"Coney Island"

Oil on artist board painting of the beach at Coney Island by the American artist, Samuel Rothbort. Signed lower right. Titled verso Coney Island. The building in the foreground is the Half Moon Hotel built in 1927 which was a Coney Island iconic landmark. Circa 1945. Overall size in custom made gold leaf frame by Motoyka Frame Company. 20 by 24 inches.

Samuel Rothbort began making art as a child in a Russian sector of Poland and immigrated to the United States in 1904, at 22. In New York, the self-taught artist found employment as a decorative painter for churches and wealthy homeowners; he also made his own colorful, Ashcan-style paintings.

He exhibited regularly in New York from the teens until his death in 1971. In the 30's, while operating a chicken farm in Rosedale on Long Island, Rothbort started carving found pieces of stone and wood, joining the so-called ''direct carving'' movement whose more famous practitioners were John Flannagan, Robert Laurent, Chaim Gross and William Zorach. The 30 examples on view at Hollis Taggart, in a show titled ''Direct Carver,'' have a rough immediacy and quirky romance.

Mothers and children, self-portraits, animals and doll-size figures are the subjects, but the main interest is in the tension between the image and the raw material. Some, like a white marble dove, approach Brancusian simplicity while modified tree branches verge on Surrealism. Others, like the lumpy stone ''Cat and Kittens,'' suggest the work of a backwoods folk sculptor.

Late in life, Rothbort produced a large quantity of mystical, semi-abstract watercolors, a selection of which are at Luise Ross in an exhibition titled ''Twilight Fantasies.'' Working spontaneously with pen and brush, he created densely worked compositions of blotchy color and fields of swirly, engraving-like lines out of which emerge landscapes, seascapes and fantastic narratives. They have an incandescent, almost combustive visionary energy.