Brookston Beer Bulletin

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Beer In Art #145: Ben Sanders’ Beer Portraits

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art-beer
This week’s works of art are part of a series of “beer portraits” by a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, where he studied illustration & design. Ben Sanders lives in Los Angeles, where since graduating in 2009, he’s been involved in “a number of projects that include Illustration, Graphic Design, Large Scale Painting, Sign Painting, Sculpture, Book Design, and Book Binding.” There are nine paintings currently in the series, of which these are my favorites:

Sanders-orval
Orval

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Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA

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Chimay

You can see the rest of the six paintings in the series at Sanders’ website and some of his non-beer work at his gallery.

Beer In Ads #460: In A Hurrying, Scurrying World There’s Serenity In Beer & Ale

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Friday’s ad is a brewery industry PSA from 1941, brought to you by the United States Brewers Foundation. After Prohibition, the beer industry was sensitive to the fact that prohibitionists sentiments did not magically melt away with the passage of the 21st Amendment and produced a number of ads portraying beer as “America’s Beverage of Moderation” and other positive associations. You’ve got to love ad copy that begins “In a hurrying, scurrying world there’s serenity in beer and ale.” Now that’s a picnic I want to go on!

USBF-Life-08-04-1941

Craft Beer: A True Underdog Story

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Here’s a fun video about craft beer’s struggles to get to market. With a hat tip to Brian Stechschulte at Bay Area Craft Beer, it’s a student film by a Michael Jolly, done for his “Motion Graphics class. It’s an animated info graphic concerning American Craft Beer. I created all artwork, narration, and animation myself. Hope you enjoy it…And drink craft beer!” He’s titled it: Craft Beer: A True Underdog Story.

craft-beer-atus

Beer In Ads #459: Ballantine Bowling

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Thursday’s ad is for Ballantine Ale and is — I’m guessing here — from the late 1940s-50s given that that was the time when bowling was king. The ad shows a cutaway of a bowling alley, with the bar at the right, and seemingly every person there having either a ball or a beer in their hand. You have to love a sport where drinking is not only allowed, but encouraged. And how about that lovely poem?

A cheery chatter at the Alleys tonight;
     The pins are flying left and right.

The “Beer frame” next … everyone agrees,
     Ballantine, waiter, over here, please!

We’ve learned long since this beer will hold
     Its flavor even when when ice cold!

A-a-h! that deep-brewed flavor chill can’t kill—
     Another round? Of course we will!

ballatine

Beer In Ads #458: Knickerbocker, Less Filling … More Delicious

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Wednesday’s ad is for New York City’s Knickerbocker Beer, from 1955. Showing a towering Knickerbocker above the skyscrapers, wearing colonial garb, and handing a pilsner glass of beer. I’d be afraid not to take it. And how about that slogan, “less filling … more delicious, too!” That sounds awfully similar to another slogan for a lighter beer, doesn’t it?

1955+BEER++AD knickerbocker beer 2

Beer In Ads#457: If You Like Beer You’ll Love Schlitz Again

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Tuesday’s ad is a third Schlitz ad from 1954, and it’s very similar to the last two Schlitz ads. It also uses the slogan “If you like beer you’ll love Schlitz,” though this time a really, really happy-looking man with a huge smile — most likely a grocery clerk — is holding a six-pack of Schlitz cans as if to hand them off to a waiting customer. He looks a little bit like a very young, though slightly less skinny, Frank Sinatra.

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Beer In Art #144: William Frederick Witherington’s The Hop Garland

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art-beer
This week’s work of art is by the English artist William Frederick Witherington, who was known for his landscapes and depictions of small incidents of everyday family life. One of these was The Hop Garland, painted in 1834 and today hanging at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Witherington-hop-garland

Described on the V&A’s website simply as “[a]n oil painting depicting a girl in a hop garden placing a garland of hop blossoms on the head of a younger girl as a boy looks on,” but an art journal from 1851 adds additional details about the painting.

At the proper season, men, women, and children are employed in picking the hops, and preparing them for the market. Mr Witherington has selected for his picture a little episode in the day’s work, when the younger labourers are resting awhile from their tasks: a girl, who, from her superior style of dress, we should rather suppose to be a visitor to the garden than a ‘picker’, is decorating a younger child with a chaplet of the golden flowers. The idea is excellent; so also is the manner in which it has been carried out. The faces of the group are highly expressive, especially that of the little girl, so full of self-complacency at the honours bestowed upon her … this group, in all its parts, is admirably painted, and finished with great care; it is brilliantly coloured, yet with perfect harmony of tones … the picture is unquestionably one of the best ever painted by Mr Witherington …

And a contemporary newspaper account had this to say:

The Hop Garden presents an incident true to nature, in a little girl standing full of pride and delight, while an older one is decking her head with a crown of hops, and a lad sits in his basket laughing at the sport. The expression of the child’s face is not quite so pretty or rustically joyous as we could have wished, but it is arch and good. The boy and his drapery are perfect, both in the painting and character; the back-ground is well managed and the whole rich in harmony of colour and truth of effect.

The sitter for one of the girls was identified some years ago by a descendant as her great-grandmother, either Mrs Sarah Ancketill or Lady Selina Ker.

Witherington apparently liked the subject, because he painted it a second time, though ever so slightly differently. That Hop Garland is in the Tate Museum.

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In addition, it was apparently a popular painting. An engraving based on Witherington’s painting was done for sale to a mass audience entitled the Youthful Queen of the Hop Garden by a James Posselwhite.

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You can read more about Witherington at his Wikipedia page and there are some links to more of his works at ArtCyclopedia.