LOWELL NESBITT, Flower Screenprint, Rare Artists Proof

This stunning screenprint is a quintessential example of Lowell Nesbitt's flower works. 

Nesbitt was a realist painter famous for his large scale renderings of flowers. An artist with a highly intimate style, Nesbitt made realistic studies of many themes throughout his career, though he always returned to flowers. Born in Baltimore in 1933, Nesbitt was a graduate of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and attended the Royal College of Art in London, where he worked in stained glass and etching. 

From his 1993 New York Times obituary: 

"Mr. Nesbitt often said that a stint working as a night watchman at the Phillips Collection in Washington inspired him to paint. 

In 1964, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington gave him one of his first museum exhibitions, and by the mid-1970s he had decided to leave the museum a bequest of more than $1 million. But in 1989 Mr. Nesbitt publicly revoked the bequest after the Corcoran canceled a disputed exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, who was an old friend. Mr. Nesbitt named the Phillips Collection as a beneficiary instead. Mr. Nesbitt was frequently grouped with the Photo Realists, but his images were more interpretively distorted, somewhat loosely painted and boldly abbreviated....Mr. Nesbitt was best known for gargantuan images of irises, roses, lilies and other flowers, which he often depicted in close-up so that their petals seemed to fill the canvas. Dramatic, implicitly sexual and a little ominous, they earned the artist a popularity with the general public that tended to overshadow his reputation within the art world. 

In 1980 the United States Postal Service issued four stamps based on Mr. Nesbitt's floral paintings. He also served as the official artist for the space flights of Apollo 9 and Apollo 13."