Natural Painting stolen in Florida, recovered in New Hampshire

Even though the painting was worth up to $20,000 by a few estimates, John McCulloch was offering the one-of-a-kind Douglas Van Howd work for $1,000 on the Web site Craigslist, police said.

Police learned that the painting, "Nuyakuk Falls Rainbow" by wildlife artist Douglas Van Howd, was taken from a house in Lauderdale by the Sea, Fla. They received a tip that the personality with the painting was living Salem.

Investigators said a detective posed as an art buyer and negotiated a price with John McCulloch, 25, who was finally taken into custody.

Announcing street painting winners

TEMECULA - Winners of the ninth annual Temecula Street Painting festival and the second annual Ralph Love Plein Air Art Festival, held in Old Town last weekend, has been announced.

In the street painting competition, Best of Show honors went to Jesus Gutierrez of Murrieta for his "Aztec" painting. Gutierrez wins same honor in 2006. He has received a $500 prize and will be invited back to the 2010 festival as the featured artist.

The 2009 People's Choice Award went to Lee Rupp of Wildomar for his "Fly Girl," a painting of a pin-up girl.

Taking the Best of Show/Purchase Award in the plain air festival was Temecula artist Shawn McKelvey for his work "Old & New." Artists in this contest painted scenes of Old Town Temecula.

Painting award winners confirm promise, surprise

An exhibit of the work of the eight finalists in the annual Bethesda Painting Awards competition is on display at the Fraser Gallery in Bethesda through July 4. The winners of the liberal awards, funded by the Trawick Foundation, were announced at the opening earlier this month.

As in the past, the competition was open to artists of all levels from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Of the record 240-plus submissions received, 38 were selected as semi-finalists. The jurors included John Winslow, painter and Catholic University emeritus professor, whose proclivities are fairly evident in the assortment of finalists. The extra two jurors, also painting professors, were Patrice Kehoe, University of Maryland, and Ruth Bolduan, Virginia Commonwealth University.

Perhaps most interesting about the consequences of the judging is the relative homogeneity of the selections, with one glaring exception. On one hand is a group of abstract works, all of them connecting linear patterning and layering of forms. The rest are realists, apart from for the top prize winner, Camilo Sanin, who works in a style that might be called Neo-Color Field. Sanin's striped paintings are evocative of the work of 1960s Washington Color Field painters Gene Davis and Howard Mehring, but on a much smaller scale.

Landscape painting auctioned in Beijing for record $12.3 mln in china

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) - A record auction price of 84 million yuan (about 12.3 million U.S. dollars) was achieved for a unique Chinese painting in Beijing.

The landscape painting by Zhu Da, also known as Bada Shanren (1626-1705), sells to a private buyer at the Council Auction held on Friday.

The previous record was put in 2007 when The Red Cliff Handscroll by the Ming Dynasty painter Qiu Ying (1494-1552) was sold for 79.52 million yuan.

A famous freehand brushwork painter and calligrapher, Zhu Da was born into the majestic family of the dynasty. He retires to the mountains when the dynasty fell in 1644.

His early paintings included albums of flowers and rocks, accompanied by poems and signed under a range of obscure names. Later he used to paint birds and fish to signal distress, painting lotuses with broken stems, and ink landscapes.

M.F.Husain painting sells for Rs 3.1 cr at Christie's

London (PTI): A 1960 painting by M F Husain fetched a whopping Rs 3.1 crore at Christie's South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art sale here which saw 76 lots of famous artists going under the hammer for Rs 18.98 crore.

Pakistani artist Rashid Rana's "Red Carpet" has got the second highest price of Rs 1.3 crore at the auction which took place on June 10, the organisers said. Ram Kumar's "Untitled (Benares)" paint sold for Rs 1.04 crore.

The "Ragamala Series", oil work on canvas, features visual interpretation of Indian musical modes. The series capture Husain's continuous fascination with 'rasa' or aesthetic rapture.
The inter-disciplinary nature of music, dance, sculpture, painting and film provided enormous inspiration to M.F.Husain at that time (1950s and 60s) and his "Ragamala Series" embodies the masterful usage of his most recognisable pictorial elements.

Husain's other works "The Preacher at Mecca" fetched 250, 121pounds (Rs 9.5 million) and "Untitled (Horses)" Rs 5.7 million.

Franz Marc painting fetched 6.2 million dollars

London - The oil paintings Springende Pferde by German expressionist artist Franz Marc fetched 6.2 million dollars At Christie's auction house Tuesday. The price exceeded the lowest estimation of 4.9 million dollars and grazed just under the maximum estimate of 6.5 million dollars.

Marc is one of the main important painters of the 20th century and was a co-founder of Munich's 'Blaue Reiter' artist circle that included Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke. His painting of the three leap horses was made in 1910. He was draft into the German army after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and was killed in 1916 during the Battle of Verdun.

Also sold at the auction was Claude Monet's Au Parc Monceau from 1878, for 10.4 million dollars - well beyond the maximum hope of 7.4 million dollars.

Man's duck paintings won second place in competition

Dan Speidel, 25, of Elyria Township, he likes to paint and hunt. By combine his two avocations, he has won second place in the Ohio Wetlands Habitat Stamp Design Competition sponsored by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Speidel's 16-inch-by-21-inch acrylic paintings of two bufflehead ducks in flight over Lake Erie show the Lorain Lighthouse in the background. Tim Daniel, public information officer for ODNR, said the judges praised the particulars of Lake Erie, the positions of the birds and the way they were portrayed in Speidel's painting. The first-place honor in the competition is the use of the winning artwork on the $15 waterfowl hunting stamp issued just before hunting season begins in September, Daniel said. Speidel's entry was one of 24 paintings entered by artists from 12 states, Daniel said. First place wins by Jeffrey Hoff, a North Dakota resident whose painting shows two ruddy ducks in the water.

This is the third time Speidel has enter the Ohio Wetlands habitat Stamp Design Competition, and the second place award is the highest he has earned.