1963 Fred Machetanz Oil Painting
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GUEST:
It's from Alaska, and the artist is Fred Machetanz. I was in Anchorage, Alaska, and I walked into an art dealer, and I saw this on the wall. I just looked at it and fell in love with it and it just said, "Buy me," so I did.
APPRAISER:
Well, Fred Machetanz was born in 1908 in Ohio. He studied in the Midwest. And then in 1935, he intended to make a brief visit to his uncle in Alaska, but he ended up staying for two years.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
So he obviously liked the place. And then he served in the Aleutian Islands in the Navy during the war and came back to live in Alaska in 1946. He married Sara Dunn, and she was a writer, and they would work together on books and films and lecture series about Alaska. And he is really known as a colorist, which you can definitely see in this picture. This is a great Alaska subject, and he would depict frontier life and native animals and these beautiful Arctic landscapes. He was quite a good artist and had quite a bit of recognition in his lifetime. One of his big influences was another American artist named Maxfield Parrish, and they had a similar technique, which was to use an underglaze-- in the case of this, it was an ultramarine blue-- and then they used very thin oil glazes to build up the surface and give this kind of luminous glow to the picture. Now, how much did you say you had to pay for this?
GUEST:
Uh, $500.
APPRAISER:
Well, his market has definitely increased since you bought it. It's signed and dated down here, and you bought it right around the time it was painted in 1963. And I think if this were to sell in a retail gallery today, it might be for about $25,000.
GUEST:
Really?
APPRAISER:
Yeah.
GUEST:
That's wonderful.
Appraisal Details
Current Appraised Value: $25,000 (Unchanged)
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