.org/photo-of-auseklis-ozols-and-walter-stuempfig-1963/

Auseklis Ozols with his Painting Professor and mentor, The American Artist, Walter Stuempfig (perhaps 1963.) Ozols sits with Stuempfig in a park while he has his shoes shined.

Stuempfig was from an old Philadelphia family and a well respected, highly sought after painter in the North East. He taught at The Museum School of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, ( the first Art Academy in America) where he met Ozols as a student. Ozols went on to win the most prestigious prizes and positions offered to students at the Academy.

“The Triumph of Louisiana,” or “The Apotheosis of Time,” by Auseklis Ozols. Oil on Linen, Private Collection 2000

As we prepare to welcome the new year we also prepare welcome for change and transformation. This painting about apotheosis, development, and the process of becoming addresses the relationships of dawn and dusk, of flight with stasis, and of light with darkness. The contrasts of beginnings with endings and of opposites offer contemplation on the circles of life and and how we occupy them.

Today , as Louisiana is suffering with covid we hope for a future with healing, light, and of course art.

Many blessings in the new year and beyond from the Ozols Collection !

https://ozolscollection.org/happy-new-year-from-the-ozols-collection/

Looking forward to these new lectures !! Exciting new classes with Auseklis Ozols coming soon to Abbey Art Works !! Please contact Lyn Hill Taylor for details. For more about the artist please visit http://www.ozolscollection.org

More details soon!

Practice Preservation / Institute for Fine Arts Practice and Preservation

Happy Birthday America !! Two paintings of the same scene at two major American cultural institutions now offer additional insight and entry points for analysis.

Further research and documentation about painting, sculpture, and certainly all of the arts contains the potential benefit of enlightening society regarding perspectives other than one’s own, introducing ethical arguments for debate, and offering sources for learning empathy.

Gigi Sperinck

👍🏻

Portrait of Auseklis Ozols painting on Horn Island, by his student Billy Solitario. What a treat to see this, thank you Billy Solitario for posting! It is so nice to see a record of AO's influence, especially by an artist he taught and mentored ! We will post a landscape of almost the exact same composition as this that AO painted in 1992. Stay tuned ! What a legacy, art connects us all in so many ways....

Repost!
Thanks for posting this great memory!
“Auseklis Ozols Painting on Horn Island”
Artist- Billy Solitario
2016
Oil on Canvas

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Conference Postponed until Spring/Summer 2021 – International Institute for Fine Arts Practice, Research, and Preservation

practicepreservation.org Conference Postponed until Spring/Summer 2021 Post published:June 25, 2020 Post Category:Uncategorized Our conference will be postponed until the late spring or early summer of 2021 due to concerns related to the pandemic. Please keep working on those paper proposals and artist’s demonstrations! R...

Practice Preservation / Institute for Fine Arts Practice and Preservation

https://practicepreservation.org/what-is-art-and-why-does-it-matter/

Considering art as a vehicle for learning. The Arts are so vital to our development as a global society. Art is not a luxury-it has the capacity to teach at multiple levels on multiple topics simultaneously.

NOLA.com

What started as a fund-raiser for the Contemporary Arts Center has in recent years attracted tens of thousands of people to the four-block art district, and prompted similar events in the French Quarter and on Magazine Street.

Van Thiel-Laan, Magtillt. The Cast Hall of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. 1960’s. Oil on canvas, Private Collection, New 0rleans, LA.

Magtillt Laan is a pafa/penn graduate and Cresson winner from the 1960’s. She studied with Walter Stuempfig and was a colleague of Auseklis Ozols while they were students, friends, and painting buddies at pafa. This painting is still inscribed on the back from the pafa faculty that it was the Winner of the Thouron Composition Prize. Years later Ozols and Laan taught together in New Orleans, La. when Ozols eventually met and married her sister, Gwendolyn Laan and founded the New Orleans Academy Of Fine Arts in 1978.

Stuempfig, Walter. Portrait of Auseklis Ozols. 1960's. Oil on Linen, Private Collection, New Orleans, LA.

This life sized portrait of Auseklis Ozols was painted by Walter Stuemphig while Ozols was his student at the Pennsylvania Academy Of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The painting exemplifies Stuempfigs’s stern approach to composition and its relationship with color and value. Ozols was one of Stuemphig’s apprentices and regularly accompanied him on trips to New York and elsewhere for visits to other artist’s studios including Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol snd Morandi.

Black Christ, by Auseklis Ozols, 1991.

This is a detail of the figure from Ozols’ monumental mural at St Rose de Lima Church in Bay St Louis, MS.

This work celebrates the duality of life and death as well as suffering and peace- through the arrangement of familiar imagery. The imagery both occupies and transcends religious affiliation, place, and even race through a universal understanding of pain and the desire to escape it.

Ozols painted the Christ figure in heroic proportion, a compositional device historically reserved for depictions of important figures, and very rarely used for the representations of blacks, especially in coastal Mississippi.

The heroic figure is rising, larger than life size, in front of a live oak tree. The oak tree is a symbol of strength, everlasting life, perseverance and stability. Conversely, the same tree was also used for countless lynchings of black Americans in the south, and so occupies a double meaning in this painting. A second double symbol is the pose, as it can be perceived as both a resurrection and crucifixion.

The mural celebrates the circle of life and death, incorporating the depiction of a heroic black figure rising upward in front of yet another symbol of strength.

From the Church’s website:
The focal point of the sanctuary is a powerful mural, designed by New Orleans artist Auseklis Ozols and dating to the 1991 Renovation, that covers the wall behind the altar. Representing both the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, it features a strongly realistic Christ of mixed heritage. Behind him, but draped in an early morning fog, is an equally realistic ancient live oak tree with its Spanish moss and century plants. Christ wears a cloth trimmed in Kente cloth. The figure of Christ floats...free of bonds and burdens of this earth...” before a huge oak tree, “the Cross... grasping the ground with ample roots yet reaching up toward the heavens...”and the names of parishioners’ families are painted at the sides. Thus, the mural portrays the congregation’s pride in its personal heritages as well as the Christian tradition.

Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece

A recent NYT article on Realist painter, Thomas Eakins. A true master of American Realism who worked, taught, and studied in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His work inspired generations with his quick, sure and unpolished approach.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/28/arts/design/thomas-eakins-gross-clinic.html

nytimes.com I’ve become obsessed with Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic.” Let me show you why.

The Ozols Collection – A Museum of American Painting and Pedagogy

https://ozolscollection.org

The Ozols Collection was formed in order to preserve, archive, and maintain the life’s work of Auseklis Ozols. His paintings, drawings, demonstrations, lecture notes, carvings, cartoons, correspondence, and personal collections are hurriedly being moved out of his workspace of 40 years. Currently in boxes, the life’s work of this important American artist needs immediate attention and care.

The Ozols Collection and Museum is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of the artistic vision of New Orleans artist Auseklis Ozols.

Resources are needed for establishing a stable, climate-controlled environment for the archiving, documentation, and preservation of countless drawings, oil sketches, painting demonstrations, written notes, lecture drawings, designs, plans and related correspondence and personal collections. These resources document endangered techniques mastered by Ozols and offer insight into the relationship between Realist painting technique and its fluidity as a major factor in the artistic identity of America, as well as the visual arts community in New Orleans where he has lived and worked for over 50 years.

Please consider contributing to our cause to help with preserving his vision, dedication, and selfless giving of his talent to all he encountered.

The collection will facilitate educational programming and exhibits related to American Realism, the history of Classicism, and the visual arts in New Orleans.

ozolscollection.org

Grandmama’s Delft Pots, oil on Linen by Auseklis Ozols. Private Collection

The Ozols Collection: A Museum for American Painting and Pedagogy