My first stop was Flowers Gallery, located at 1000 Madison Avenue. This gallery is well established in London for showing the work of leading contemporary British artists. The Madison Avenue gallery has been open less than a year, and the intimate space seemed quite appropriate for the works on paper currently on exhibition by Roger Hilton (1911-1975). A member of the influential group of artists that emerged from St. Ives, Cornwall, Hilton has been the subject of a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, and his work is in numerous international public collections including the Tate Gallery, the British Museum and the Fogg Art Gallery at Harvard.

These late works on paper reflect the artist’s move in and out of abstraction and figuration; they often allude to the nude figure or to landscape. Their lyrical quality recalls the work of Matisse. Hilton’s vibrant color and energetic line reflect the passion of an artist who declared near the end of his life, “Art if it is anything is a blood and death battle, into which you have to throw in everything you’ve got”. These late works on paper are eloquent testaments to the artist’s belief. Roger Hilton: Works on Paper is on view until March 27th.

My next stop was Gerald Peters Gallery, at 24 East 78th street for a view of the wonderful, whimsical watercolors of Ben Schonzeit. Known primarily for his photo-realist works, Schonzeit’s work can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

These watercolors reveal what the artist describes as “…things I have sensed or seen for so many years that I wanted to keep.” The works seem immediate, despite being drawn from memory by a careful hand. They are joyful reflections on a life that seems to have been lived to the fullest—scenes of him with his child are juxtaposed with depictions of exotic locales. From a stylistic standpoint, the works reflect a strong regard for the Modern Masters that proceeded him—especially Picasso. The watercolors of Ben Schonzeit are on view until March 20th.

The final stop of the afternoon was at JG Contemporary, a department of James Graham & Sons, at 1014 Madison Avenue. On view was an exhibition of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, concurrent with a show of Hannah’s work in the gallery’s Chelsea space. The artist has had over thirty five solo exhibitions in the U.S. and London, and his work can be found in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, among others.

The paintings of Duncan Hannah have the nostalgic aura of a black and white movie. One has a sense that the artist’s fantasies influence his paintings. Images of London and England figure prominently, despite the fact that the artist is a Midwesterner. Much like the works of Edward Hopper, the figures in Duncan Hannah’s portraits are not individualistic. In fact, Hannah’s characters seem partly to be embodiments of the artist’s imagination—perhaps of a perfect childhood never spent or the sexy girl next door. Much like the desires they seem to depict, the work is hard to resist. Catch it while you still can, the exhibition is only up until March 6th.