|
Cleade Enders
Cleade Enders was a versatile painter best known for his images of nineteenth-century Vermont houses and farm buildings. Dreamlike and meditative in character, these compositions typically eschew narrative or anecdotal content. Recalling the work of Andrew Wyeth (b.1917), Enders’s paintings are enigmatic and atmospheric. Yet there is little sense of the tragic desolation that pervades Wyeth’s work. Utilizing a white ground and a limited palette, Enders conferred on his compositions a kind of radiant serenity.
Enders was born in Utica, New York, in 1925. After serving in the Army Air Corps during World War II, he took up the formal study of art, pursuing instruction at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Barnes Foundation and the Art Students League of New York. At the Art Students League, Enders worked with realist painter Louis Bouché (1896-1969), with whom he completed a mural project for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Library in Abilene, Kansas.
Enders later settled in Dorset, Vermont, and for many decades was an active member of the Southern Vermont Arts Center. He exhibited his work widely, and besides showing his work in New York Galleries, he was featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Enders died in Vero Beach, Florida, in 2001.
V. Scott Dimond February 2007
References: Biographical material in artist file, Southern Vermont Arts Center
|
