TitleThe End of the Hurricane
Artist
Paul Resika
(b. 1928)
Date1979
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 24 × 29 in.
Framed: 24 5/8 × 29 7/8 × 1 7/8 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right: "Resika".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, February 4, 1980
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1980.17
Label TextBorn and raised in New York City, Paul Resika is known for his landscapes of the countryside of Cape Cod and elsewhere. Resika studied with Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann from 1945 to 1947, spending the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1947 and beginning a life-long love of Cape Cod. His first exhibition was in 1948 with a group of like-minded artists from Provincetown, but Resika ultimately turned away from abstract painting and would not exhibit again until 1964. In the interim, the artist decided to apply himself to the study of the Old Masters by moving first to Paris, then Venice, and finally Rome. He returned to New York in 1953 at the height of Abstract Expressionism's popularity.Since the early 1960s Resika has remained steadfast to the craft of painting and works both outdoors and in the studio to create his landscape and figurative compositions. The artist is truly the descendant of esteemed landscape painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and others. The highly-nuanced "The End of the Hurricane" was painted in September 1979 at Horseleech Pond, Wellfleet, Cape Cod and illustrates not only the artist's facility with his medium, but also his ability as a colorist. This painting, like all of Resika's works, is not a slavish imitation of nature, but in the artist's own words: "It's all in the spiritualization--not the copying--of nature.
