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Horowitz first discovered painting at the age of ten, when he found a
paint box in his familys basement. In his teens, Horowitz began
studying painting with German Expressionist Maxim Bugzester. Aside from
slapping the table with a yardstick when a student made a mistake, Bugzester
(who was one of master Cubist Georges Braque's only three students and
he later studied at the Bauhaus with Kathe Kollwitz) gave Horowitz a solid
grounding in modernism, especially in his concepts of spatial overlap
and the pushpull; theories that were a part of Hans Hoffman's aesthetic
dictums.
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Later, as a student at the Art Students League in New York, he found himself
with fabled social realist Isaac Soyer and then he hooked up with painterly
realist Paul Resika the State University of New York in Purchase, New
York in the mid-to-late 1970s. Horowitz next studio-apprenticed to landscapist
Wolf Kahn in his New York studio for nearly seven years. Critics have
compared Horowitz work to Kahns.
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There is no way of escaping the comparison, says Horowitz,
I spent almost seven years with him, and I have tremendous respect
for the man. It couldnt have helped but rub off.
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When Horowitz left Kahns tutelage, he was quite adept at painting
landscapes. Also, he was making pastels for his own use as well as for
the use of a small, if select, clientele that included Willem & Elaine
De Kooning, Michael Steiner, Frank Stella, Jennifer Bartlett and Wolf
Kahn.
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Horowitz has had one man shows at noted galleries
across the country, from Beverly Hills to New York City. He has traveled
thousand of miles from coast to coast to paint the American landscape.
The oil paintings and pastels that have resulted are a true celebration
of the American scene. As the world has become more complicated with so
many events that change our lives at an ever more quickened rate, Horowitz's
paintings provide us with precious moments to stand back, reflect and
enjoy the many miracles of our environment.
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Horowitz says that when he was studying art in college, his professors
told him that landscape painting was dead, a dead genre. Now some
of those same people are painting landscapes. Art constantly reinvents
itself, and its changes find expression in the images that permeate and
shape our culture. This offers contemporary painters like me a vast store
of artistic sources on which to draw. I can borrow from Rembrandt for
my sepia paintings or from de Kooning for the way I ply two-dimensional
surfaces with a palette knife.
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Horowitz enjoys traveling and stresses the importance of keeping his mind
open to cultural differences. Feeling that an artist can never know enough,
he studies everything such as architecture, geography, history,
horticulture, geology and even weather. Painting a seascape might require
that the artist know about boat building, so he can paint boats, about
meteorology, so he can paint rocks at the waters edge. Through
my travels I continue my explorations by painting the unexpected and the
"unexperienced".
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I can give pleasure with my work, he states, and that
gives me pleasure. Just about the most important thing in my life is to
give pleasure to other people.
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The other thing Im after, he adds, is inner truth.
Art is about what you dont know. Were all searching for the
truth. Were all searching for what we dont know.
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