September 25, 2018

O.T.W. On The Water THE SCHUYLKILL RIVER: A suite of seven archival digital prints of journal-paintings by James Lancel McElhinney due to be published October 25, 2018.This weekend’s sales pushed the number up to 20, more than one-third of the limited edition has been sold.

Inspired by expeditionary artists, from Jacques le Moyne and John White to J.M.W. Turner, John-James Audubon, Seth Eastman and Thomas Moran, Delaware Valley native James Lancel McElhinney has revived the practice of journal-painting during trips to Europe, Hawaii, Ecuador, Peru, California, the Rocky Mountains, the American Southwest, the Hudson Valley, and now the Schuylkill River, as it flows through Fairmount Park.
Reviving practices employed by such traveler-artists as Benjamin Henry Latrobe, William and Thomas Birch, Joshua Rowley Watson, Nicolino Calyo, James Lancel McElhinney now returns to Philadelphia to explore its Hidden River, call attention to its environmental priorities, explore its history and celebrate its beauty.
Works from the project O.T.W. The Schuylkill River will be featured in an exhibition at Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, opening on October 24, 2018. The show will be on view for one year.

Following the examples of these late-18th and early 19th-century artists, McElhinney’s works have been reinterpreted as suites of prints, which can be enjoyed in the form of an unbound book, or framed for display on the wall.
O.T.W. The Schuylkill River, the limited edition, follows the success of McElhinney’s Hudson Highlands: North River Suite Volume One, which can be found in the following collections:
Avery Fine Art and Architecture Library, Columbia University
Boscobel House and Gardens, Garrison, New York
University of Denver. Library Special Collections. Denver Colorado
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers New York
Huntington Library and Museum, San Marino, California
West Point Museum, United States Military Academy
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven Connecticut
Newberry Library. Chicago, Illinois
And private collections in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

PREVIEW

Needlewatcher Editions announces the forthcoming publication of O.T.W. The Schuylkill River, a suite of seven (7) numbered, signed and dated archival digital prints. Loosely bound in a fine cloth-covered Solander (clamshell) box, this suite of prints is accompanied by a descriptive chapbook. The edition is composed of 100% archival materials and limited to fifty (50) copies. Below is a selection of journal-paintings included in the deluxe limited edition.

You are invited to support this project with a subscription to the deluxe limited edition at $1200.00 per copy.
Subscribers who pledge prior to October 7, 2018 will be thanked in the limited edition, and acknowledged in the exhibition at Independence Seaport Museum, opening on October 24, 2018. The show will remain on view for one year.
On October 25, 2018 (the official release date) remaining copies of the limited edition will be offered with tiered pricing, starting at $1,600.00 per copy. Personal check, PayPal and credit cards are accepted by Needlewatcher Editions. For further details, or to reserve a copy, please enquire at

ot*@ne***********.com











, or call 347-266-5652

James Lancel McElhinney is a visual historian, author and publisher, known for his investigations of American rivers and battlefields. The Delaware Valley native attended Tyler School of Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Yale.
He is a recipient of a 2017 Pollock-Krasner Grant., and an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
McElhinney is listed on the Master Artist Council of the Arthur Miller Foundation. O.T.W: The Schuylkill River will be on view from October 24, 2018, at Independence Seaport Museum, as the inaugural exhibition in a contemporary art-space complementing the museum’s new River Alive galleries. McElhinney lives in Manhattan with his wife, historian, author and curator Dr. Katherine Manthorne, and a feline named Maeve. His website is www.mcelhinneyart.com

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Reviving the historic model of expeditionary travel, drawing and painting in books, later unpacked as books and prints in limited editions, James Lancel McElhinney is one of a growing number of living artists producing new works in dialogue with history, science and literature. In this talk, McElhinney shares his experience, research, practice and insights, as an historian, visual artist and publisher.

We hope to see you there. Please share.

Poster:

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In August and November, 2014 Kathie Manthorne and I made two trips to the Andean region of South America. The first trip was to Lima, for an academic conference at the Catholic University, with an excursion to Cusco, the Valle Sagrado and Macchu Picchu. Against the advice of our handlers we hired a private driver who delivered us to the ruins of Pachacamac, along the coast just south of Lima. In November we took a holiday to Imbabura, in the northern part of Ecuador. Both Alexander von Humboldt, and the American painter Frederic Edwin Church had passed through the area, decades apart. Humboldt’s great epiphany came to him as he scaled the volcano Cotopaxi (19,347 feet of elevation). Inspired by his writings, Church retraced Humboldt’s Andean travels, but never saw Cotopaxi without its peak shrouded in clouds. We had the same experience with Cayambe. On our last night in Quito, we finally saw its snowy peak–a dot on the horizon.

Downloadable PDF. Click below to retrieve the file

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Founded by civic leaders and literate working-men as a book club and adult learning center in 1826, the New Haven Young Men’s Institute Library is the oldest private reading-room and membership library in the United States. During its heyday in the nineteenth century the Institute Library featured speaker such as Henry Ward Beecher, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Everett, Grace Greenwood, and Herman Melville.
With the founding of the New Haven Free Public Library, the Institute Library entered into a long period of decline. Revitalized and renovated in recent years, the Institute Library also hosts exhibitions featuring living artists in The Gallery Upstairs.

Curator in residence and host of the radio show Live Culture , Martha Willette Lewis, has organized an exhibition entitled Wish You Were Here: Journals, Journeys and Expeditions, which runs from June 2 to August 31, 2018.
A public reception will be held on Thursday, June 7 from 6-8pm.

Press release:

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The exhibition includes six original painting-journals by James Lancel McElhinney, together with Hudson Highlands: North River Suite Volume One. Needlewatcher Editions. New York, 2018. Copies of the limited edition now reside in the following collections:

Albany Institute of History and Art
Avery Fine Art and Architecture Library, Columbia University
Boscobel House and Gardens, Garrison, New York
University of Denver Library. Special Collections. Denver. CO.
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers New York
Huntington Library, Museum, and Gardens. San Marino, CA
Newberry Library. Chicago, Illinois
West Point Museum, United States Military Academy.
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven CT

And private collections in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

PDF:

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Evite:

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Journal Painting: Kiluea Kulaniapia (Hawai’i). Solander box by Wyvern Bindery, London

JLM atop Ellafjallajokuk, Iceland

JLM at the summit of another volcano: Kilaeua, Hawai’i. July 1, 2015

JLM signing prints, November 17, 2017. Publication date for Hudson Highlands: North River Suite Volume One., Needlewatcher Editions.
2017 Pollock Krasner Grant recipient James Lancel McElhinney will discuss the practice of plein-air Journal Painting, as the revival of historic expeditionary art, unpacked as limited-edition books and archival digital prints. The talks will take place in Suite 9D (Building 9), Garnerville Arts and Industrial Center, 55 Railroad Avenue, Garnerville, New York. (Rockland County). The facility is located thirty minutes north of the George Washington Bridge. McElhinney’s talk will be one of a number of activities taking place as part of the annual Garner Arts Center annual Arts Festival.

Admission to the talk is free to all attending the 2018 Garner Arts Festival.
Tickets to the festival can be purchased here: http://garnerartscenter.org/arts-festival/

Map of the facility:

McElhinney (MFA Yale) has been described as a Visual Historian. He is the author of several books on painting and drawing, who has conducted many art-world oral history interviews for the clients such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Frick Center for the History of Collecting, Rauschenberg Foundation, Newington Cropsey Cultural Studies Center, Vermont Studio Center, to name a few. He is the owner of Needlewatcher Editions, LLC.

Its first publication Hudson Highlands: North River Suite Volume One. (2017) has been acquired by West Point Museum, Boscobel House and Gardens, Hudson River Museum, Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library, Huntington Library, Museum and Gardens (CA), Newberry Library, Chicago, Avery Library, Columbia University, University of Denver, and other notable public and private collections.

On January 17, 2018 I was invited by the United States Capitol Historical Society to deliver a lunchtime lecture on soldier-artist Set Eastman (1809-1875), and a series of paintings he produced between 1870 and 1875, entitled The Principal Fortifications of the United States.

Link: https://www.c-span.org/video/?439843-1/artist-seth-eastmans-military-fort-paintings

My article on the subject will be forthcoming in the Summer issue of The Capitol Dome magazine. Eastman came to my attention in the early 1990s when I was in the midst of exploring and painting Civil War battlefields threatened by residential development and sprawl commerce. Little-known among painters today, Eastman gained renown first as “the pictorial historian of the Indian”, illustrating Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s massive ethnographic study of the indigenous peoples of North America. Eastman and his wife collaborated on a trade book about Native American life and lore in what is now the state of Minnesota. Mary Henderson Eastman’s 1849 Dahcotah, or Life And Legends Of The Sioux Around Fort Snelling, found its way into the library of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was one of the principal inspirations for his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.

Fort Knox, Maine. 1870-1875

Rower in a single scull on the Schuylkill River below Columbia Bridge

The working title for the project had been River of Champions, but a Philadelphia curator wisely cautioned that it sounded a bit too much like a breakfast cereal. A longtime member of the University Barge Club shared the acronym OTW, which in the parlance of the amateur rowing community, means “on the water”. The expression signifies more than just getting into ones scull. It denotes the three-mile stretch of unbroken water that flows from East Falls to the Boathouse Row. The river was known to the indigenous Lenni-Lenape as Tulpehanna, or “turtle river”.
When Dutch explorers in 1616 failed at first to discover its confluence with the Delaware (Lenapewihittuck), concealed behind a barrier of wooded islands, they named it Schuylkill, or “hidden creek”. They had not idea that its watershed rose in the foothills of the Alleghenies, 135 miles to the northwest.

The sport of crew and single scull rowing began during the colonial period, when ferry-men carrying goods and people from ship to shore began to organize races to test their skills in competition. This was nothing new in 18th-century Philadelphia. Barge-men on the River Thames had been racing for centuries, as had gondolieri in the Regatta di Venezia.

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), detto Canaletto. Regatta on the Grand Canal. 1740. National gallery, London.

With the completion of the Fairmount dam in 1821, a body flat water stretching upstream afforded rowing enthusiasts the perfect venue for their sport, free of tides, shoals and sawyers. The first oarsmen on the Schuylkill were tradesmen and members of the working class. After the first regatta in 1835 rowing began to attract athletes from all walks of life.

Nicolino Calyo. The First Schuylkill Regatta. Gouache on paper. 1835.

Twenty-three years later the Schuylkill Navy was formed, as an umbrella organization for all the barge-clubs, a governing body to vet competitors and oversee regattas. Boathouse Row today has become familiar landmark, on the left bank of the river just above the dam.

Hydrographic Survey of the Schuylkill River. 1866

Few rowers venture upstream past Falls Bridge, three miles to the north, but there are stretches of the river where one can find oarsmen and women on the water. A rowing center exists along the flat water below Conshohocken, in Montgomery County. A few stalwart souls will launch their boats in the tidal estuary at Forgotten Bottom, below Grey’s Ferry, near Bartram’s Garden.

William Bartram (1739-1823). Zoological studies. Natural History Museum, London.

Following the success of Hudson Highlands, as the next volume of North River Suite goes into production, I now embark on a new project that celebrates another river.
Made famous by William Birch and Thomas Eakins, the Schuylkill has for nearly two centuries been the heartbeat of amateur rowing in America. Last year’s exhibition at Independence Seaport Museum “Breaking Barriers” corrected the misperception that rowing is a sport reserved for elites, by revealing how amateur rowing today promotes diversity, inclusivity, health and community.

A wonderful article by Fine Art Connoisseur Editor in Chief Peter Trippi unpacks the story behind the genesis of Hudson Highlands in the magazine’s March-April issue, now on sale at Barnes & Noble and other locations. The same issue features articles on Thomas Cole, Wilhelm Schadow, a new murals arts project in Washington DC, American Realism in European collections and other engaging articles.
To subscribe, follow this link: http://streamline-hub.com/fac-landing/FAC-Landing1.htm

Read a PDF of Peter’s article:

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Hudson Highlands: North River Suite Volume One was published on November 17, 2017. Four months later, the majority of the edition has found its way into private and public collections including West Point Museum, Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Newberry Library in Chicago, Boscobel House and Gardens, Garrison, New York, with other museum and library acquisitions pending. A limited number of copies (10) will be offered at the original price pf $1,500.00USD through April 6, 2018. Copies after April 6 will increase in price to $1,800.00USD. The final five copies will be offered at $2,500.00USD.
Please address enquiries regarding purchase to

ed******@ne***********.com

Preview:

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Hudson Valley Sketchbook in view at Antipodean Books, ABAA New York International Book Fair, Seventh Regiment Armory, 631 Park Avenue. March 8-11, 2018