Artist: Sid Maurer
Title: Orson Welles
Year created: 2010
Medium: Original Painting on Wood Panel Board
Edition: Original Unique Artwork
Height (inches): 23-5/16
Width (inches): 17-1/2
Signed by the artist
Signed Area: front and back
This piece is unframed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
Description of piece:
Hip and iconic, Sid Maurer’s visually powerful painting captures the vibrancy and intensity of Orson Welles, and demonstrates Maurer’s mastery of portraiture. Personal and intimate, combining the abstract with representational, it is a strikingly accurate, incisive and intuitive portrait.
An original mixed media painting on wood panel board, Maurer’s Orson Welles synthesizes Maurer’s artistic visual aesthetic with his strong foundation in graphic design. Bold, visible paint texturing and layering bring depth and dimensionality to the painting.
Measuring 23-5/16” in height x 17-1/2” width, the work is signed by Maurer, lower right, in bold silver paint. The artist has also signed, and titled, the work on the reverse.
Orson Welles is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Allan Rich, Sid Maurer’s gallerist, long-time personal friend, and Hollywood persona; Allan Rich is a well-known character actor who also doubled as an art dealer. The final image of the item’s listing is a photograph of Allan Rich.
Artist bio:
Sid Maurer's (1926-2017) long career spanned decades in the world of Art and Music, beginning at age seventeen when he was hired as Assistant Art Director at Columbia Records in New York City. When the music industry exploded, Maurer designed album covers and promotional material for popular artists, alongside Columbia Records colleague Andy Warhol. Maurer expanded his commercial art studio to tackle a wide range of projects for the music and film industries, while his striking artistic style developed, influenced by artists he met including Pollack and Rauschenberg.
Maurer left the empire of music and art that he had helped to build to focus on his passion: painting. In the last decade, his work has been shown in a wide variety of venues, including the Georgia Capitol, the Carnegie Museum and U.C.L.A. His commissioned artwork includes work for ESPN, MotorSport America Magazine, David Bowie, Boy George, and Donovan.
As a painter, Maurer created large mixed media pieces that were very much a product of his varied training and experience. His style combined bold, dynamic colors and strokes with painstaking layouts and typographical elements. The result is the unique blend of a painter's passion tempered with the calculating compositional eye of a graphic designer, exploring his themes through the use of bold subject matter, symbols and graphics.