WOMEN M A K ING A RT | BEN NET T PR IZE | A N NE HIGHTOW ER-PAT T ER SON | DON T ROI A NI
JUNE 20 22 VOLUME 19 ISSUE 3
JUNE 2022
WOMEN M A K ING A RT | BEN NET T PR IZE | A N NE HIGHTOW ER-PAT T ER SON | DON T ROI A NI
JUNE
JUNE
20 22
$6.95
VOLUME
$8.95
19 ISSUE 3
2022
U.S.
CAN.
BARBARA JAENICKE
Creekside Reverie, 24” x 30” oil
February Color, 20” x 24” oil
Waning Wintry Day, 30” x 24” oil
Blue Sky Over Snow Canyon, 11” x 14” oil
MOCKINGBIRD GALLERY, BEND, OR | ILLUME GALLERY, ST. GEORGE, UT | THE ARTFUL DEPOSIT, BORDENTOWN, NJ
W W W. B A R B A R A J A E N I C K E . C O M
Elizabeth Olds (1896–1991), Miner Joe, c. 1937, lithograph on paper, 17 3/4 x 13 5/8 in. (image), private collection
“We find our subject on the streets, in the factory, the machines, and workers of industry, and on the farm. We aim to picture truly the life about us, as the people we are, in reference to the forces that make us. We choose all sides of life, searching for the vital and significant.” — Elizabeth Olds (1896–1991) describing herself and other artists associated with the Federal Art Project and Works Progress Administration, 1935
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
MAY/ J U N E
2 0 2 2
007
5 E. 57th Street, 8fl, NY, NY 10022 212 355 5710
www.rehscgi.com info@rehscgi.com
JENNY BUCKNER
PUBLISHER
B. Er ic Rhoads bericrhoads@gmail.com Tw i t t e r : @ e r i c r h o a d s f a c e b o ok . c o m /e r ic . rh o a d s EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
MANAGING EDITOR
Peter Tr ippi peter.trippi@gmail.com 9 17.9 6 8 . 4 4 76
Br ida Connolly bconnolly @streamlinepublishing.com 702.665.5283 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Matthias A nderson Kelly Compton Max Gillies Daniel G rant DESIGN
A llison Malafronte David Masello Louise Nicholson Charles R askob Robinson
DIRECTOR
Kenneth W hitne y k whitney @streamlinepublishing.com 561.655.8778 C R E AT I V E D I R EC TO R
A lf onso Jones alfonsostreamline@gmail.com 5 61 . 3 2 7. 6 0 3 3 DIRECTOR OF SALES & MARKETING
K atie Reeves k reeves@streamlinepublishing.com VENDORS — ADVERTISING & CONVENTIONS
S a ra h We b b swebb@streamlinepublishing.com PROJECT MARKETING SPECIALIST
C h r i s t i n a S t a u f fe r cstauffer@streamlinepublishing.com SENIOR MARKETING SPECIALISTS
Confetti Cow oil 24x24”
Dave Ber nard d b e r n a r d @ s t r e a m l i n e p u b l i s h i n g .com
Jenny Buckner, Buckner Gallery
Jennif er Taylor j t a y l o r @ s t r e a m l i n e p u b l i s h i n g .com
Paintingsbyjenny@bellsouth.net
Gina Ward g ward@streamlinepublishing.com
www.paintingsbyjenny.com
M A R K E T I N G C O O R D I N ATO R
Br ianna Sheridan b s h e r i d a n @ s t r e a m l i n e p u b l i s h i n g .com S A L E S O P E R AT I O N S S U P P O R T
K ather ine Jennings k j e n n i n g s @ s t r e a m l i n e p u b l i s h i n g .com E D I TO R , F I N E A R T TO DAY
Cher ie Haas chaas@streamlinepublishing.com
010
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Inner Fire 16x20 Pastel
www.laurapollak.com
Laurapollak.artist@gmail.com
Abstract
Realism
Dali Higa
Catch at Sunset
First catch at sunset As the sun slowly fades But chores still abound us At the end of the day
30" x 40"
OIL ON CANVAS
Mend the net clean the gear As the sun slowly sets Yet most important bring dinner For the family still waits.
CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF FINE ART www.californiamuseumoffineart.com
DAVID
MARTY
Grand Ending, oil, 22x28”
Featured Artist, Scott Milo Gallery, Anacortes, WA, May 6-28 Carmel Plein Air Art Festival, Carmel, CA, May 13-15 AIS Small Works Showcase, Wilder Nightingale Fine Art, Taos, NM, May 12-June 19 Driggs Plein Air Festival, Teton Valley, ID, July 23-30 The Russell Auction, Great Falls, MT, August 19-20 Sonoma Plein Air, Sonoma, CA, September 5-10 Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitational, Laguna Beach, CA, October 1-9
www.dav idm art y.c om
•
425 . 2 7 5 . 8 7 7 3
JILL BANKS
331 SE Mizner Blvd. Boca Raton, FL 33432 Ph: 561.655. 8778 • Fa x : 561.655.616 4
Capturing Life in Oils
CHAIRMAN/PUBLISHER/CEO
AWA | WAOW | WSLP
B. Er ic Rhoads
bericrhoads@gmail.com Tw i t t e r : @ e r i c r h o a d s
f a c e b o ok .c om /e r ic . rho a d s E X E C U T I V E V I C E P R E S I D E N T/ C H I E F O P E R AT I N G O F F I C E R Tom Elmo
telmo@streamlinepublishing.com CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Jim Speakman
jspeakman@streamlinepublishing.com PRODUCTION DIRECTOR
Nicolynn Kuper
nkuper@streamlinepublishing.com DIRECTOR OF FINANCE Laura Iser man
liserman@streamlinepublishing.com CONTROLLER
Love by the Sea oil 12x24 in (detail)
Jaime Osetek
jaime@streamlinepublishing.com S TA F F AC C O U N TA N T
Nicole Anderson
nanderson@streamlinepublishing.com C I R C U L AT I O N C O O R D I N ATO R Sue Henr y
shenr y @streamlinepublishing.com C U S TO M E R S E R V I C E C O O R D I N ATO R Jessica Smith
jsmith@streamlinepublishing.com
A S S I S TA N T TO T H E C H A I R M A N A li Cr uickshank
acruickshank@streamlinepublishing.com
Sub scriptions: 800.610.5771 Also 561.655.8778 or www.fineartconnoisseur.com One-year, 6-issue subscription within the United States: $39.98 (International, 6 issues, $76.98). Two-year, 12-issue subscription within the United States: $59.98 (International, 12 issues, $106.98).
Attention retailers: If you would like to carry Fine Art Connoisseur in your store, please contact Tom Elmo at 561.655.8778.
After Hours oil 36x24 in (detail)
Flower Power oil 30x24 in (detail)
JillBanks.com
Jill@JillBanks.com 703.403.7435 jillbanks1 JillBanksStudio Subscribe and follow for happier news and fresh art
014
M A Y / J U N E
Copyright ©2022 Streamline Publishing Inc. Fine Art Connoisseur is a registered trademark of Streamline Publishing; Historic Masters, Today’s Masters, Collector Savvy, Hidden Collection, and Classic Moment are trademarks of Streamline Publishing. All rights reserved. Fine Art Connoisseur is published by Streamline Publishing Inc. Any reproduction of this publication, whole or in part, is prohibited without the express written consent of the publisher. Contact Streamline Publishing Inc. at address below. Fine Art Connoisseur is published six times annually (ISSN 1932-4995) for $39.99 per year in U.S.A. (two years $59.99); Canada and Europe $69.99 per year (two years $99.99) by Streamline Publishing Inc., 331 SE Mizner Blvd., Boca Raton, FL 33432. Periodicals postage paid at Boca Raton, FL, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Fine Art Connoisseur, 331 SE Mizner Blvd., Boca Raton, FL 33432.Copying done for other than personal or internal reference without the express permission of Fine Art Connoisseur is prohibited. Address requests for special permission to the Managing Editor. Reprints and back issues available upon request. Printed in the United States. Canadian publication agreement # 40028399. Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement #40612608; Canada returns to be sent to Bleuchip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2.
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Big Cottonwood Canyon, 30” x 30”, oil on canas
arly snow dusts the distant mountains and Eautumn. casts a silence over the brilliant colors of Painted from a plein air sketch, the
awe-inspiring colors of the West are realized in strokes of vibrating color.
BRAD TEARE travels the West capturing light and color. In the studio, he enhances essential elements in larger versions. He paints with palette knives and other mark-making tools, including cement trowels. The process produces surprises difficult to replicate any other way.
Palace Ave. Gallery • 123 West Palace Avenue Santa Fe, NM 87501 • 505.986.0440 info@manitougalleries.com
Brad Teare near his studio in Cache Valley, Utah. Above: Silence of First Snow, 36” x 36”, oil on canvas.
F I N E
A R T
J U N E
007 Frontispiece: Elizabeth Olds 020 Publisher’s Letter 024 Editor’s Note 029 Favorite: Barbara Ascher on Thomas Eakins 136
Off the Walls
158
Classic Moment: Sharon Pomales Tousey
2 0 2 2
•
C O N N O I S S E U R
VO LU M E
19,
I S S U E
063
By Matthias Anderson
109
Allison Malafronte highlights the talents of Michele Byrne, Erik Ebeling, Diego Glazer, LaToya Hobbs, and Megan J. Seiter.
068
GREAT ART WORLDWIDE
THE BENNETT PRIZE: CELEBRATING WOMEN PAINTERS By Max Gillies
074
We survey 11 top-notch projects occurring this spring.
115
ART IN THE WEST
There are at least five great reasons to celebrate the American West this season.
118
By Max Gillies
078
REFLECTIONS OF REALITY: THE GABRIEL AND YVONNE WEISBERG COLLECTION
LOVELADIES AND THEIR PORTRAITS OF HOPE
By Janet Whitmore
124 131
By Kelly Compton
084
FAREWELL, JOHN H. SCHAEFFER By Vern Grosvenor Swanson
ANNE HIGHTOWER-PATTERSON: LIFE IN WATERCOLORS By Daniel Grant
090 098
TREASURING OUR GREEN ZONES By Matthias Anderson
MEGAN J. SEITER (b. 1986), Limones (detail), 2021, colored pencil and pastel on paper, 7 3/4 x 7 1/4 in. (overall), available through Meyer Gallery (Santa Fe). For details on the artist, please see page 64.
106
ULRICH GLEITER: PAINTING THE WORLD
ARTISTS MAKING THEIR MARK: FIVE TO WATCH
A LEGACY OF WOMEN & ART ENDURES
ON THE COVER
3
THE HUDSON RIVER FELLOWSHIP: CONNECTING WITH NATURE AND EACH OTHER By Milène J. Fernández
DON TROIANI: BRINGING THE PAST TO LIFE By James Lancel McElhinney
Fine Art Connoisseur is also available in a digital edition. Please visit fineartconnoisseur.com for details.
016
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Dede Russell Fine Art
Loving Hug oil on linen 12 x 16
www.dederussell.com
|
dede@dederussell.com
D o u gl a s Fry er
Creek Bottoms and Foothills oil 36 x 36 in.
“Momentary Reflections” |
So lo Exh ib itio n June 24 - Jul y 7, 2022
There is poetry hidden in unremarkable places, in ordinary moments, and in memories we accumulate and distill. - Douglas Fryer
.
225 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 | 505-983-1434 | Meyergalleries.com
P U B L I S H E R ’ S
L E T T E R
READY TO LIVE REALISM LIVE
I
t is hard to believe six months have passed since we concluded the second edition of Realism Live — a virtual art convention that teaches realist techniques for painting and drawing portraits, figures, landscapes, flowers, other still lifes, and more. Like the inaugural edition in 2020, last year’s was a huge success, and now the team from Fine Art Connoisseur and RealismToday. com are busy planning Realism Live 3.0. As ever, this event has been designed for artists and enthusiasts at all levels of experience, from the highly accomplished to those just starting out. Beginner’s Day will occur on Wednesday, November 9, and the main program will follow on November 10, 11, and 12. By press time we were thrilled to have secured for our faculty some of the most outstanding artists in the field, including Clyde Aspevig, Michelle Dunaway, Daniel Graves, John MacDonald, Michael Mentler, and Glenn Vilppu. More renowned talents are being added to the roster every week. Beginner’s Day will help all viewers — not just novices — get to the next level, opening their eyes and enhancing confidence in their ability to paint and draw. On offer for the following three days are art instruction demonstrations, talks on the principles and history of art, critiques, and roundtable discussions among artists and other experts. For all sorts of reasons (not just pandemicrelated ones), the art world has gone digital in a big way. Once again, Realism Live participants will use Streamline Publishing’s sophisticated community platform to interact; it is set up so that you deal only with our faculty and your fellow registrants. This is not an event open to the general public. Our participants have hailed from 30 countries, and now we are expecting an even broader turnout.
020
JOHN HOWARD SANDEN (b. 1935), Publisher B. Eric Rhoads, 2015, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in.
The beauty of it all, of course, is that everyone can participate safely from their own homes and studios. Our previous registrants have learned from the faculty, built a community and support network for themselves, and made lifelong friendships. They tell us that what they learned has kept their work looking real, but not like a photograph; that they can give their impression of a scene without going too far; that they feel better equipped to convey the truth in their own artistic voice; and that they have created a signature look. Best of all, they continue to grow and learn from what they experienced. These are impressive results after only four days together. Please visit realismlive.com now to learn more and register, and see you this November, at the latest. P.S. If you can’t make the actual “live” dates, don’t worry: replays are available to all who sign up (but not to those who don’t).
B. ERIC RHOADS Chairman/Publisher bericrhoads@gmail.com facebook.com/eric.rhoads @ericrhoads
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
GRAND OPENING WE INVITE YOU TO JOIN US IN MONTANA! COME CELEBRATE AND INTERACT WITH 45 INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ARTISTS AS WE OPEN THE DOORS TO THEIR NEW GALLERY.
JULY 16, 2022 • 5:00 - 9:00 PM ILLUME GALLERY WEST 130 EAST BROADWAY ST • PHILIPSBURG, MT 59858
DON OELZE “CORDIAL BUT CAUTIOUS” 40" X 48" OIL
130 E. BROADWAY ST, PO BOX 763 • PHILIPSBURG, MT 59858 | 435-313-5008 JANE@ILLUMEGALLERYWEST.COM • ILLUMEGALLERYWEST.COM
AMERICAN T ONALIST S OCIET Y Fostering the Tradition and Art Form of Contemporary American Tonalism
Look for info about our upcoming show at the Salmagundi Club, NYC in 2023. Sign up on our mailing list to be the first to knowwwww
Mary Erickson
Nancy bush
www.MaryEricksonArt.com 704-219-0391 maryericksonart@aol.
“Intention - White Egret” 36 x 36 in. Oil on Linen
“Winter” 20 x 20 in. Oil on Belgian linen www.nancyb ush.com 830-997-0515
John MacDonald
A.J. Wainright
“Berkshire Dusk” 12 x 16 in. Oil on Linen Panel www.jmacdo nald.com
“River Dreams” 12 x 24 in. Oil on Panel www.ajwain right.com
Visit AmericanTonalistSociety.com or Instagram @americantonalistsociety
LPAPA CELEBRATES “ WOMEN IN ART”
K AT H L E E N D U N P HY Signature Member - Laguna Plein Air Painters Association
P U B L I S E H D E I TR O ' SR ’ LS E N T O T E T R E
WOMEN ARTISTS, AND MORE W
024
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
VIRGINIA VEZZI (1600–1638), Herodias or Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist, n.d., oil on copper, 9 1/4 x 7 1/8 in., Robert Simon Fine Art, New York City
contemporary women artists contribute to our visual culture now. None of this means that Fine Art Connoisseur has lost interest in men, of course. On page 110 you’ll find news of a group exhibition I am co-curating this season with Michael Gormley, executive director of the innovative New York Artists Equity Gallery in Manhattan. Our topic? The male nude as seen by contemporary artists of all descriptions, in various materials and from diverse perspectives. This show should be fun, a bit provocative, and a reminder that even timeless themes like the human figure can always be considered afresh when talented artists get involved. Here’s to a busy, art-filled spring for all of us. Correction: In the Portfolio section of our April 2022 issue (“The Timeless Appeal of Horses”), we accidentally misspelled the middle name of artist Mary Ross Buchholz. We regret any inconvenience caused. F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
TRIPPI PHOTO: FRANCIS HILLS
hat a joy it has been assembling this issue! From our front cover image by Megan J. Seiter right through to the back cover adorned by Kathryn Mapes Turner — not to mention the impressive gatefold cover created by our friends at The Bennett Prize — this is an issue that takes Fine Art Connoisseur’s longtime championing of women artists to a new level. Our team has enjoyed reconnecting with colleagues at various organizations devoted to women in art, and we thank them for bringing us up to date on their exciting activities. See, for example, our editorial coverage of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club (page 74), the National Association of Women Artists (page 110), and the important exhibitions of female artistry on view this season at museums in Fort Worth and Huntsville (both page 112). And rest assured that in future issues we will return to covering what’s new at such lively nonprofits as American Women Artists and Women Artists of the West. Our highlighting of contemporary women artists comes naturally because their creations are all around us, but it remains challenging to discover female talents of the past. Just this weekend, I was strolling through The Winter Show in Manhattan, a superb fair filled with enticing art and design of all kinds. On the always-fascinating stand of the New York City dealer Robert Simon hung a small yet compelling oil-on-copper painting that depicts Herodias (or possibly Salome) holding the head of St. John the Baptist. It was made by Virginia Vezzi (1600–1638), a gifted Italian artist of whom I had never — to my shame — even heard. As was once often the case, she developed technical skills only because her loving artist father trained her; she proceeded to train with, and then marry, the artist Simon Vouet. At age 24 she was inducted into the world’s first art academy (still operating in Rome), and soon she and her husband moved to Paris, where he became a star and she died too young. I mention Virginia Vezzi because her obscurity should not deter us, but rather inspire us to keep digging — to learn more about historical women artists, whose unique perspectives enrich our understanding of the past, just as
HUSE SKELLY
F I N E
A R T
G A L L E R Y
Debra Huse
Lisa Skelly
Kim Lordier
Amanda Fish
Camille Przewodek
Yun Wei
Celebrating Women in Art since 1998 www.HuseSkellyGallery.com
Between Artists: Life in Paintings and Prose Damon Falke and Tabby Ivy
June 17-August 20, 2022 Preview Reception: June 16, 5-7 pm A collaborative project featuring new paintngs by Montana tonalist painter Tabby Ivy and responsive prose and poetry by Norway-based writer and playwright Damon Falke. Tabby Ivy, At the End of the Day, 2021, oil on panel, 18x24 inches; courtesy of the artist (c) Tabby Ivy
A TIMELESS LEGACY 2022:
ARTISTS OF GLACIER, PAST AND PRESENT August 27-October 29, 2022 Opening Celebration: August 27, 5-8 pm
Photo: Lucy Van Slyck in Glacier Park, April 1929, Pac 93-28, Montana Historical Society Research Center Archives, Helena , MT
PLEIN AIR GLACIER 2022: APAINTMONTANA PAINT OUT OUT: SEPTEMBER 6-13, 2022 PARTY & SALE: SEPTEMBER 17, 5-8 PM EXHIBITION: SEPTEMBER 17- OCTOBER 15
JOIN US!
HISTORIC DOWNTOWN KALISPELL, MT
WWW.HOCKADAYMUSEUM.COM
Call for Entries
16th International Salon Competition Entry Dates:
March 1 - June 16, 2022 International recognition & opportunities through partnerships with prestigious magazines, galleries and museums. Over $130,000+ in cash awards • Top Prize $25,000 • 11 Categories • 180+ Awards & Honorable Mentions • Exhibition, Publication & Sale Opportunities
www.arcsalon.org
ART SA L E WEEK EN D | J U N E 1 7 – 1 8 , 20 22
David A. Leffel, Spanish Bulto and Roses, Oil on canvas, 23'' x 20''
Event details, reservations, online catalog and proxy information available at pdw.nationalcowboymuseum.org. On exhibit June 2 – August 7, 2022. 1700 Northeast 63rd Street • Oklahoma City, OK 73111 • (405) 478-2250 • nationalcowboymuseum.org Museum Partners Devon Energy Corporation • E.L. and Thelma Gaylord Foundation Major Support The True Foundation Presented by
WRIT TEN BY DAVID MASELLO
S T I L L
W A T E R S
BARBARA ASCHER Writer
The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) 1871, oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 46 1/4 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 34.92
E
ven though Barbara Ascher loves to sail, her favorite moments on the water are when all is still. “I think one of the reasons I love Thomas Eakins’s painting The Champion Single Sculls is that it’s very reminiscent of that moment when you’re rowing and you’ve raised the oar blades and you’re just still in the water,” she says. “There’s something so entrancing about that sound, when all you hear is the silent dripping of the water off the oars. You’ll be sitting in the water and you might hear a bird or, off in the distance, some man yelling at his wife to ‘Take care of the anchor!’” Ascher has written some of the most engaging, poignant, and resonant memoirs of our time, including the recently published Ghosting: A Widow’s Voyage Out (Pushcart Press), which recounts the years-long grief and subsequent healing that followed the death of her beloved first husband. So inured to water and sailing is she that the book’s very title references that open-sea sailing phenomenon whereby a seemingly undetectable phantom wind propels one forward. Although she is a fearless sailor, swimmer, and recreational rower, Ascher admits to not having sculled, as is depicted in this Eakins painting, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. “I’ve always dreamed of being a sculler. I love both the loneliness and the companionship
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
you have with the water. A scull moves through the water like a swan.” Every time Ascher, who lives and writes in New York City, visits the Met, she “checks in” with Eakins’s painting “to make sure it’s still there. I have no idea where it might go,” she says, as if recognizing that a ghosting phenomenon might set the painting a-sail elsewhere, “but I guess I just want to make sure that the work hasn’t been a dream of mine all along.” In fact, a 1993 memoir she wrote about the death of her brother from AIDS was named for a (nonexistent) painting she saw at the Met in a dream, entitled Landscape Without Gravity. Even though this champion rower of his era, Max Schmitt, sits idle in his scull on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, Ascher is keenly aware of the movement around him. She cites the plume from the steamboat in the far background, the vessel of rowdy boaters near the bridge, the drifting of clouds in the blue sky, and Eakins himself busily rowing nearby. “I realize I’m projecting,” Ascher notes, “but
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
Max has that daydreaming look when you stop on the water and look into it. He’s at a still point, a quiet point, even though there’s action all around him. When any of us stop and there’s all this action around and we’re no longer a part of it, something happens in the moment. You’re more receptive to, but not agitated by, what’s going on around you. You’re very alert, very aware, but also very quiet.” Schmitt’s stillness is emphasized, Ascher points out, by the perfect, unwavering reflection of a tree in the river. As a memoirist, Ascher requires and covets quiet and stillness for her writing. From her Manhattan apartment, there are head-on views of the East River, busy with its barges and tugboats and the occasional motorboat headed south to open waters. So she’s never far from water, actually or emotionally. “While I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly mentioned this Eakins painting in my writing, the experience of looking at it, and knowing it, is very present in what I do.”
029
Kathy Anderson
Carol Arnold
Anne-Marie Boisvert
Michele Byrne
Younghae Chung
Michelle Dunaway
Kathleen Dunphy
Zhenya Gershman
Vic Hollins
Wennie Huang
PROUD TO CELEBRATE OUR WOMEN ARTIST AMBASSADORS Susan Lyon
Johanne Mangi
Lori McNee
Charlene Mosley
Dena Peterson
Jenn Song
Terry Strickland
Karen Weihs
Willow Wolfe
Elizabeth Zhang
Karen Weihs “Maeras” Oil on canvas 24” x 24”
FAC_Full_Page.indd 1
Kristen Olson Stone
ROYALTALENS.COM 4/6/22 5:52 PM
National Oil and Acrylic Painters’ Society www.noaps.org
“Halifax Harbor Morning” 11x14, Oil, $1,050 by William Rogers www.williamrogersart.com
“Sunflowers”, 11x14, Oil, $725 by Josie Gearhart www.josiegearhart.com
“Finis!”, 14x18, Oil, $2,800 by Robin Williamson www.robinwilliamsonfineart.com
“In the Bag”, 10x12, Acrylic, $4,800 by Cher Pruys www.artbycher.com
Best of America, Small Works, 2022 National Juried Exhibition Paintings on Display April 28- May 27, 2022
605 28th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35233 205-328-1761 • www.beverlymcneilgallery.com
National Oil and Acrylic Painters’ Society
“Zoey at 9 Months”, 12x16, Oil, $7,000 by Shuchi Muley www.shuchimuley.com
“Doorway Reflections”, 14x11, Oil, $900 by Karen Merkin www.karenmerkin.com
“On Alert”, 18x14, Oil, $2,200 by Barbara Nuss www.barbaranuss.com “Whispers of Jasmine”, 20x16, Oil $3,300 by Sarah Paddock www.sarahpaddock.com
Best of America, Small Works, 2022 National Juried Exhibition Paintings on Display April 28- May 27, 2022
www.noaps.org
“Belgian Blonde”, 11x14, Oil, $2,000 by Yvonne Bonacci www.yvonnebonacci.com
“Bow and Arrows”, 16x16, Oil, $2,750 by Karen Budan www.karenbudan.com
“Lotus”, 48x60, Oil, $5,000 by Frank Hoeffler www.frank-hoeffler.pixels.com
“Life and Legend”, 60x60cm, Oil, $2,550 by Jessica Bianco www.biancofineart.com
605 28th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35233 205-328-1761 • www.beverlymcneilgallery.com
SAVE THE DATE FOR THE RUSSELL 2022
AUGUST 18–20, 2022 Much more than a Western art exhibition and sale, The Russell is a Western art experience!
The Russell is the premiere fundraising event for the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana, attracting artists, collectors, and patrons from around the country. The event culminates in Saturday’s Live Auction featuring important pieces by Charles M. Russell and other historic artists, and new work by acclaimed contemporary western artists. The Russell, now recognized as one of the most prestigious western art events in the country, provides critical funding through commissions and premiums that directly support the museum’s educational programs and cultural outreach.
Now featuring the lowest buyers premium on contemporary works in the industry at 12%!*
THE RUSSELL 2022 HIGHLIGHTS: LEFT: Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey, Night of the Wolf, dye on silk, 20 X20 in. RIGHT: Randy Van Beek, Hunters Return to Saint Mary Camp, oil, 36 X 54 in.
Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey and Randy Van Beek are distinguished members of the C.M. Russell Skull Society of Artists.
400 13th Street North | Great Falls, Montana (406) 727–8787 | CMRussell.org/the-russell
*Payment by cash/check. Historic pieces purchased with cash or check realize a premium of 12–17%, the most competitive in the market.
2022 MAY/JUNE RUSSELL SAVE THE DATE FP.indd 1
4/6/22 11:09 AM
AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF WOMEN MAKING ART 2 022 J U RI E D EXH I BITIONS
BREAKING THROUGH: THE RISE OF AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS
ANNUAL SPRING ONLINE SHOW
until May 29 at Customs House Museum Clarksville, TN
debuts May 10
www.americanwomenartists.org
BREAKING THROUGH EXHIBITION PRESIDENT’S CHOICE AWARD NA N CY B O R E N MASTER-SIG NATU R E M E M B E R Daffodil Oil • 20” x 16” • nancyboren.com
BREAKING THROUGH EXHIBITION GRAND PRIZE AWARD E LLE N B U S E LLI MASTER-SIGNATURE M EMBER Woman with Turban Oil on linen • 12” x 10” • ellenbuselli.com
BREAKING THROUGH EXHIBITION DISTINGUISHED ACHIEVEMENT AWARD LAU R I E KE R S EY MASTER-SI G NATU R E M E M B E R Late Afternoon, North Point Oil • 24” x 30” • lauriekersey.com
AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF WOMEN MAKING ART
C H R I STI N E G R AE FE D R EWYE R MASTER-SIGNATURE MEMBER Testing Her Wings Oil on linen • 24” x 18” • christinedrewyer.com
KI R STE N KO KKI N MASTER-SIG NATU R E M E M B E R Daphne Bronze • 67” x 47” x 13” • kokkinsculpture.com
American Women Artists is a non-profit organization dedicated to the inspiration, celebration, and encouragement of women in the visual fine arts. www.americanwomenartists.org
S AR AH M PAD D O C K ASSOCIATE M E M B E R Mint Julep Oil on linen • 18” x 24” • sarahmpaddock.com
PAD D I M OYE R SIGNATURE MEMBER Awakening Desert Stone wall sculpture 17” x 19” x 10” • #5 edition of 27 paddimoyerstudio.com
AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF WOMEN MAKING ART
LO R R A I N E WATRY SI G NATU R E M E M B E R Coral Chorus Watercolor • 26” x 19” • lorrainewatrystudio.com
A N NA LI SA LEAL ASSOCIATE MEMBER Mother Lode Pastel • 48” x 48” • annalisaleal.com
DANA LO M BAR D O SIGNATURE M E M B E R Happy Hour at the Garage Oil • 24” x 48” • danalombardo.com
American Women Artists is a non-profit organization dedicated to the inspiration, celebration, and encouragement of women in the visual fine arts. www.americanwomenartists.org
R O S ETTA MASTER-SIGNATURE MEMBER The Challenge Bronze • 15” x 22” x 12” • rosettasculpture.com
JAN ET WI LS O N ASSOCIATE M E M B E R Sunrise on Mt. Si Oil on canvas • 30” x 36” • janetwilsonart.com
DAN NA TARTAG LIA ASSOCIATE M E M B E R Capricious Oil on canvas • 30” x 36” • tartagliagallery.com
N O R A XU ASSOCIATE MEMBER Fallen Angel Acrylic • 16” x 20” • nora-xu.com
AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF WOMEN MAKING ART
LI SA C U N N I N G HAM ASSOCIATE WITH DISTINCTION MEMBER Seaside Cottage Pastel • 16” x 20” • lisacunninghamfineart.com
B E C CA D R A C H ASSOCIATE MEM B E R Notes to Myself Oil on linen • 40” x 30” • beccasfineart.com
C I N DY HAR R I S ASSOCIATE MEMBER
R UTH G R E E N ASSOCIATE MEMB E R
Raining in Kyiv Oil on linen board • 12” x 16” • cindyharrisart.com
The Gallant One Bronze on marble base • 12” x 10 ¾” x 5 ¼” edition of 10 ruthgreenfineart.com
American Women Artists is a non-profit organization dedicated to the inspiration, celebration, and encouragement of women in the visual fine arts. www.americanwomenartists.org
J U D ITH H UTC H E S O N ASSOCIATE MEM BER Saturday Drive Oil on wood panel • 12” x 16” • judithhutcheson.com
GAYLYN N R I B E I R A ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION M EM B E R At the Opening Oil on copper • 8” x 10” • gaylynnribeira.com
D E B S C H M IT ASSOCIATE MEMBER Kit and Kaboodle Oil on linen • 30” x 30” • debschmit.com
PO KEY PAR K SIGNATURE MEM B E R Tom Bronze • 8” x 11 ½” x 10” edition 15 • pokeypark.com
31st National Juried Exhibition • www.oilpaintersofamerica.com
BARBARA COLEMAN OPA Albuquerque, New Mexico Raking Light at Ghost Ranch, 18 x 24 in., oil on linen www.barbaracoleman.com
CHULA BEAUREGARD Steamboat Springs, Colorado Lift, 8 x 10 in., oil on linen www.chulabeauregard.com
All paintings are available at Steamboat Art Museum • 970-870-1755
DAVID HARMS
Centennial, Colorado Morning Sun and Shallow Water, 30 x 40 in., oil on canvas www.davidharms.com
Steamboat Art Museum • Steamboat Springs, Colorado • June 3 - August 27, 2022 • www.steamboatartmuseum.org
RICH ALEXANDER OPA
Mt. Kisco, New York The Game of Life, 24 x 30 in., oil on linen www.richalexanderart.com
ELIZABETH POLLIE Harbor Springs, Michigan Local Dirt, 30 x 30 in., oil www.elizabethpollie.com
OPA
CHRIS KLING
Stuart, Florida Preparing the Catch, 24 x 24 in., oil www.chrisklingartist.com
All paintings are available at Steamboat Art Museum • 970-870-1755
31st National Juried Exhibition • www.oilpaintersofamerica.com
JACALYN BEAM
Greenville, Delaware From the Station, 14 x 18 in., Plein Air oil on conservation linen and baltic birch panel www.jacalynbeam.com
LINDA NEARON Alamo, California Pondering, 20 x 16 in., oil www.lindanearonstudio.com
LYNN MEHTA
Alexandria, Virginia August Sunflowers, 12 x 12 in., oil www.lynnmehta.com
All paintings are available at Steamboat Art Museum • 970-870-1755
LEE MACLEOD
Santa Fe, New Mexico Storm Front, 18 x 24 in., oil on board www.leemacleodfineart.com
Steamboat Art Museum • Steamboat Springs, Colorado • June 3 - August 27, 2022 • www.steamboatartmuseum.org
JOHANNE MANGI North Haven, Connecticut Marshmallow, 10 x 8 in., oil on linen www.johannemangi.com
All paintings are available at Steamboat Art Museum • 970-870-1755
Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club a national organization to show and promote works by professional women artists founded in 1896
Our 125th Anniversary
UPCOMING EVENTS April 11-30 2022 Juried Member and Associate Show Deepwells Mansion 2 Taylor Ln, St James, NY
To Celebrate, we have set a donation goal of $12,500. Please visit CLWAC.org donation page
June 20-30 2022 125th Open Juried Exhibition Salmagundi Club 47 5th Avenue, NY, NY June 23, 2022 5:30-8 PM Benefit Reception for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing June 30, 2022 6:00 PM 125th Gala Awards Dinner September 4-October 1, 2022 Juried Member and Associate Show Ridgewood Art Institute 12 East Glen Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ September 30-November 10, 2022 Juried Member and Associate Show Lyme Art Association 90 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT For further information visit CLWAC.org
CLWAC AD.indd 1
Above: Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louis Lemonnier, 1848-1904) and Her Children, Georgett-Berthe (1872-1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875-1895), by Auguste Renoir 1878, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund 1907. Top right: Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887) By Alexandre Cabanel 1876, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
3/21/22 4:15 PM
ub
s
y LESLIE DUPRATT
Davis, California Cutting Board, 18 x 24 in., Oil on canvas dupratt@sbcglobal.net 530.979.0535 www.leslieduprattstudio1609.com
POKEY PARK
ldren, e Metropolitan
llard Wolfe w York.
3/21/22 4:15 PM
ALAYNE SAHAR
Ambler, Pennsylvania Bubbles, 25 x 22 in., Watercolor www.alaynesahar.art Gallery inquires welcome
Tucson, Arizona Hitching a Ride, 9.5 x 14 x 7.5 in., bronze pokey@pokeypark.com | 520.869.6435 | www.pokeypark.com Represented by K. Newby Gallery, Tubac, AZ; Lovetts Gallery, Tulsa, OK; Fredericksburg Good Art Company, Fredericksburg, TX
Women Artists of the West (WAOW)
is thrilled to return to McBride Gallery in Annapolis, MD for the 52nd annual juried National Exhibition and Sale “East Meets West” from November 6, 2022 to January 7, 2023. The public is invited to the November 6th awards ceremony and opening reception from 1:00-4:00 p.m. The City of Annapolis is designated as one of the Top 25 Arts Destinations by American Style Magazine and one of the Top Ten Most Walkable Cities. The McBride Gallery, restaurants and shops line the Main Street of the city’s historic section leading down to the dock toward the Chesapeake Bay. This stunning gallery’s warm, home-like atmosphere offers a beautiful setting in which to appreciate approximately 160 2D and 3D works presented in this year’s National Show. Patrons will enjoy a large range of artworks: landscape, seascape and figurative paintings in a variety of mediums plus large and small fine art sculpture. Originally named Women Artists of the American West (WAOAW), the group was founded in 1971 in Norco, California by a small group of women wanting to network as professionals and compete in the world of art. WAOAW soon became known for its high caliber of artists and distinctive western style. Now, in its 52nd year, WAOW has grown beyond its western roots to nearly 300 juried women artists from coast to coast working in a variety of genres, styles and mediums. For more show information or to learn more about WAOW, please visit www.waow.org.
Susan Hediger Matteson
Dolores, Colorado Reverence, 36 x 27 in., oil on linen susan@susanmatteson.com www.susanmatteson.com Represented by Mary Williams Fine Art, Boulder, CO; Kilgore American Indian Art, Mancos, CO
Margie Hildreth
San Antonio, Texas Awakening, 9 x 12 in., Watercolor info@margiehildreth.com 210.836.6668 www.margiehildreth.com Represented by Art Gallery Prudencia, San Antonio, TX
Nina Cobb Walker
Gloria Chadwick
El Cajon, California Rising Jellies, 16 x 12 in., Watercolor on Yupo paper gloriaachadwick@gmail.com | 619.203.0607 www.gloriachadwickart.com Gallery inquiries welcome
Renascent, 8 x 16 in., oil Ninawalker63@gmail.com 915.494.0275 www.ninacobbwalker.com Represented by Cate Zane Gallery
Sherry Cobb-Kelleher
Delta, Colorado Trusting, 16 x 20 in., Oil on Linen Panel sherry@sherrystudio.com 970.261.3396 www.sherryspaintedhorsestudio.com Gallery inquires welcome
Laara Cassells
Canada Bella 2, 36 x 24 in., acrylic on baltic birch laara.cassells@gmail.com 403.556.9902 www.laaracassells.com Visit website for gallery representation
Sheryl Knight
Santa Maria, California Mist Falls, 24 x 18 in., oil on linen sheryl@sherylknight.com 805.478.1314 www.sherylknight.com Represented by Nancy Dodds Gallery, Carmel, CA; Bronze, Silver, and Gold Gallery, Cambria, CA; Sandz Gallery, Pismo Beach, CA
WOMEN ARTISTS’ SPOTLIGHT
HIGHLIGHTING WOMEN ARTISTS
T
hroughout this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur, we celebrate the quality and diversity of artworks being made by women nationwide today. We also applaud the growing number of organizations and institutions that are training, encouraging, exhibiting, and documenting women artists. This current vitality is especially heartening given that, until the 1960s, society expected most women who were trained professionally in the visual arts to teach, rather than to exhibit actively. If they did choose to compete in the professional arena, it was hoped they would not try too hard. Even today, the system remains skewed: an impressive 51 percent of American visual artists are women, yet only 11 percent of the artworks on view in this country’s museums were made by women. How can this be? The (several) answers to this question are complex and reach right back to the days when women could often not obtain training or even supplies. Yet this imbalance also implicates us as museum and gallery visitors, no less than the curators and dealers who serve us. For example, if “average” art lovers are asked if they would prefer to see a masterpiece by John Singer Sargent or one by Mary Cassatt — both great artists who flourished around the same time — most will probably request Sargent, regardless of gender. It’s unlikely that exact question would ever be posed, but you get the idea. Then multiply that likelihood by the number of male talents who flourished in historical periods when women could not (e.g., Leonardo, Rubens, Monet), and you have an inkling of the problem’s scale. What to do about it? We should keep excavating the stories of historical women artists who deserve greater recognition, and we must keep highlighting the superb art women are making today. We congratulate and thank everyone involved in this collective journey, and we look forward to enjoying even more of their artistry in the years ahead. Peter Trippi, Editor-in-Chief
CAROL STROCK-WASSON
Union City, Indiana Sunrise Indian Pass Road, Florida’s Forgotten Coast, 12 x 16 in., pastel carol@strockwasson.com | 937.459.6492 | www.carolstrockwasson.com Represented by StrockWasson Gallery, Union City, IN; Gordy Fine Art and Framing, Muncie, IN; Brown County Art Guild, Nashville, IN
WOMEN ARTISTS’ SPOTLIGHT
JO RIDGE KELLEY
Waynesville, North Carolina Blue Ridge Radiance, 48 x 60 in., Oil on Linen Spring Paradise, 36 x 60, Oil on Linen jo@jokelley.com | www.joridgekelley.com Represented by Jo Ridge Kelley Fine Art Gallery
WOMEN ARTISTS’ SPOTLIGHT
MARY GARRISH
Merritt Island, Florida End of the Day, 12 x 16 in., Oil on Linen MaryGarrish@aol.com www.marygarrishfineart.com Represented by JM Stringer, Vero Beach, FL; Hagen Fine Art, Charleston, SC
WOMEN ARTISTS’ SPOTLIGHT
ALESSANDRA MARRUCCHI
Florence, Italy Self-Portrait with Pearl Earring, 15.75 x 9.84 in., oil on canvas alessandramarrucchi@gmail.com www.alessandramarrucchi.com
HEATHER ARENAS
Distillation, 40 x 30 in., oil on cradled wood artist@heatherarenas.com 720.281.4632 www.heatherarenas.com
LAURA MAE NOBLE
Chicago, Illinois The Teaching Artist at The Tributary, 11 x 14 in., watercolor, gouache lauramaenoble@gmail.com 773.558.2047 www.thetributaryarts.com
WOMEN ARTISTS’ SPOTLIGHT
SHERRY CAMHY
Anonymous, 8ft. x 6 ft., graphite sherrycamhy@gmail.com
WOMEN ARTISTS’ SPOTLIGHT
JENNIFER TAYLOR
Orquevaux Sunrise, 24 x 36 in., oil on linen 931.655.0499 www.jstaylorart.com
BRENDA BOYLAN
United States A Secret Place, 48 x 60 in., oil on gallery wrapped canvas 503.702.2403 www.brendaboylan.com Represented by Art Elements Gallery, Newberg, OR; Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT
n., anvas
m
wberg, OR; ,
WOMEN ARTISTS’ SPOTLIGHT
LINDA MUTTI
A.C. LINDNER
Texas Les Hortensias, 36 x 36 in., oil on linen lindnerstudios@yahoo.com www.aclindner.com
THERESA GRILLO LAIRD Gulf Breeze, Florida Season’s End, 48 x 60 in., oil art@theresagrillolaird.com | 850.261.6006 www.theresagrillolaird.com
Stillness of the Evening, 12 x 16 in., pastel www.LindaMutti.com Represented by Santa Barbara Fine Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Park Street Gallery, Paso Robles, CA
FAY WOOD
Saugerties, New York Three-Ring Pandemic Circus-Walk for Two, 15 x 9.5 x 13 in., Galvanized & coated copper wire & found objects & brass rings info@faywoodstudio.com | 845.246.7504 www.faywoodstudio.com Gallery inquires welcome
TAKE YOUR WORK TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL AND BECOME A PART OF THE PLEIN AIR FAMILY
Joe Anna Arnett
SANTA FE
MAY 17-21, 2022 www.PleinAirConvention.com
There is a lot of superb art being made these days. This column by Allison Malafronte shines light on five gifted individuals.
DIEGO GLAZER (b. 1992), Rain or Shine, 2021, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in., Paderewski Fine Art (Beaver Creek, Colorado)
DIEGO GLAZER (b. 1992) describes his style of painting as indirect and his artistic position as interpretive, meaning that his imagination and personal experience are as much a part of the process as reality. “I work in several layers of oil paint,” the Denver-based artist explains. “This approach makes the painting itself a physical object with great variety and complexity. There are thick and thin areas, as well as passages of transparency interacting with opacity. When working from life, I take suggestions from the beauty of nature and reality, but I distill them through my own aesthetic and emotional lens.” Painting figures, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes with equal dexterity, Glazer is an artist who purposefully availed himself of a wide range of techniques throughout his education. He earned a degree in visual arts focused on impressionist methods at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende (Mexico), then completed a three-year program at Florence’s Angel Academy of Art, where he learned a classical approach to the figure based on the 19th-century French academic model. After that, Glazer embarked on a path of self-training and selfdiscovery. “One of my priorities has been to explore many different styles, mentalities, and methods of painting that often have little to do with one another and bring them together in a coherent and satisfying F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
way,” the artist shares. “I want my paintings to transport the viewer into a dreamlike atmosphere, and at the same time to give a familiar feeling.” Glazer does this particularly well in the still life genre, where he revels in the opportunity to convey stories and ideas in a symbolic, subtle fashion. One example is his recent painting Rain or Shine, where two stalwart ships in the foreground of a calming scene represent an enduring partnership in the journey through life. “This work alludes to two companions navigating forward, shining bright despite an approaching ominous shadow,” Glazer explains. “These two will ride it out together through thick and thin, rain or shine.” Although he was born in Omaha, Glazer grew up in Querétaro, Mexico, and holds Swiss nationality — a situation that has exposed him to a variety of cultures from an early age. After studying art in Florence, the artist decided to set up his studio in America, where he believes realism and traditional methods are more favorably received. “Having grown up in a place where an artist is unlikely to make it,” he says, “I’m hoping to find success upon my return to the States.” Glazer is represented by Abend Gallery (Denver), Aldama Fine Art (Mexico City), Artemesia Galerie (Denver), and Paderewski Fine Art (Beaver Creek, Colorado).
063
In MEGAN J. SEITER’s (b. 1986) still life drawings, simple objects such as limes, lemons, artichokes, leaves, figs, and tulips transform into stunning visions of clarity, color, and design. “I’ve discovered that I can find surprisingly emotive qualities in inanimate objects,” the artist says. “My compositions focus on the subject alone, without a contextual background, to shine light on the details that make each object distinctive.” For the last 12 years, Seiter has been experimenting with, and perfecting, her trompe l’oeil, hyperrealist technique at her home studio in Northern California, using a range of colored pencils, PanPastels, and watercolors. Originally from Rhode Island, Seiter earned her B.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and moved to California in 2009. Although she has been exposed to many types of art since childhood (she grew up with an artist-calligrapher mother who was involved in a large community of creatives) and has worked with various media, it was ultimately colored pencils that satisfied Seiter’s passion for precision, luminous color, and texture. “I build my drawings with light layers of wax- and oil-based colored pencils on sanded pastel paper,” she explains. “Colored pencils are unique for their exceptional ability to render fine detail, and they become luminous and vibrant when applied in soft layers. I continue to push the boundaries of my medium to achieve the highest level of realism I can.” That crisp realism can be seen clearly in such pieces as Artichokes, Limones, and Parrot Tulips, where every object is intimately observed and tended to in much the same way the artist once approached
064
MEGAN J. SEITER (b. 1986), Artichokes, 2022, colored pencils with PanPastel on sanded pastel paper, 6 1/2 x 16 in., private collection
portraits and figures. “Limones is not just a drawing of some lemons, but rather a drawing of two specific lemons that are underripe, slightly imperfect, and so beautiful in their individuality,” says Seiter. “Artichokes features a spread of artichokes and lemons, each with its own expression. The lemon on the far right is a saturated yellow, aged and oblong, and slightly past its prime, while the middle one is juicy and enticing. The flowers in Parrot Tulips made their way into three of my drawings. I bought the blooms closed, and over several days their stems started to bend toward the light and the flowers opened fully. It was exciting to document these changes and draw them in their varying states.” Seiter’s detail-oriented approach necessitates time and care, and she therefore produces only about 10 to 15 drawings per year. She has recently expanded from selling only originals to also offering prints through her website, which allows her to share her popular work with an even wider audience. Seiter is represented by Dolby Chadwick Gallery (San Francisco) and Meyer Gallery (Santa Fe).
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
LATOYA HOBBS (b. 1983), Founding Members of Black Women in Print Series: LaToya M. Hobbs, 2022, acrylic and collaged paper on carved wood panel, 36 x 24 in., available through the artist; photo: Ariston Jacks
LATOYA M. HOBBS (b. 1983) is a thoroughly modern woman as adept at time management as she is at art-making. This Arkansas-born, Baltimore-based painter and printmaker is not only creating ambitious works that are moving her genre forward, but she is also a wife and mother who home-schools her two children and doesn’t typically get studio time on school-term weekdays until everyone else is asleep. It’s a life that requires focus, discipline, and distraction-aversion to make the most of every moment. One of Hobbs’s latest series, Salt of the Earth, explores the personification of women as salt and their function as preservers of family, culture, and community. Featured within the series is the life-size Carving Out Time, a fivepart woodcarving with mixed media that shows a day in the life of Hobbs as a mother and artist. Standing eight feet high and reaching 60 feet wide, Carving Out Time is a rare, large-scale feat of printmaking and just finished a five-month showing at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Other series include Hobbs’s most recent Founding Members of Black Women in Print, which contains seven portraits of the founders of an organization that raises awareness of independent black women printmakers. Hobbs’s self-portrait appears in this series and is a telling example of the bold color, texture, and pattern she consistently conveys in her work. “There are elements throughout the series that connect one woman to another, such as the Adinkrahene-patterned background,” she explains. “There are also elements that honor each artist’s individuality, such as the specific color palette within each work and the sitter’s chosen clothing and adornment.” Hobbs’s style can be described as a mixedmedia hybrid between painting and printmaking that combines such processes as drawing, painting, collage, relief carving, monotype, and woodcut to achieve a unique art form that is both personal to Hobbs and universal. “My mixed-media works seamlessly marry traditional painting and printmaking techniques with the intent of showcasing a more balanced perception of black womanhood,” the artist says. “In addition to painting and collaging, I physically carve into the surface of wooden panels to create my portraits, mimicking the woodcut process. With this unique approach, I’ve re-envisioned the purpose of the woodblock from a production tool to an art object itself, expanding the parameters of contemporary printmaking.” Hobbs earned a B.F.A. in painting from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Indiana’s Purdue University. Today she is a professor at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Hobbs is self-represented.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
065
ERIK EBELING (b. 1982), Minotaur, 2020, painted aqua resin (edition of 6), 38 x 20 x 15 in., available through the artist
ERIK EBELING (b. 1982) is both a painter and a sculptor, but it is in his towering cast-resin sculptures of mythical and superhumanlooking modern figures that his unique artistic vision and prowess are fully expressed. Hailing from Kansas and now residing in Portland, Oregon, Ebeling began his training at Florence’s Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute of Art and then earned a B.F.A. in graphic design and painting from Drake University in Iowa. After spending several years as a senior graphic designer for Disney Interactive, he returned to his first love of sculpture, this time from a perspective that combined his classical training with the contemporary sensibilities he gleaned in the design world. “Overall,” Ebeling explains, “I’m attempting to achieve an effect that is simultaneously ancient and modern; fragmented like the classical marbles, while still contemporary, with gestural textures and modern materials.” The artist has been experimenting for years and has landed on an approach that naturally suits his stylistic goals and artistic temperament. Sculpting in water-based clay, he executes each phase himself, from drawing and creating small maquettes to molding and final casting. It’s a time-intensive process that Ebeling works through methodically, and his finished work testifies to the fact that he is after both tactile results and those of a more philosophical nature. “I’m interested in the way light interacts with the textured surface, the way a form can feel rough while still giving the impression of a highly modeled figure,” he says. “I believe sculpture should be designed to be visually compelling from all angles and distances. As the viewer enters the space occupied by the piece, the ambiguous attitude and disposition of the portrait encourage further contemplation of feeling, meaning, and metaphor.” Ancient history and mythology are obviously sources of inspiration for Ebeling, but he is careful not to fall into cliches or stereotypes. “Depicting familiar characters can be a trap,” he notes. “The piece can quickly become stagnant. The viewer recognizes, then categorizes, then potentially dismisses, the subject, without engaging further. In my current work, I’m depicting ancient mythological figures not as heroes in action but as observers in enigmatic, meditative moments. This allows viewers to contextualize and interpret the mood and atmosphere, without an overly prominent narrative. The Minotaur is contemplative, no longer a gigantic, aggressive, monstrous destroyer. The Gryphon, formerly a lion, is now a female form. Enki, the Sumerian lord of water, knowledge, and creation, becomes the artist himself.” Admittedly, these pursuits are sometimes easily attained and at other times elusive, yet Ebeling’s devotion to his practice and imagination ensure that every work resonates. “There is a massively wide spectrum of approaches to artmaking,” he concludes, “but I’ve
066
always felt that this quote from Odd Nerdrum perfectly encapsulates the way I view my process: “First I win the effect. Then I win the likeness, but lose the effect. After a long time, I win something I can’t define.” Ebeling is self-represented.
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
MICHELE BYRNE (b. 1959), Celebrating the Fabric of America, From a Woman’s Perspective: Berta Zoltan/ Budapest, Hungary, 2019, oil on linen, 36 x 24 in., available through the artist
In January 2019, MICHELE BYRNE (b. 1959) debuted a timely series of paintings titled Celebrating the Fabric of America, From a Woman’s Perspective at Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania. The 15-work collection featuring portraits of American women of different heritages aimed to spark dialogue about cultural diversity and the common humanity that knits this country together. It did just that. A year later, the pandemic halted the exhibition’s momentum and tour dates, but now that Byrne is again able to welcome models to her studio and universities are resuming their events, she is moving forward with additional portraits and exhibition bookings. “The inspiration for this project evolved from the glaring reality of issues of race and immigration in America,” Byrne explains. “To escape the news media, I started looking deep within myself by painting small self-portraits. One day, inspired by Gustav Klimt’s full-figure portraits of women, I decided to paint a full self-portrait, and over the next few weeks, I asked others to pose for me. There was no plan at first, but I knew I wanted the paintings to transcend cultural boundaries. I wanted to reflect all ethnicities and create a fabric that includes us all. The idea that we are all equal parts of this Universe — literally uni (one) verse (song) — has always inspired me. I want to sing this message loud and clear.” Known for decades as a plein air and cityscape painter of the greater New York area — she is a life-long Pennsylvanian who moved to Santa Fe in 2020 — Byrne departed from her usual subjects with Celebrating the Fabric of America, challenging herself not only to hone her portraiture skills but also to capture the essence of each woman’s life story. Italy, Africa, the Czech Republic, Israel, Korea, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Hungary, Native America, and more are represented in this series, with nods to each woman’s customs and cultural symbols embedded throughout their portraits. In Berta Zoltan/Budapest, Hungary, Byrne depicts an artist who came to her studio with a selection of meaningful treasures from her past. “In 1956, the 10 members of the Zoltan family arrived in America after fleeing the Soviet invasion of Hungary,” Byrne explains. “With them they brought the Hungarian language, treasured recipes, embroidery craft, and their history.” “I feel very honored to be part of this project,” says Berta Zoltan. “This painting captures my past, with the Hungarian Parliament in the background, my green-card photo, the embroidery craft my mother learned as a child, and the Cry Hungary book, which contains a photo of my father taken during the uprising. It also highlights the present, with the fresh-baked poppy-seed beigli and hand-crafted fakanál
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
(wooden spoon) sculptures. I appreciate the way in which Michele tells my story of the past and present with strokes of her brush.” In each of the series’s paintings, a piece of ribbon with a symbol from each woman’s country appears at top right, and the ribbons connect one painting to another. “At the Alvernia show, I also had twoinch white ribbons adjoining each piece,” Byrne recalls. “The sitters all chose words to represent what being in the show meant to them, and we wrote them on the ribbons. Words such as Diversity, Compassion, Empowering, and Tapestry of Womanhood. This thread defines and unites us.” Byrne is represented by Acosta-Strong Fine Art (Santa Fe), Reinert Fine Art (Charleston), and James R. Ross Fine Art (Indianapolis).
067
BY MAX GILLIES
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
THE BENNETT PRIZE
CELEBRATING WOMEN PAINTERS
T
he COVID-19 pandemic seems to have scrambled most people’s sense of what happened when, so now it’s especially helpful to recall and anticipate our milestones whenever possible. Hard to believe, it was exactly three years ago — in May 2019 — that the winner of the first Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters was announced. This unique honor was presented to the Tampa-based artist Aneka Ingold — specifically $50,000 payable over two years — constituting what is still the largest award offered solely to women figurative painters. Endowed through a $3 million fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation by the San Antonio-based art collectors Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, this biennial prize is designed to propel the careers of full-time female painters who have not yet reached “full professional recognition,” which the Bennetts define as having sold a single work for $25,000 or more. In receiving $25,000 annually for two years, the winner is accorded some financial “breathing room” in order to create a fresh body of work she might not otherwise have the bandwidth to make. Fortunately, the Prize has been welcomed with open arms. Steven Alan Bennett notes, “There was never a doubt in our minds that the Bennett Prize addressed an important need among women painters. What has amazed us is the immense and immediate acceptance that the Prize has received among artists, museums, galleries, and collectors.” THE STARTING POINT The driving force behind the prize initiative was the impressive collection that Bennett and Schmidt have formed. It consists of more than 200 paintings by women figurative realist painters, most of them alive and working today. Their artworks feature women seen in a variety of situations, from the magical and fantastic to the mundane. The couple
068
Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt (left) and Steven A. Bennett congratulate Bennett Prize 2 winner Ayana Ross.
began acquiring such works in earnest in 2009, and the collection now includes major examples by such living talents as Julie Bell, Margaret Bowland, Aleah Chapin, and Alyssa Monks, though there are also historical pieces from such forerunners as Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, and Elaine de Kooning. The Bennetts have grown their collection on the basis of two beliefs. First, they see that women painters have not received the same degree of acceptance as their male counterparts. Second, they see that figurative M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEF) ANEKA INGOLD (b. 1979), Postpartum, 2019, mixed media on paper, 72 x 48 in. Sunset or Simply Stand Together (Two Boys in Gabon), 2020, acrylic, watercolor, and wood, 22 x 14 in.
SOPHIA-YEMISI ADEYEMO-ROSS (b. 1999), Say Something at
TANMAYA BINGHAM (b. 1978), Sexy Giggles, 2020, acrylic, colored pencil,
watercolor, and glitter on panel, 60 x 72 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
069
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) CHLOE CHIASSON (b. 1993), Quick Draw, 2021, oil, acrylic, and resin on canvas,48 1/2 x 42 in., courtesy of Seth Carmichael XOXIMON II, 2020, oil and gold leaf on panel, 36 x 24 in.
JUNE GLASSON (b. 1979),
AYANA ROSS (b. 1977), My Turn, 2020,
oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in.
realism has come to be disfavored by the art establishment. Schmidt observes, “When Steve and I married, we both realized that collecting art was a powerful way for us to use our respective gifts. We felt we could build a collection that mattered and would have something to say to others after we’re gone.” Bennett adds, “We really do believe women see themselves and one another differently, so the ‘women painting women’ definition has been an important organizing principle for us.” According to artist Katie O’Hagan, whose work is in the Bennett Collection: “There’s no question that women have been given short shrift when it comes to artistic opportunities. The Bennetts understand the particular challenges facing female artists. Maybe because the artworks
070
in their collection are more than just calculated acquisitions. When it comes to fine art, the Bennetts have long been listening to us.” Andrea Kowch, an artist member of the prize’s inaugural judging committee, adds, “The Bennetts are truly providing a historic opportunity and exceptional level of support to allow painters the ‘sacred’ space that every artist needs in which to develop and master their craft, to create works of art that freely express their voices and beliefs. The Bennett Prize serves to recognize and honor the technical challenges one faces when painting figurative realism, as well as to provide a novel way of addressing and presenting solutions to the perceived social challenges and imbalances that exist.” M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
HOLLY KEOGH (b. 1991), Girls Running, 2020, oil on canvas, 60 x 71 3/4 in.
PAST AND PRESENT A brief survey of the Bennett Prize initiative’s history reminds us of how strategic Schmidt and Bennett have been in ensuring maximum impact. In November 2018, the jury announced the first edition’s 10 finalists, chosen from 647 entries received: Dorielle Caimi, Jennifer R.A. Campbell, Kira Nam Greene, Mary Henderson, Aneka Ingold, Stefanie Jackson, Rebecca Léveillé, Jenny Morgan, Daniela Kovaĉić Muzio, and Carrie Pearce. Each finalist received $1,000, and 10 honorable mentions were also announced. Only seven months later, in May 2019, finalist Aneka Ingold was announced as the winner of the first Bennett Prize during a festive event at Michigan’s Muskegon Museum of Art. Elaine Schmidt says the MMA was chosen as the initiative’s lead museum partner because of its longstanding commitment to both women artists and realism:
REBECCA ORCUTT (b. 1992), Talking About Leaving, 2021, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
071
(ABOVE) SU SU (b. 1989), Bed Straw, 2020, oil on canvas, 42 x 36 in.
(LEFT) AMY
WERNTZ (b. 1979), Berg, 2020, oil on wood panel, 41 3/4 x 15 1/2 in.
“They understood what we were trying to do from the beginning and shared our passion,” she explains, adding special praise for executive director Kirk Hallman and for senior curator and director of collections and exhibitions Art Martin, who served on the inaugural judging committee. Opening that same evening three years ago was the Rising Voices exhibition of recent paintings created by all 10 finalists. Organized by Art Martin in collaboration with the Bennetts, it went on to visit several museum venues in Pennsylvania and Florida, bringing these talented artists to places their work had never been seen before. Surely the happiest person in the room that May evening was winner Aneka Ingold, whose Postpartum is illustrated here. Asked about her art, she replies that she tries “to imagine what the past would be like if seen through the eyes of women. Making these images is not only a way for me to understand the woman that I am, but the woman that I want to become.” Now fast forward to November 2020 — 18 months and one pandemic later — when the 10 finalists for the Bennett Prize 2 were announced, again at Muskegon. Selected from 674 entries, this cohort consisted of Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo-Ross, Tanmaya Bingham, Chloe Chiasson, June Glasson, Holly Keogh, Lavely Miller, Rebecca Orcutt, Ayana Ross, Su Su, and Amy Werntz. Illustrated here are recent works by all 10 artists, each of whom possesses a compelling and distinctive aesthetic. Sure enough, seven months later — in May 2021 — Ayana Ross of Georgia was announced as winner of the Bennett Prize 2. Her art explores identity and cultural awareness in the everyday lives of African Americans in the South. She characterizes her work as “very nostalgic, in that I’m pulling a lot from my childhood memories, but also from stories that have been told to me, through my family.” That night, the MMA not only hosted the award ceremony but also launched the Rising Voices 2 exhibition surveying recent works by all 10 finalists. This show has been on the road
072
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
LAVELY MILLER (b. 1978), God Shot Me in the Face and Then I Saw (Blue Shirt), 2020, acrylic on paper on panel, 40 x 30 in.
visiting Tennessee and is now headed for the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York (May 16–August 12), the Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, Georgia (September 2–November 5), the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust (December 14, 2022–February 19, 2023), and Philadelphia’s Studio Incamminati (March 1–June 30, 2023). In addition, the MMA launched the show of fresh paintings Aneka Ingold had produced during the two (extraordinary) years since she won the first prize. Her show is touring alongside that of the Bennett Prize 2 finalists. LOOKING FORWARD Now the Bennett Prize team have their eyes trained firmly on the horizon. The call for entries in the Bennett Prize 3 opened last month and will close on October 7. This edition’s judging committee consists of artists Julie Bell and Zoey Frank, Steven Bennett, and Joseph Rosa, who until recently served as director and CEO of Seattle’s Frye Art Museum. Elaine Melotti Schmidt has good reason to be optimistic: “We continue F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
to marvel,” she says, “at the creativity and talent of women figurative realist painters. The breadth and creativity of the entries never ceases to amaze us.” Like her, everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur is anticipating the November 2022 announcement of the next 10 finalists, and then their group show in May 2023, when Ayana Ross’s newest works will make their debut. Information: thebennettprize.org, thebennettartcollection.com. At Studio Incamminati, the next “Bennett-Schmidt Lecture on the Higher Aim of Art” will occur via Zoom on May 9 when dean Dan Thompson moderates a discussion on the atelier resurgence with Gary Christensen, Darren Kingsley, Carl Samson, and Richard Whitney. To register, visit studioincamminati.org. MAX GILLIES is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
073
BY MAX GILLIES
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
A LEGACY OF WOMEN & ART ENDURES
M
arking a 125th anniversary is a rare privilege for any organization, which explains why the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club (CLWAC) is celebrating in style this year. The high point of its commemorations will be the 125th Annual Open Juried Exhibition, on view June 20–July 1 at New York City’s Salmagundi Club. Created by the club’s members and associates, the 148 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints displayed there will be eligible for more than $18,000 in prizes. The judges selecting awards during the closing reception on June 30 will be the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Sylvia Yount, printmaker Vijay Kumar, sculpture foundry proprietor Jeff Buccacio, Lyme Academy instructor Kimberly Monson, and critic Milène J. Fernández (who wrote our article about the Hudson River Fellowship on page 131). Illustrated here are seven of the wideranging works to be exhibited this summer. AN EXCEPTIONAL BENEFACTOR These and many other CLWAC activities are possible thanks to the munificence of the New York philanthropist Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887), whose decision not to marry allowed her to keep control of her enormous inherited fortune and then put it to good use. Illustrated at right is the nearly life-size portrait of Wolfe that she commissioned from the fashionable French painter Alexandre Cabanel during a visit to Paris when she was 47. The scholar Dianne Sachko Macleod writes that Wolfe was “said to be the richest single woman in America after she inherited two well-established mercantile fortunes. Her mother, Dorothea Ann Lorillard, who died in 1866, left her the extensive tobacco holdings that her French Huguenot ancestors had accumulated in the South. Six years later her father, John David Wolfe, passed on to her substantial rental property and a wholesale hardware enterprise in New York, which he had inherited from his father, who had served in the Revolutionary War under George Washington. As a result, Catharine Wolfe’s fortune was estimated at $12,000,000. Given the means, she quickly set out to establish a distinctive
ALEXANDRE CABANEL (1823–1889), Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1876, oil on canvas, 67 1/2 x 42 3/4 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
074
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
PATRICIA HUTCHINSON (b. 1948), Mary and Brandon, 2021, oil and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in.
GRACE SHARR MCENANEY (b. 1952), Town Bricks, Casa Grande Trading Post, Cerrillos, New Mexico, 2019, watercolor on paper, 21 1/2 x 28 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
075
(TOP) EVELINE MILLER (b. 1948), Pleasant Point, 2021, soft pastels on sanded 400 grit paper, 7 x 14 in. 32 in.
(ABOVE) GAIL WEGODSKY (b. 1955), Sittin’ in the Lat(itude) Yearn Seat, 2021, oil on panel, 22 x (LEFT) ANN ROSOW-LUCCHESI (b. 1960), New Coat, 2021, polychrome terracotta (unique),
21 1/5 x 6 x 6 in.
076
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
NICOLE MONÉ (b. 1971), A Day Like Any Other, 2021, oil on panel, 24 x 18 in.
identity for herself, skillfully cultivating a public persona and deflecting interest from her personal life.” In 1870, Wolfe became the only woman among the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 106 charter subscribers, and it was to that institution that she bequeathed 143 paintings, including Barbizon landscapes by Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny, as well as Salon scenes by Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gérôme. Wolfe also left the Met a fund of $200,000 that has grown over time and allowed its trustees to purchase masterworks by Renoir, Goya, Delacroix, Daumier, Homer, and other artists. Wolfe gave generously to a range of other charities, including an African-American church, a mission for Italian immigrants, and the Newsboys’ Lodging House. She also bequeathed funds to found Grace House, a place of learning for the poor equipped with reading and lecture rooms, with the stipulation that part of that bequest be used for “some form of woman’s work.” It is that very mandate which is sustained today by the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club through its promotion of professional women artists. HERE AND NOW The CLWAC’s Annual Open Juried Exhibition will be celebrated not only with the awards reception on June 30, but also on June 23 with the benefit reception, which has, since 1966, dedicated its proceeds to the travel and research fund of the Met’s American Wing. Thanks to the club’s generosity, many curators of American fine and decorative arts have been able to make visits around the country, allowing them to better understand the subjects of their studies by seeing them in person. This summer also marks the resumption of the club’s annual luncheon. It will occur on June 9 in The Bronx on the scenic grounds of the New York Botanical Garden, specifically — and appropriately — in a 1792 building once known as the Lorillard Snuff Mill. In further celebration of its big 125, the CLWAC has organized three satellite shows of art created by its members and associates. The first occurred in April at Deepwells Farm on Long Island, and the others will soon appear at the Ridgewood Art Institute (Ridgewood, New Jersey, September 4–October 1) and the Lyme Art Association (Old Lyme, Connecticut, September 30–November 10). In all of these ways, the vision of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe lives on, perhaps more brightly than ever. Information: clwac.org, salmagundi.org. All of the Annual Open Juried Exhibition’s works will be illustrated on the CLWAC website and in a printed catalogue available at the Salmagundi. MAX GILLIES is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
WING NA WONG (b. 1983), Phase of Life, 2022, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
077
B Y K E L LY C O M P T O N
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
LOVELADIES AND THEIR PORTRAITS OF HOPE
A
n extraordinary exhibition is coming to New York City’s Salmagundi Club this season. On view there June 12–17, Portraits of Hope will feature more than 40 likenesses painted by artists including Samuel Adoquei, Michele Anderson, Larry Bruce Bishop, Phil Boatwright, Glenda Brown, Katherine Buchanan, Marc Chatov, Ellen Cooper, Stephen Craighead, Melissa Crawford, Barbara Davis, Grace Mehan DeVito, Michael Field, Kathy Fieramosca, Daniel Gerhartz, David Goatley, Kyle Keith, Carol Baxter Kirby, Carter Laney, Bart Lindström, Liz Lindström, Ying-He Liu, Heather Marcus, John Boyd Martin, Teresa Mattos, Jamie Lee McMahan, Steven Moppert, Mary Morvant, Sandra Murzyn, Michael Shane Neal, Richard Christian Nelson, Paul Newton, Mary Qian, Michele Rushworth, John Howard Sanden, Chris Saper, Sharon Sprung, Patricia Watwood, Jennifer R. Welty, and Dawn E. Whitelaw. Beyond its substantial size, this show merits a note because it focuses primarily on women who don’t normally capture the attention of such talented artists. All of the sitters are associated with The Lovelady Center (TLC), a faith-based facility in Birmingham, Alabama, where women come to live for nine to 12 months. Whether selfadmitted or sent there by a judge, most “Loveladies” are recovering from addiction, domestic violence, and/or incarceration. Today TLC houses and feeds more than 400 women and 90 of their children at any given time. The center was founded in 2004 by Brenda Lovelady Spahn and is directed by her daughter Melinda MeGahee. Almost 20 years ago,
078
SAMUEL ADOQUEI (b. 1964), Beverly McNeil, 2022, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. YING-HE LIU (b. 1952), John McNeil, 2014, oil on canvas, 44 x 29 in.
Brenda recognized the endless cycle that leaves many women feeling broken and without any hope that their lives can change. This, she notes, is “sadly understandable given the cruelties and hardships many of them have faced.” When Brenda meets someone in this predicament, she tells her, “You are worthy,” and also that “Your past does not define you — only what God, your Creator, says about you is what counts.” By providing “hope to the hopeless,” TLC M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
JOHN HOWARD SANDEN (b. 1935), Brenda Lovelady Spahn, 2021, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
079
DANIEL GERHARTZ (b. 1965), Shay Bell Curry: Joy in Your Presence, 2021, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.
(ABOVE) MARY MORVANT (b. 1958), Monica, 2021, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. (BELOW) DAWN E. WHITELAW (b. 1945). Carrie: Into the Light, 2021, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.
helps residents redirect their lives and return to society as productive members of their communities. Though she is already the mother of six, grandmother of 23, and great-grandmother of five, Brenda is now known to thousands of reformed women nationwide as “Mama,” and it seems only appropriate that TLC’s logo features a butterfly, which symbolizes “changes in life where we come to our fullness.” The center’s unique story has been chronicled in the 2015 book Miss Brenda and the Loveladies, which the founder co-authored with Irene Zutell, and which is now being adapted into a major motion picture. Art entered the story via lifelong Birmingham resident Beverly McNeil, who owns the nationally recognized portraiture agency Portraits, Inc. In 2021, she established Portraits of Hope, Inc., in order to raise both funds and visibility for TLC, primarily by exhibiting portraits of the people involved. The sitters are not only TLC’s female residents, but also other women and men who contribute to its work, such as ministers and staff members. Beverly explains, “Art, especially portraiture, has always been a major passion in my life. Ever since my husband, John, started working at the center [as its chief operating officer and chairman of the board] almost a decade ago, our family has become quite connected to this incredible ministry. Through Portraits of Hope, I’ve been able to combine my passion for art with my connection to The Lovelady Center.” In celebration of the portraiture collection and its showings at Portraits, Inc. and the Salmagundi, McNeil recently published the 112-page book Portraits of Hope: Inspirational Stories from the Lovelady Center. Inside are large illustrations of all the portraits, along with the powerful human stories behind them. LIVES TRULY LIVED Gracing the book’s cover is the Connecticut-based master portraitist John Howard Sanden’s likeness of Brenda Lovelady Spahn. In her 2015 book, she recalls being “a fairly successful businesswoman,
080
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
SHARON SPRUNG (b. 1953), Paige Kote, 2021, oil on canvas, 16 x 16 in.
mother, wife, and daughter. I went to church and even served on our church board. I was a ‘good person,’ I would think to myself. Was that not enough?” Apparently not. After modestly acknowledging that TLC “was not my brainchild, nor was it my vision,” Brenda continues, “Most any day someone will thank me for starting the ministry and having such a great resource for hurting women. I have to tell them … I never could have had The Lovelady Center without God calling me.” The only portrait in the new book painted posthumously is that of Shay Bell Curry, created by the renowned Wisconsin-based artist F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
Daniel Gerhartz. Brenda recalls that, on TLC’s opening day in 2004, Shay was the first woman to step off the van arriving from Tutwiler Prison: she was “a bit scary to be around… like a keg of dynamite ready to explode.” This was perhaps understandable given Shay’s history of sexual abuse during childhood and then physical abuse on the streets. Now Brenda laughs that Shay “kept thinking her horrible life would run me off,” yet she eventually became the founder’s best friend (other than her own daughter, Melinda). Eventually Shay joined TLC’s staff and proved crucial in welcoming new arrivals, demonstrating how her own life had been transformed there. Ultimately, she reconnected with one of her daughters, married, bought a home and a car, and spoiled her grandchildren. Alas, Shay succumbed to liver disease at age 60, but her memorial service was, in Brenda’s words, “fit for a queen, complete with butterflies
081
ELLEN COOPER (b. 1957), Rosie Mullen, 2021, oil on canvas, 42 x 28 in.
082
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
and TLC women serving as pallbearers.” After completing his 40-inch-high portrait, Dan Gerhartz said, “From the moment I started hearing the stories of Shay’s electrifying and transformed personality, I envisioned this larger-than-life piece. My regret is never having had the chance to meet her and experience the wonder of her renewal.” A different story lies behind the portrait of Paige Kote painted by the New York City artist Sharon Sprung. After an adolescence marred by alcohol abuse and being gang-raped, Paige went on to pursue a successful professional career. At 21, however, she tried alcohol again, soon getting entangled in an abusive, co-dependent relationship, then addicted to heroin. She recalls overdosing more than a dozen times, to the extent that she was actually medically dead on three occasions. Not surprisingly, Paige lost custody of her daughter and went to jail, but finally reached TLC. There she recovered fully and even joined the center’s staff as its graphic designer. Today she highlights her gratitude to the center “for the life skills, knowledge, and faith that people there instilled in me while going through the program.” Paige has lost countless friends to addiction, and now she honors their memories by staying sober. One example of a portrait of someone who has not resided at TLC herself is Ellen Cooper’s likeness of Rosie Mullen. Rosie recalls being introduced to Brenda and TLC in 2006, two years after it opened. Soon she started volunteering, and within a year she had become its chief financial officer, while also ministering to the women. Looking back, Rosie has “watched God perform so many miracles time and time again; this is a place where everybody is somebody special and gets chance after chance to get it right.” After completing the portrait, Ellen Cooper observed that Rosie “is vibrant, alive, and joyful, and so I wanted this entire painting to be warm and uplifting, brimming with nature, light, and color. Many women call Rosie ‘Mom,’ and here she appears to look toward the viewer with a motherly warmth and acceptance, as if she is gathering up her children and cradling them in the safety of her nurturing strength and God’s love.” The new publication highlights almost 40 more such people and their remarkable stories; it can be ordered online or purchased at the Salmagundi Club during the run of the exhibition there. Even better, proceeds from its sale are being directed to TLC residents who have completed the program and are living independently again.
PAUL NEWTON (b. 1961), Jocelynn: The Gift of a Lifetime, 2021, oil on canvas, 31 x 24 in.
Information: portraitsofhope.charity, portraitsinc.com, loveladycenter.org. The exhibition will next be seen at the Mentone Arts Center (Mentone, Alabama) July 8–24. Beginning in January 2023, it will be presented at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia. Once their national tour has ended, all of the portraits — currently owned by Portraits of Hope, Inc. — will be donated to The Lovelady Center, where they will hang permanently. KELLY COMPTON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
083
BY DANIEL GRANT
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
ANNE HIGHTOWERPATTERSON
LIFE IN WATERCOLORS
A
rt school can teach artists a number of interesting things, but sometimes not quite what they want to learn. When Anne Hightower-Patterson (b. 1950), already a reasonably skilled watercolor painter of figurative subjects, entered the studio art program at the University of South Carolina in 1968, she found that its faculty didn’t offer classes in watercolors or even oils, and they had little interest in any subject matter other than abstraction. “I had to do some abstract painting,” she recalls, “but I didn’t do a lot, and I wasn’t very good at it.” This was 1968, after all, when the art world was dominated by minimalism, conceptualism, process art, Op Art, performance art, Fluxus, and other trends having little to do with twodimensional images of a recognizable person. Art departments, even in the conservative South, wanted to point their students toward the future, not the past. Abstraction “was in my face the whole time I was in college,” Hightower-Patterson says. The business about not teaching watercolors — that’s nothing new, and most schools still don’t because they associate the medium with amateurs. As for oils, “They just thought acrylics were going
084
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, 2016–19, watercolor, charcoal, and pastel on paper, 16 x 20 in., collection of the artist
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Hanging Out, 2016, watercolor and gouache on paper, 16 x 12 1/2 in., available through the artist
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
085
Hands of the Homeless, 2014, watercolor on paper, 21 x 14 in., private collection
And not just that group, but also the Watercolor Society of Alabama, Mississippi Watercolor Society, Georgia Watercolor Society, Louisiana Watercolor Society, and ultimately the Rocky Mountain National Watercolor group, American Watercolor Society, National Watercolor Society, and Transparent Watercolor Society.
to be the new oil paint,” HightowerPatterson laughs. “There was some conversation about one of the professors being allergic to oils, but I don’t think they could have hired somebody like that. They just thought, ‘Well, here we have a new medium. We don’t need oil paint anymore.’” Rest assured that HightowerPatterson did learn some things at college, about design and color and, yes, how to handle acrylics. But gaining greater skill and confidence with watercolors required her to take adult education classes after graduation, and also to attend other artists’ workshops, some offered by the South Carolina Watermedia Society. Eventually, that organization became more than just a means to hone her skills, but a professional community in whose annual exhibitions she participated and won awards.
THE HUMAN CONNECTION Hightower-Patterson still lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where she attended college, and people remain her principal subject. Perhaps it’s no surprise that her early influences were painters who looked long and hard at other humans, such as Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent. In their work there seems to be a story, though we are not always certain what it is. The critic Robert Hughes (1938–2012) wrote disparagingly about Wyeth that “his work suggests a frugal, bare-bones rectitude, glazed by nostalgia but incarnated in real objects, which millions of people look back upon as the lost marrow of American history.” Hughes himself leaned toward urban modernism — he bristled at scenes of small towns and rural life — and so he might also have had negative things to say about Hightower-Patterson, had he the opportunity. Like Wyeth, Hightower-Patterson reveals an interest in a lived life, exemplified by her subjects’ faces and bodies and contextualized by their surroundings. They are physical objects on which a strong, often high-noon, light produces contrasts of shadow and glare, but they also are human beings to whom she directs our attention. “Light is everything in watercolor,” the artist explains, “but ultimately my work is about the story or the place, how I’m struck by that.” Sometimes Hightower-Patterson’s subjects are African-Americans who might initially appear a bit menacing; for example, Hanging Out shows two teens leaning against a wall, while Won’t You Be My Neighbor? presents a Black man wearing a do-rag and earphones. In fact, these are just the types of people she regularly sees in Columbia and elsewhere. What first interested her about the man with the do-rag “were the shapes and the color and the light,” but she drew the painting’s title from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as “a statement
Morning Snaps, 2017, watercolor and casein on paper, 11 x 14 in., private collection
086
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Fiesta in Glass, 2014, watercolor on paper, 24 x 22 in., private collection
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
087
Spring Street, 2007, watercolor and casein on paper, 9 x 12 in., private collection
about judging people based on how they look and not who they are.” She says, “People are funny. They carry their prejudices under their sleeves.” Hightower-Patterson was inspired to paint Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in the aftermath of the 2015 massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which took the lives of nine African-Americans during Bible study. For some artists, people are objects to be painted, and capturing skin tones and the effects of light and shadow are those artists’ stock in trade. Seeing beyond the surface to the struggles that a person may have faced and the story behind those struggles is one task of art, which Hightower-Patterson seeks to capture through the title, if not the image itself. Those are a woman’s hands in Hands of the Homeless, and this lady has appeared in several of Hightower-Patterson’s paintings. They met when the artist was in a city park and the woman asked her for $5. “I looked at her and said, ‘I’m not going to give you any money, but if you’ll pose for me, I’ll give you $5.’ And so she very happily sat down, and I took a bunch of photographs. Well, we had lots of conversation, and all of a sudden, I saw her not as a panhandler, but as a person. And she told me how she ended up homeless and how she wanted to get her kids back and how she hoped to get a job. And we talked about an hour,
088
I gave her $10, and I drove her somewhere she wanted to go.” (As a postscript, the two met again some time later. The woman had seen in a magazine one of the paintings Hightower-Patterson had made and said she was now working in a hotel. Still, she asked the artist if she had any change. “I emptied all my change out and gave it to her. And that’s the last I’ve seen of her.”) When she isn’t painting people, Hightower-Patterson depicts still lifes, flowers, and outdoor scenes such as city streets or waterways with wildlife or boats. When we see such works as Morning Snaps or Fiesta in Glass, with their prisms, reflections, and juxtaposition of objects and textures, we might think, “This artist is showing off.” And, to a degree, she is. “It is partly to show that glass and that shiny object in light, because people are always fascinated and don’t know how you do it,” the artist observes. “So it’s kind of fun to leave them in wonder.” Hightower-Patterson quickly relates these subjects to an important forerunner, Carolyn Brady (1937–2005), who specialized in hyper-realistic watercolors of flowers and table settings. Another watercolorist who has made an impact is Carrie Waller (b. 1976), best known for depicting empty and filled Coke bottles, Mason jars, and light bulbs that reflect and refract bright light. The two artists have never met, but they communicate through their Facebook pages. WAYS OF LEARNING Hightower-Patterson has learned many techniques over the years, but because she had a lot going on in her life, much of this education took M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Light Reading, 2019, watercolor and gouache on paper, 18 1/2 x 12 1/2 in., private collection
place on weekends and evenings. For 29 years she worked in Columbia’s public school system, mostly as a middle school art teacher. There she taught drawing, painting, and printmaking, the type in which students cut into linoleum blocks. (She smiles, “We always had to watch them cutting their fingers because they’d never hold the thing right, even though you showed them how.”) For most classroom art teachers, a typical session involves 40 minutes of something-or-other followed by 10 minutes of clean-up, resulting in a two- or three-dimensional creation that can be taken home that afternoon. Above and beyond that, Hightower-Patterson aimed to imbue students with her own excitement about creating an artwork, and she found that the experience of teaching helped clarify her own ideas, skills, and techniques. “I always taught the fundamentals of design,” she remembers, “both process and product. There are two things in art you have to learn. First, the compositional elements like line, shape, value, and texture. And second, how to put it all together.” Hightower-Patterson’s focus on design is evident in Spring Street, which ostensibly shows a somewhat run-down city street along which an elderly Black man walks; further down the sidewalk, a F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
woman walks her dog. Notable here is the geometry of vertical telephone poles and architectural columns, horizontal clapboards, and diagonal telephone lines and shadows. “Good composition is always based on horizontals versus verticals,” the artist explains. “That becomes the armature upon which I build my compositions; those elements move the eye through the artwork.” Still, it is the sense of place (“an area of downtown Charleston not yet gentrified”) and the people who live there that give Spring Street its pathos. Many professional artists have worked in colleges and universities, and many others in public schools. In higher education, studio art faculty often get their own studios and are expected to make work there. One semester, HightowerPatterson got to sub at Columbia College for a faculty member on sabbatical (she recalls, “It was really no different, in many ways, than teaching ninth graders”), yet her principal teaching experience outside public schools has been through workshops, private classes, and private students. Those pupils have ranged widely in age, ability, and what they seek from the experience. She confides, “There’s one man in his 40s I adore. He really just wants it to be as easy as he thinks it looks. So I have to break it down for him and say, ‘Hold on. We can’t paint like Winslow Homer today. First we’ve got to understand some of the things Homer does.’” Perhaps another reason that colleges and universities don’t teach watercolor painting is that the road ahead for artists is difficult enough without seeming to promote a medium that usually pays so little. Hightower-Patterson’s very accomplished paintings generally sell for between $300 and $3,500. A commercial gallery in a major city would have to sell out her whole exhibition just to cover that month’s rent, so her principal sales channel is not a gallery but her own website. People, she notes, visit it primarily through word-of-mouth. “I may have done something for somebody else, and they’ve seen it, and they ask, ‘Can you do this?’ What I charge them usually depends on the medium and size.” Fortunately, the pension Hightower-Patterson earned after 29 years of teaching school has become the handy backstop that allows her to create whatever she wants. DANIEL GRANT is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur, as well as the author of The Business of Being an Artist and several other books on career development for artists.
089
BY M AT T H I A S A N D E R S O N
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
TREASURING OUR GREEN ZONES
A
s milder weather arrives in North America, the editorial team at Fine Art Connoisseur has looked out the window and highlighted more than 30 recent images of “green zones.” These are areas of natural verdure including gardens, pastures, woodlands, forests, valleys, rivers, ponds, waterfalls, golf courses, marshes, and dunes — places where all kinds of foliage are in charge. Artists see such places from many perspectives, so we are glad to include not only the panoramic vistas you would expect, but also some flowering branches, a close-up study of a clump of earth, animals enjoying the greenery, and even a figure seemingly emerging from the mist with a floral offering. Timeless as these artists’ visions seem, we can no longer gaze at such art without recalling that climate change triggered by mankind’s carelessness is causing many plant species to disappear. All the more reason, then, for us to marvel at those that remain, and to do all we can to pass along their visual and emotional power to future generations. MATTHIAS ANDERSON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
CATHERINE HILLIS (b. 1953), Marsh Tapestry, 2020, watercolor on paper, 16 x 20 in., private collection
090
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(TOP) ARLESS DAY (b. 1951), Blue Reflections, 2019, acrylic and mixed medium collage, 16 x 20 in., available through the artist
(ABOVE) ELLEN HOWARD (b. 1965), Restful
Light, 2021, oil on linen canvas panel, 11 x 14 in., Arnould Gallery & Framery (Marblehead, Massachusetts)
(LEFT) CHULA BEAUREGARD (b. 1974), Summer Skies, 2018, oil on
linen, 8 x 8 in., Simpson Gallagher Gallery (Cody, Wyoming)
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
091
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) POPPY BALSER (b. 1971), The Green and Gold of Spring, 2021, watercolor on paper, 11 x 14 in., available through the artist (b. 1968), With the Dawn, 2020, oil on linen, 11 x 14 in., available through the artist through the artist
KRYSTAL W. BROWN
BARBARA COLEMAN (b. 1956), Walt’s Garden Gate, 2022, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in., available
KIM LORDIER (b. 1966), Salinas Valley Abundance, 2022, pastel on board, 24 x 24 in., available through the artist
LAUREL DANIEL (b. 1956), Garden of the
Lion, 2020, oil on canvas, 18 x 18 in., Anderson Fine Art Gallery (St. Simons Island, Georgia)
092
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) JULIE RIKER (b. 1969), Cactus Shapes, 2020, oil on linen, 6 x 12 in., available through the artist
CHRISTINE GRAEFE DREWYER (b. 1954), Violet Interlude, 2020, oil on linen, 18 x 18 in., private collection
PETER SWIFT (b. 1945), Five Cubic Inches of Maryland Dirt, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 in. collection of the artist GABRIELLA DI XX MIGLIA (b. 1949), Berries, 2020, oil on canvas, 10 x 8 in., available through the artist
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
093
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) KATHLEEN DUNPHY (b. 1963), Inamorata, 2020, oil on linen, 44 x 44 in., private collection
KATHERINE GALBRAITH (b. 1948), Garden Gate, 2019, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in.,
private collection
AIDA GARRITY (b. 1957), Golf Tournament Practice, 2020, oil on panel, 24 x 30 in.,
available through the artist private collection
TIM C. TYLER (b. 1958), Apple Blossoms, 2021, oil on panel, 16 x 12 in.,
SCOTT GELLATLY (b. 1975), Nicol Wetland, 2018, oil on canvas panel, 8 x 10 in.,
Laura Vincent Design & Gallery (Portland, Oregon)
094
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(ABOVE) ELENA BURYKINA (b. 1977), Winter Flowers, 2019–21, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in., available through the artist
(LEFT, TOP TO BOTTOM) KAREN ANN HITT (b. 1960), A Very Special Place, 2013, oil on linen
panel, 18 x 24 in., collection of the artist
BARBARA JAENICKE (b. 1964), Broken Top from Dutchman Flat,
2022, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in., Mockingbird Gallery (Bend, Oregon)
THERESA GRILLO LAIRD (b. 1955),
Summer Evening, 2018, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in., available through the artist
ROLAND LEE (b. 1949), By the
Canal, 2021, transparent watercolor on paper, 14 x 11 in., Roland Lee Art Gallery (St. George, Utah)
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
095
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) Dan Mackerman (b. 1958), Temperance River Falls, Lake Superior, 2020, oil on panel, 16 x 12 in., private collection LAURENCE O’TOOLE (b. 1968), Somewhere in County Cork, 2019, oil on canvas, 36 x 52 in., private collection
MICHAEL ORWICK
(b. 1975), Radiant Trail, 2022, oil on panel, 16 x 20 in., Art Elements (Newberg, Oregon)
CAROL STROCK WASSON (b. 1957), Spring
Morning Haze, pastel on Uart 320, 2022, 16 x 20 in., available through the artist
ELIZABETH RHOADES (b. 1955), A New Beginning, 2022,
oil on linen panel, 12 x 9 in., available through the artist
096
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) Michele Usibelli (b. 1962), Morning Greys, 2021, oil on panel, 12 x 16 in., private collection
DAVID MARTY (b. 1951), Gentle Swaying, 2020, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in.,
private collection
AARON SCHUERR (b. 1973), Shields Valley in June, 2022, oil on linen, 30 x 40 in.,
private collection
BRAD TEARE (b. 1956), On the Bear River, 2021, oil on panel, 34 x 34 in., Manitou
Galleries (Santa Fe)
KATHRYN STATS (b. 1944), Reflections on the Colorado, 2019, oil on linen
panel, 12 x 24 in., available through the artist
DAVID HARMS (b. 1960), Autumn’s Final Curtain
Call, 2021, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in., Wild Horse Gallery (Steamboat Springs, Colorado)
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
097
BY JAMES LANCEL MCELHINNEY
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
DON TROIANI
BRINGING THE PAST TO LIFE
T
he Connecticut painter Don Troiani (b. 1949) is having a moment. Through September 5, Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution is presenting the exhibition Liberty: Don Troiani’s Paintings of the Revolutionary War. Based upon the artist’s painstaking research, the more than 40 works on view reconstruct a variety of the conflict’s events and participants with both rigorous authenticity and technical virtuosity. In the accompanying catalogue, the museum’s chief curator, Philip Mead, rightly praises “the power of Troiani’s art to confront the errors in our expectations, and to see the Revolutionary War with its farreaching promise, and bitter ironies.”
A PROUD HISTORY American art depicting military history has a rich heritage traceable back to Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, and John Trumbull. Heroic paintings such as William Powell’s Perry’s Victory (1857) and Peter Rothermel’s Battle of Gettysburg (1870) wowed
098
popular audiences with romanticized depictions of mortal combat. James Walker favored a sweeping cinematic approach in his paintings of the Mexican-American War (1846–48) and the Civil War (1861–65). Suffering from childhood paralysis, William T. Trego (1858–1909) overcame severe physical difficulties to produce a remarkable oeuvre of action-packed battle scenes. Working alongside soldiers at the front, “special artists” such as Alfred P. Waud and Winslow Homer plied their trade for imagehungry weeklies like Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s, which later sent Frederic Remington to the Southwest to cover the U.S. Army’s pursuit of Geronimo. Like Homer, Remington favored artistic reportage. As many fine-art painters became swept up in the excitement of European modernism, their more traditionminded colleagues embraced a new identity as illustrators. Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth (who lived in a house on Pennsylvania’s Brandywine battlefield) won acclaim for their treatment of historical subjects. Costume designers working in the nascent M A Y / J U N E
The Redoubt, Bunker Hill, 2009, oil on canvas, 37 x 51 in. (framed), private collection
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
099
WILLIAM T. TREGO (1858–1909), Bringing Up the Battery: Civil War Battle Scene, 1887, oil on canvas, 19 x 29 in., James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, museum purchase funded by Anne and Joseph Gardocki
greater accuracy in living-history “impressions,” museum displays, and theatrical costuming scoured archives for records, patterns, fabric samples, and period images to develop best-guess depictions of clothing that was no longer in existence. MAKING HIS OWN WAY Growing up in Westchester County, New York, Troiani was surrounded by relics of the past. He was an only child, and his antiquedealer parents nurtured his appreciation of historical objects — an upbringing that prepared him to become a collector. Drawing since early childhood, he chose soldiers as his primary subjects. Following high school, Troiani enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he recalls getting little instruction. Realist painting in the late 1960s was not only unfashionable, it was taboo. The military subjects to which Troiani was drawn were beyond the pale. Nevertheless, he recalls his years at PAFA as productive. There was regular access to life models and guidance from some of the older teachers who still revered the traditional craft of painting. During the summers, Troiani took classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied with Arthur Foster. He recalls: Everybody in this class hated [Foster] because he would criticize what they were doing, which obviously destroyed their creativity. So he would come in and sit down with me and go through my whole pad, looking at all the soldier drawings, and then tell me how to do each one better. I learned a lot more when I moved up to [western Connecticut] and met new friends like Edward Bell. He was a real old-time hardcore illustrator, a superb draftsman. I would have him and other illustrators I knew critique my work. Half an hour with them was worth six months at PAFA.
Photograph of a stolen (and still unlocated) painting by HOWARD PYLE (1853–1911): The Battle of Bunker Hill, oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 36 3/8 in. It was commissioned to illustrate “The Story of the Revolution” by Henry Cabot Lodge in Scribner’s Magazine, February 1898. Photo courtesy: Delaware Art Museum Archives
motion picture industry drew heavily on these sources, which were often inaccurate. Representational painting fell out of fashion during the Cold War, but the 1961 centennial of the Civil War renewed interest in military imagery. Fashionable artists like Larry Rivers flirted with historical themes. Commemorations of specific events and battles took the form of alfresco amateur theatrics staged by hobbyists and
100
living-history interpreters dubbed “reenactors.” Historian Edward Tabor Linenthal likens these activities to religious observances in which reverence is measured in terms of historical authenticity. Incorporated in 1951, the nonprofit Company of Military Historians provided collectors and researchers with a publishing outlet for their findings. Interpreters, artists, and traditional craftspeople striving for M A Y / J U N E
As America prepared to celebrate its bicentennial in 1976, Troiani wrapped up his formal training and launched his career. Since then, he has produced hundreds of paintings, many of them published as limited-edition prints. Troiani’s work has been widely exhibited, collected by museums, national parks, and other public venues, and highlighted in more than a dozen books. He 2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Raiders of the Mohawk Valley, 2019, oil on canvas, 49 x 56 3/4 in. (framed), private collection
also serves as a historical consultant for the entertainment industry. During a recent conversation, Troiani shared insights into his working method. His studio in southwestern Connecticut measures 22 by 40 feet, with a large northfacing window. Scattered across one wall is an array of weapons, and nearby are racks full of reproduction uniforms. By the time Troiani left school, he was already a collector of military artifacts. He made his first purchase at age 11: a German helmet from World War II, acquired at a Parisian antique shop. Today, he owns thousands of objects — enough to establish a museum. Because most original uniforms of the Revolutionary period were worn to tatters or eaten by moths, garments have had to be F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
reconstructed from period artworks and the descriptions of deserters published in newspapers. Inaccurate paintings by Charles Willson Peale and Xavier Della Gatta have come to be accepted as documentary evidence, as have sketches by soldier-artists such as Friedrich von Germann. Part of Troiani’s mission is to set the record straight. He explains:
M A Y / J U N E
Take Howard Pyle’s Battle of Bunker Hill [1898]. It’s fantastic, but the British didn’t march up the hill that way. Their uniforms are actually more Napoleonic than anything else. Virtually everything is wrong, but it’s still a great painting. Another example is Trumbull’s 2 0 2 2
Surrender of General Burgoyne [1821]. Because many portraits of the officers involved were painted after the war, they didn’t want to be shown in old-fashioned clothing, but rather in the latest style. That means a lot of traditional historical art is really inaccurate. A passion for accuracy also guides Troiani’s choice of models and how to pose them: There’s an assumption that all reenactors are accurate, but they’re not. There are some with really good impressions, but there’s almost nobody you could use cold, just as they are. A lot of reenactors tend to
101
Battle of Pound Ridge, 2021, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in., private collection
be overweight, or too old, or their hair is all wrong. Probably about 5 percent have just the right look. I’m looking for guys that are the right size, with good faces. If they don’t have a pose, I show them. Sometimes artificial poses can work better in painting than the real thing. Let’s say we’re doing a charging scene. I’ll have the guy actually do it, then I’ll also pose fake running scenes; propping a leg up, we’ll put something under the front foot, so it’s turned up. Lean forward, I’ll tell them — more, more. Sometimes they’ll smile a little. I’ll go over to them, and move their lips around with my fingers until I get the right expression. And then there are the chronic smilers. I’ll give them a little plastic cup of vinegar to drink. Some models can be a little stiff, so I loosen them up. My drive-
102
JEAN-BAPTISTE ÉDOUARD DETAILLE (1848–1912), 19th Chasseurs, 1893, watercolor and gouache on paper, 13 1/2 x 19 1/2 in., collection of Don Troiani
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
KEITH ROCCO (b. 1955), Marshall’s Crossroads, 2006, oil on linen, 30 x 44 in., collection of the U.S. Cavalry Museum, Fort Riley, Kansas
was of an ambush in Westchester, with the [Hudson River] Palisades in the background. I had to be careful because a section [of those famous cliffs] had broken off 30 years before, and I needed to paint it the way it looked at the time of the action. Troiani consults a wide range of primary sources, documents, and archives while pursuing his research.
way is 300 feet uphill, so I’ll make them run up and down it wearing all of their equipment until it loosens them up. If the painting will show a lot of fighting, I’ll blacken their hands and faces with makeup. It’s not unusual for me to take ten or fifteen thousand photos for a single painting, using a digital camera. I’ll shoot the figure at three different exposures and then shoot close-ups of the faces, hands, and everything else. Three exposures are needed because if a guy has a broadbrimmed hat, a regular exposure might go black under the shadow.
Ticonderoga’s uniforms are terrific. I borrowed a few of their extra coats and accouterments, which I used to pose the rest of the action back at my studio. Having done a lot of my own research into the French uniforms, the staff at Ti provided a lot of detailed research on the battle. I also consulted [Canadian military historian] René Chartrand and several experts in France on all the minor details. I had a French regimental flag made because you just can’t fake a full-size French regimental Cross of Lorraine or the pole with a white silk scarf on top.
STUDYING THE EVIDENCE Before Troiani starts a painting, he conducts exhaustive research into the uniforms and equipment consistent with the event depicted. He engages sartorial historians like Henry Cooke to re-create the uniforms, and today his archive of original and reproduction uniforms numbers in the hundreds. When new research unearths further details, the garments are modified. At the time of our conversation, Troiani was working on a painting inspired by an event during the so-called French and Indian War — the 1758 attack by Britain’s Black Watch regiment on Fort Carillon, the precursor of Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. Troiani had two Highlander outfits, which he had altered because the cut was of a slightly later period. He also had one complete French uniform, which he brought to Ticonderoga. Augmenting props and clothing from his own collection with those from Ticonderoga’s archive, the costumed models were staged where the actual event occurred. He notes:
This rigorous attention to detail extends to Troiani’s landscapes. Since blood was spilled at Lexington and Concord in 1775, America’s Eastern Seaboard has been blanketed by second-growth forests — terrain that would be unrecognizable to the combatants.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
I did a painting of the Battle of Kingsbridge, which took place in The Bronx, in today’s Van Cortlandt Park. A lot of the actual site is intact, but it’s wooded. It was open at the time, so I had to reconstruct its appearance from maps drawn by the participants. There is also a pre-Revolutionary War map that shows the locations of fence lines, buildings, and so forth. [The British general J.G.] Simcoe had a map in his book, and there was another one. Of course, they’re all different, showing different houses and different places, so I had to figure it out. I almost spent more time on the painting’s background than on its principal figures. Another painting I did 2 0 2 2
A guy named McDonald went through Westchester County in the 1830s, interviewing everybody he could find about their reminiscences of the Revolution. I went through it all, about a thousand pages, and photographed every page. The ambush in Westchester was described in great detail — the dead horses in the road, with sheepskin saddle covers. A woman told McDonald how she remembered the British troopers at the Battle of Pound Ridge, standing in their stirrups, swords raised over their heads, shouting, whirling their swords around. That’s a great tidbit. Each of Troiani’s paintings is a visual essay on the appearance of historical fighting men and the material culture of their age. He readily acknowledges his debt to such European masters as Adolph Menzel, Ernest Meissonier, and Fortunino Matania. Troiani has drawn particular inspiration from JeanBaptiste Édouard Detaille (1848–1912), an academic realist who worked closely with the French military. Trained under Meissonier, who was renowned for his meticulously rendered episodes from the Napoleonic wars, Detaille won acclaim for paintings of the Franco-Prussian War. Before the art market caught up with Detaille in recent years, Troiani wisely acquired several of his works at reasonable prices. Those are my painting lessons around the house; I can learn and assimilate so much from looking at them. How he did the trees, or there’s that pen-and-ink work on the horses’ bits. He has been a huge influence. Detaille painted every day, whether he felt like it or not. I have read a lot of great articles from the 1880s about him and Meissonier, who one day said to Detaille, “My boy, you can go off on your own. There’s no more I can teach you.” That’s a pretty strong statement.
103
Oneida Warrior 1777, 2014, watercolor, gouache, and pen and ink on paper, 16 x 12 in., private collection
104
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Brave Men As Ever Fought, commissioned 2019 and unveiled 2021, oil on canvas, 38 3/4 x 68 1/2 in. (framed),
Troiani himself might scrape out a figure and move elements around throughout the painting process:
collection of the Museum of the American Revolution,
WORKING IT OUT Recently I asked Troiani to describe his working process in detail:
I might do a pencil drawing on the panel, then add some pen and ink, on stuff like weapons, and then I’ll cover it with a layer of clear gesso and sand it smooth, which seals the drawing into the primer. That way you can wipe off the paint and start again. In 20 minutes what you were monkeying with for a couple of hours comes out better. I might use a tinted gesso ground to start. Sometimes I start working in color from the beginning, or I might start with a monochromatic underpainting, often in sepia tones.
When I have an idea, I do a quick pencil sketch of the overall layout. I’m not as organized as people think. I just go for it. After getting a lot of the figures blocked in, I start thinking a pose in one place might be better somewhere else. There is a lot of moving around. My process is not like some of those 19thcentury artists who would do the entire painting — three quarters of it roughed in and then add finishing touches. Meissonier did endless studies for Friedland, which took him 15 years. Somebody said to him, “I’ve seen you working on that figure many times before.” Meissonier replied, “I just want to make sure to get it right.”
In addition to his large finished works in oils, Troiani produces small figure studies representing individual soldiers of a particular period or military unit. These are done primarily in watercolor and gouache, with some pen-and-ink embellishment in the details. Here again, his research is unpacked in visual form. Military historians, museum professionals, and historical interpreters regard Troiani paintings like these (see page 104) as today’s best source for how 18th-century fighting men once looked. The exhibition on view now was originally inspired by the Museum of the American Revolution’s 2019 commission of Troiani to create “a painting that would capture some of the exceptional contributions to American Revolutionary victory … of the men of African-American and Native American
Philadelphia. Its commissioning was funded by the National
Park
Service
Washington-Rochambeau
Revolutionary Route National History Trail.
Other artists active today, such as Keith Rocco, also acknowledge their debt to Detaille. Many are motivated to work in a traditional manner because it allows for fidelity to data and also for creative visual storytelling.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
descent.” The result was unveiled at the museum last September: Brave Men As Ever Fought shows the 15-year-old African American sailor James Forten watching Black and Native American troops marching past Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on their way to Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. Now, in the gallery where this painting hangs, a first-person theatrical performance about Forten’s later success as a businessman and abolitionist, written by local playwright Marissa Kennedy and performed by actor Nathan AlfordTate, is presented regularly for school groups and museum visitors. In the exhibition catalogue, Troiani writes, “It is my hope that my paintings help people today grasp the significance of Revolutionary struggles of the people who lived 250 years ago, whose brave actions continue to shape our lives.” Information: amrevmuseum.org. Unless noted otherwise, all images are by Don Troiani. JAMES LANCEL MCELHINNEY is a visual artist, author, and speaker. His Sketchbook Traveler trilogy was released by Schiffer Publishing. McElhinney’s writings have appeared in Hudson River Valley Review, Orientations, The Capitol Dome, American Arts Quarterly, Metalsmith, Urban Glass, and Fine Art Connoisseur.
105
BY M AT T H I A S A N D E R S O N
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
(TOP) Melting Snow: Swedish Lapland in Spring, 2021, oil on linen, 15 3/4 x 21 3/4 in.
(LEFT) Ulrich Gleiter
painting Melting Snow: Swedish Lapland in Spring; photo: Mikael Tuominen
ULRICH GLEITER
PAINTING THE WORLD
U
lrich Gleiter (b. 1977) is a man on the move whose latest plein air paintings will settle, though only briefly, at Denver’s Gallery 1261 from June 24 through July 15. On view in his exhibition Migration will be almost 40 works, primarily landscapes, that evoke recent travels in French Burgundy, Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Spanish Andalucia, and Croatia’s Dalmatian islands. Born in Saarbrücken, Germany, Gleiter pursued his undergraduate studies at Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he learned to paint with the bold, colorful strokes handed down from the early 20th-century German expressionists. Students there
106
prioritized their individuality — no one but you could have made this picture, they were told. Gleiter then absorbed a different view of artistry during his exchange year at Moscow’s Surikov Institute, followed by six more years at the Repin Institute in St. Petersburg. Russian training emphasizes mastery of the process of drawing and painting the nude — not as precisely as in U.S. ateliers, but with more emphasis on how relative value is established by the play of light and shadow. Despite the international renown of their country’s naturalist landscapists, Russian professors do not actually teach plein air painting, instead encouraging students to make a picture outdoors every day if possible. M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(LEFT) Cortijo in the Sierra Alhamilla (Andalusia, Spain), 2021, oil on linen, 27 1/2 x 21 2/3 in. (ABOVE) French Town, 2020, oil on linen, 28 x 32 in.
(BELOW) Dalmatian Coast (Near
Dubrovnik), 2018, oil on linen, 22 x 31 1/2 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
107
(LEFT) Midnight Sun on the Karelian Lakes (Finland), 2021, oil on linen, 20 x 16 in.
(ABOVE)
Brook (Caucasus Mountains, Russia), 2013, oil on linen, 27 1/2 x 35 1/2 in.
Gleiter was glad to do so, relying heavily on such historical forerunners as Isaac Levitan (1860–1900). Gleiter has become well known among collectors for his dynamic landscapes and scenes of untouched nature, developed on site throughout the year in various regions of Europe. As suggested in a snowy photo illustrated here, he paints in all kinds of weather. Last year, the artist was quarantining for four months in a remote Finnish cabin, a site originally intended only as an overnight stop on a drive from Lapland to Germany. He explains, “In order to feel what I’m painting, I need to be in touch with nature. To watch the sunsets, observe how the snow is melting and how the weather changes. This inspiration is invaluable.” In this anxious era of international strife, Gleiter feels a renewed appreciation for nature’s timelessness — for its inspiring capacity to rise above the ins and outs of manmade problems. Today, he says, “I often think about the history of an area where I am painting, about how many troubles and beautiful things may have happened there. Most importantly, I am humbled to observe how natural forces never stop moving.” Information: gallery1261.com, ulrichgleiter.com. Gleiter’s next solo show will occur at Berlin’s Sandau & Leo Galerie in December (sandau-leo.de). MATTHIAS ANDERSON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
108
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
GREAT ART WOLDWIDE
E V E N T S P R E V I E W
ISLANDS IN FOCUS PHILIP KOCH: ISLE OF DREAMS Ogunquit Museum of American Art Ogunquit, Maine ogunquitmuseum.org May 1–July 19
PHILIP KOCH (b. 1948), Winter, 2021, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in., Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, Delaware
On view this season at coastal Maine’s Ogunquit Museum of American Art is the evocatively titled exhibition Isle of Dreams, which features Philip Koch’s recent paintings and studies highlighting islands as both subject and symbol. Scholar Eva J. Allen has written that Koch’s art constitutes “a contemporary re-imagining of the romantic panoramas of the great 19thcentury American landscape painters,” including Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, and George Inness. The artist himself notes that “Nature is older than us, and if we open up to it, it offers a great deal of emotional power.” His landscapes are composed and drawn so realistically that we recognize them as of this world, yet their expressive, anti-naturalistic coloring and lighting trigger emotions, and even mystical reflections, that mere realism cannot. Most show no sign of human habitation, as if we are the first people to glimpse these primeval places. Koch applies brilliant, even jarring, colors that do not normally appear in nature together. Together these intense tones, both cool and warm, stir viewers’ emotions, which are further triggered by an exaggeration of space and light effects. Koch grew up in Webster, New York, 12 miles from Rochester, then attended Ohio’s Oberlin College, where he studied both studio art and art history. There he found a monograph on Edward Hopper and developed a lifelong fascination that has led him to complete 17 residencies in the master’s studio at Truro, Massachusetts, since 1983. At the Art Students League F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
of New York, Koch grew interested in 1930s regionalism, and while pursuing his M.F.A. in painting at Indiana University he enjoyed arthistorical lectures about even more American realists. Koch is now professor emeritus at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he spent 46 years teaching. In 1975 he began frequenting Cape Cod with its wind-whipped trees and thick woods. He loves this “Hopper landscape” and is deeply involved in the ongoing campaign to protect its coastal heathland from overdevelopment. Even so, the encroachment of modernity on Cape Cod has driven Koch to make more frequent trips northward to Maine’s Mount Desert Island, which remains almost as pristine as when Church and other 19th-century landscapists worked there. The town of Ogunquit cherishes its heritage as one of America’s leading art colonies (particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), so it’s an ideal place to enjoy Koch’s evocations of various Maine locales — including Mount Desert and Isle au Haut.
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art was founded by artist Henry Strater, who first came to the town in 1919 to study with the master teacher Hamilton Easter Field and built a permanent home there in 1925. In 1951, Strater purchased an oceanfront spot from the family of another master teacher, Charles Woodbury, and chose architect Charles S. Worley, Jr. to design a museum, which opened in 1953. Today it houses a permanent collection of important paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs from the late 1800s to the present.
088
109
was established in 1988 under the direction of painter Liana Moonie, then NAWA’s president.) Displayed nearby are 50 works by current NAWA members, selected from more than 260 submissions. The entire checklist has been juried by three co-curators: Donna Gustafson (currently at the Zimmerli Art Museum); independent scholar Marianne Ficarra; and Jeffrey Wechsler (formerly at the Zimmerli). Launched by five women as the Woman’s Art Club, NAWA originally sought to ensure its members could study anatomy and the live model, and also to provide them with exhibiting opportunities. Today, from its Manhattan headquarters, it supports its U.S.-based members, and American women artists generally, through exhibitions, programs, and education.
WOMEN PAST & PRESENT THEN AND NOW Monmouth Museum Lincroft, New Jersey thenawa.org, monmouthmuseum.org through May 15
Gracing the Monmouth Museum this season is Then and Now, an intriguing exhibition of paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and mixed media works created by members of the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA), founded in 1889 and thus the oldest continuing professional organization of women artists in America. Representing the past are 15 works dating from 1915 to 1980 borrowed from the NAWA Collection at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. (This trove
MARY O. BOWDITCH (1883–1971), Lashko, c. 1935, wood, 18 3/4 x 9 x 10 1/2 in. (including base), Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, gift of Elise Morenon, 1999.0512, photo: Peter Jacobs
symbolic scaffolding of gender hierarchy, and the accompanying sexualized objectification (if not exploitation) of women, have rendered in high relief our current culture’s questioning of gender roles and specifically the assumed dominance of the male (predatory) gaze. The Male Nude aims to turn that gaze around and level the visual field through a fullfrontal celebration of men’s bodies. It will feature a salon of erotic and non-erotic works in a range of media and styles that explore the compositions, postures, and role-playing within this flourishing yet still underexposed genre. Almost all of the artists involved are still at work, though a few (like Nelson Shanks, whose Swimmer is illustrated here) are deceased.
OFF WITH HIS CLOTHES THE MALE NUDE: TURNING THE GAZE New York Artists Equity Gallery Manhattan nyartistsequity.org June 1–25
The New York Artists Equity Gallery is set to present a group show with the somewhat provocative title The Male Nude: Turning the Gaze. Cocurated by gallery director Michael Gormley and Fine Art Connoisseur editor-in-chief Peter Trippi, it contains works in various media by approximately 35 artists who were invited or juried in. While the female nude has long played a conspicuous role in Western art, the genre’s
EXCELLENCE IN WATERCOLORS INTERNATIONAL WATERCOLOUR MASTERS EXHIBITION Lilleshall Hall near Newport, Shropshire, England internationalwatercolourmasters.com May 16–29
The English artist and author David Poxon rejoices in the fact that Britain brought watercolors to global attention as a fine art material during the 18th century. To celebrate this heritage, he has organized the International Watercolour Masters Exhibition at an idyllic spot in western
110
NELSON SHANKS (1937–2015), Swimmer, 2010, oil on canvas, 54 1/4 x 34 1/4 in., estate of the artist
England, roughly 35 miles northwest of Birmingham. On view will be works by 42 of the world’s best watercolorists, including Linda Daly Baker, Julia Barminova, Matthew Bird, Alvaro Castagnet, Ali Cavanaugh, Fabio Cembranelli, Eudes Correia, Joe Dowden, Cesc Farre, Pasqualino Fracasso, Laurie Goldstein-Warren, Xi Guo, Patricia Guzman, Mat Barber Kennedy, Dan McCrary, Mark Mehaffey, Stan Miller, Dean Mitchell, David Poxon, Kris Preslan, Pablo Ruben, and Mary Whyte. Complementing the display will be watercolors by 12 talented newcomers who won the opportunity to have their works exhibited too, as well as a lively program of demonstrations, lectures, and broadcasts. MIKHAIL STARCHENKO (b. 1965), Koi, 2018, watercolor on paper, 27 3/5 x 19 3/4 in., private collection
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
London, and then New York. Between the two world wars and thereafter, the gallery thrived while handling the Soviet government’s sale of its museums’ treasures, placing these and other major European works in such U.S. museums as Cleveland, the Met, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art. In 1949, R&S sold to the Frick Collection Jacob van Ruisdael’s Landscape with a Footbridge, which had been seized by the Nazis from Baron Louis von Rothschild and then restituted. Other famous clients included Jayne and Charles Wrightsman, Robert Lehman, J. Paul Getty, and Helen Clay Frick, who founded the Frick Art Reference Library. The R&S archive has been complemented by the concurrent gift of the archive of Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, which contains important material related to her curatorial tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1969–83), where she pioneered the collecting of 20th-century decorative arts. Hunter-Stiebel went on to work with Oregon’s Portland Art Museum and several museums in New Mexico, where the couple now live.
PRESERVING LEGACIES GENEROUS ARCHIVAL DONATIONS Frick Art Reference Library Manhattan frick.org
In January, the Frick Collection celebrated a significant addition to its Frick Art Reference Library as the art dealer Gerald G. Stiebel and his scholar wife, Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, donated the archive of his family’s firm, Rosenberg & Stiebel — essentially the last major dealer archive in the Western hemisphere that was still privately owned. Archivists rightly seek to keep related materials together, as their value is compounded that way, and they are particularly eager to encourage the flourishing study of the history of collecting. The R&S archive will help future art historians trace the relationships of this transatlantic family firm with its notable clients over nearly 150 years, even as it enhances provenance research into situations when art was expropriated unlawfully. Founded in 1874 in Frankfurt by Jakob Rosenbaum, the gallery was turned over to his relatives Rosenberg and Stiebel, who ultimately opened branches in Paris, Amsterdam,
A page from Rosenberg & Stiebel’s New York City visitors’ book of 1956, featuring the signatures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the tire manufacturer Harvey S. Firestone, Jr. Photo: Cris Sunwoo
MASTERING LIGHT & COLOR KAMI MENDLIK: COLOR RELATIVITY Grand Hand Gallery St. Paul, Minnesota thegrandhand.com June 6–July 21
The Grand Hand Gallery has mounted an exhibition of recent works by the Minnesota painter Kami Mendlik that celebrate and amplify her new book, Color Relativity: Creating the Illusion of Light with Paint. A decade in preparation, this publication shows readers how to convey the illusion of light and form through color relativity using a simple limited palette. Renowned for her impressionistic landscape paintings, Mendlik grew up near Stillwater, Minnesota, and in 2008 founded the St. Croix River School of Painting, named for the scenic river that Stillwater overlooks. Now based on a 16-acre farm, she has been painting professionally for more than 30 years and teaching for at least 20. KAMI MENDLIK (b. 1973), Autumn on the River, 2022, oil on canvas mounted on board (panel), 14 x 18 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
111
TRACING WOMEN ARTISTS’ JOURNEY
HOW WOMEN SEE EACH OTHER
ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW: ART BY AMERICAN WOMEN
WOMEN PAINTING WOMEN Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Fort Worth themodern.org May 15–September 25
Huntsville Museum of Art Huntsville, Alabama hsvmuseum.org through June 26
HARRIET
WHITNEY
FRISHMUTH
(1880–1980), Crest of the Wave, 1925, bronze, 20 x 5 in.
In 2008, the Huntsville Museum of Art wisely acquired a rare collection of more than 400 paintings, drawings, and sculptures created by over 250 American women active primarily between 1850 and 1940. These overlooked treasures had been assembled by Alan and Louise Sellars of Marietta, Georgia, who were way ahead of the curve in noticing these artists, many of whose names are still unfamiliar, even though they once exhibited actively, won awards, and taught others. Today, fortunately, we are all rediscovering women artists’ contributions and re-establishing their rightful place in the expanding narrative of art history. The Sellars did not prioritize one style; though their holdings are strongest in realism, they also include examples of folk and modernist art, and their subjects range from still lifes and landscapes to portraits and genre scenes, made in different parts of the U.S. and indeed the world. The Huntsville Museum of Art is celebrating the Sellars Collection by exhibiting its highlights in two consecutive shows. Under the umbrella title Another Point of View: Art by American Women, Part I runs through June 26, and Part II will be on view July 24–November 13. There are roughly two dozen works in each part.
112
Women Painting Women is a title we see often. Now the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is presenting its own take on this important theme through an exhibition of approximately 60 portraits created by 46 women from around the world since the late 1960s. Chief curator Andrea Karnes says, “The pivotal narrative is how these artists use the conventional portrait of a woman as a catalyst to tell another story outside of male interpretations of the female body. They conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women. Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness, pain, and pleasure, the portraits connect to all kinds of women, and they make way for women artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the female figure.”
To achieve these goals, the show highlights four themes. First, the body, ranging from unidealized to fantasized nudes, is seen by such artists as Alice Neel, Jenny Saville, Sylvia Sleigh, Mickalene Thomas, and Lisa Yuskavage. Next comes “Nature Personified,” in which artists like Joan Semmel, Luchita Hurtado, Susan Rothenberg, and Tracey Emin look to the mythology of woman as it relates to mother earth figures, priestesses, and goddesses, as well as to the metaphysical powers associated with being female. The exhibition’s third section highlights “Color as Portrait,” revealing how exaggerated or dramatic usage of color and form can convey specific content about female identity, including race, gender, and archetypes. The artists represented here include Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold, Joan Brown, and Amy Sherald. Finally comes a section about selfhood, in which subtleties of gesture, posture, and setting capture the energy or presence of a sitter’s psychological (sometimes physical) state. On view here are works by Nicole Eisenman, Maria Lassnig, Elizabeth Peyton, Marlene Dumas, Jordan Casteel, and others. Women Painting Women is accompanied by a 172-page catalogue published by DelMonico Books.
HOPE GANGLOFF (b. 1974), Queen Jane Approximately, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 66 x 108 in., collection of Alturas Foundation, San Antonio; photo: Susan Inglett Gallery, New York City
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
OLD TRADITIONS, NEW APPROACHES
NAN LIU (b. 1974), Climbing Up, 2017, color and ink on Xuan paper, 66 x 33 in., available through the artist
ECHOES OF NATURE: WORKS BY CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ARTISTS
landscape painting epitomized by Mao Qingyun, who prefers to work in tempera, and third is the artist Mian Situ, who researches and depicts the struggles of early Chinese immigrants in America. Finally, there is the socially engaged art of Nan Liu, who paints the lives of students on his Florida university campus, and of California professor Yu Ji, who draws with pencils to capture how Chinese men live in America today. Echoes of Nature has been scheduled in tandem with the city of Camarillo’s Chinese Festival of Culture, and a series of lectures will be offered throughout June, including one by Aihua Zhou Pearce on June 25.
Studio Channel Islands Gallery Camarillo, California studiochannelislands.org/echoes-ofnature/ June 4–July 30
The Studio Channel Islands Gallery will soon open Echoes of Nature: Works by Contemporary Chinese Artists, an exhibition curated by Aihua Zhou Pearce, Ph.D., who teaches drawing at California Lutheran University. Her focus is Chinese and Chinese-American artists who depict figures and landscape, utilizing their academic training to create new forms of contemporary realist art that bridge Eastern and Western visual culture. The show is organized around four themes. First is the new approach to figuration represented by Xu Weixin, who makes portraits of sooty-faced workers who risk their lives mining coal, and by Victor Wang, who uses rich color to evoke a sense of movement more dynamic than what we often see in traditional Chinese art. Second is a new form of
SITES OF SIGNIFICANCE IN THE FOUNDERS’ FOOTSTEPS: LANDMARKS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Childs Gallery Boston childsgallery.com, godine.com, adamvandoren.net through May 27
Based in New York City, Adam Van Doren is a gifted historian and watercolorist who weaves both skills together for his unique books. His previous publications include The Stones of Yale and An Artist in Venice, but he launched a new phase in 2016 with The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents. While researching that project, Van Doren wondered, “What made these Founders ‘pledge their lives’ for independence?” In a sense, Van Doren says, his new book, In the Founders’ Footsteps: Landmarks of the American Revolution, is a sequel to the 2016 volume. He decided to visit key sites associated with the seven-year-long Revolutionary War, ultimately traveling more than 1,000 miles from Maine to Georgia. Through these experiences, during which he painted and took copious notes, Van Doren came to F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
better understand why these men (and some women) pitted themselves against the strongest military in the world, eventually creating the world’s first constitutional republic — one that, for all its faults, still inspires the world. Van Doren’s watercolors and writings flow together through his 256-page book, which has been published by Godine (Boston) and is available in shops and online. And for those who would like to see the watercolors in person, head to Boston’s Childs Gallery, where most are on view and for sale this season. In planning his travels, Van Doren knew that all of the sites must be within the 13 original colonies and accessible to the public today. They include an intriguing mix of 37 homes grand and simple, monuments, battlefields, forts, churches, meeting houses, and taverns, with 15 more noted in an appendix. (There are also appendices devoted to maps, a timeline, a who’s who, and a bibliography.) Naturally the artist visited Yorktown, Independence Hall, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, Fraunces Tavern, and the homes of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, but he also hit less familiar places like South Carolina’s Camden Battlefield, Philadelphia’s City Tavern (which still serves an 18th-century menu), the Joseph Webb House on the Connecticut River (where Washington plotted with the French general Rochambeau), and New York’s Philipsburg Manor, where enslaved people worked just as hard as their Southern counterparts did.
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
ADAM VAN DOREN (b. 1962), Maryland State House, 2021, watercolor, gouache and graphite on light green tinted watercolor paper, 22 x 15 in., available through Childs Gallery, Boston
Van Doren’s project reminds us there is always something new to be found in America’s past that also brings greater clarity to our present, and to the future we choose to make as a nation.
113
SCULPTING THEIR OWN WAYS BRONZE AND STEEL: THE ART OF MARC MELLON AND BABETTE BLOCH Brookgreen Gardens Murrells Inlet, South Carolina brookgreen.org May 7–July 24
Brookgreen Gardens is presenting a retrospective of the Connecticut-based sculptors Marc Mellon and Babette Bloch, who, though married, represent two distinct aspects of representational sculpture today. Both were living in New York City in 1984, when they met at a Long Island foundry. Married four years later, they soon bought a house in Redding, Connecticut, where they have raised their two daughters and created art in hisand-hers studios. Mellon is best known for his portrait busts, commemorative statues, and full-figure works in bronze exploring the worlds of dance, sport, and family life. In the spirit of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, he makes sculpture that is truly humanist, figures that — while recording an actual likeness — “also evoke an inner life and uplift the spirit.” Among his many sitters have been prominent politicians, scientists, creatives, athletes, and leaders in religion, business, and philanthropy. Mellon adds, “I have always loved the metaphors between sport and all of life’s pursuits. I’ve particularly focused on the beauty of sport, while trying to project the human qualities that make for quality and achievement.” Babette Bloch is renowned for her pioneering use of laser-cut and water jet-cut stainless steel to create figurative sculptures that explore form and the interplay between object and light. She manipulates sheets of heavy-gauge stainless steel, ingeniously transforming a dense and heavy material into something seemingly lightweight and fluid. Collaborating with a precision metal shop that normally handles industrial projects, Bloch cuts and punctures steel so that it reflects and interacts with the colors and shapes of its environment. (Several of her works permanently adorn the Lowcountry Trail at Brookgreen Gardens.) Bloch is perhaps best known for her Reflecting Nature series, which encompasses a wide array of floral and wildlife subjects. These range in size from tabletop to monumental, from wall-mounted to free-standing. An example is illustrated here.
BABETTE BLOCH (b. 1956), Peony Vase (maquette), 2019, stainless steel (edition of 9), 25 x 24 x 7 in.
MARC MELLON (b. 1951), Spiraling Dancer, 2008, bronze (edition of 9), 25 x 17 x 10 in.
114
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
ART IN THE WEST
A BUSY SEASON Included in the opening weekend’s celebrations are a reception, a paint-out, a “wet wall show,” studio tours, and panel discussions. Judge James Richards will present more than $15,000 in prizes and will also teach a two-day workshop at the Taos Art Museum’s Fechin Studio, then lead a critique and offer a demonstration of his own techniques. All works will be available for purchase and visible on the websites of both AIS and the gallery. Founded in 1998, AIS is a nonprofit organization with more than 1,950 U.S.-based members who promote impressionist painting through exhibitions, workshops, and other educational programs.
BOUND FOR TAOS AMERICAN IMPRESSIONIST SOCIETY Impressions: Small Works Showcase Wilder Nightingale Fine Art Taos, New Mexico americanimpressionistsociety.org and wnightingale.com May 12–June 19
The American Impressionist Society (AIS) will soon open its 6th annual Impressions: Small Works Showcase at Wilder Nightingale Fine Art in Taos. On view will be approximately 150 works selected by a five-member jury, as well as 20 more created by AIS “Masters,” officers, and founders.
CAMILLE PRZEWODEK (b. 1947), Girl in Green Shawl, 2019, oil on panel, 14 x 11 in.
SEEING NATURE, THOUGHTFULLY DOUGLAS FRYER: MOMENTARY REFLECTIONS Meyer Gallery Santa Fe meyergalleries.com June 24–July 7
Meyer Gallery is set to host an exhibition of recent landscapes and still lifes by the Utahbased painter Douglas Fryer, whose scenes are formed from abstract marks, soft edges, and washed layers that reveal nature’s complex beauty. The artist has titled the show Momentary Reflections because its works reveal poetic moments he has experienced in nature near his home or on travels abroad. Fryer writes, “Art reveals the evidence of one’s life; in observing and creating, the artist discovers themes that are the make-up of his character, and perpetuates the making and sharing of experience. I create images that become material records of places, things, and people that have been significant to me. Often, as I paint them, they become significant to me F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
in a different way: aesthetically, conceptually, and spiritually. There is a state of existence that lies between one’s physical and spiritual state, the present and the past, the reality and the symbol or impression. It is while I am in this frame of mind that life and the world seem the most clear and meaningful. It is to this state that I desire to return, and painting is one of the avenues through which I can regain and expand those feelings.”
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
DOUGLAS FRYER (b. 1963), Paper Mill on the Connecticut River, December, 2021, oil on panel, 10 x 20 in.
088
115
OIL PAINTERS HEAD TO COLORADO
Calvin Liang, Ned Mueller, Camille Przewodek, William Schneider, Michael Situ, James Tennison, Deborah Tilby, and Christopher Zhang. One of OPA’s leading members, Johanna Harmon, will serve as awards judge, distributing approximately $100,000 in prizes, including the Gold Medal worth $25,000. Enhancing the show will be a display of winning works from OPA’s second annual Student Art Competition, which focuses on artists aged 14 to 23. Launching the show will be OPA’s annual members convention (May 31–June 6), which encompasses a wet paint competition on May 31, then the awards presentation and celebration on June 3. The exhibition will be available to view on the websites of both OPA and the museum, where most of its works are available for purchase.
OIL PAINTERS OF AMERICA 31st National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils Steamboat Art Museum Steamboat Springs, Colorado oilpaintersofamerica.com and steamboatartmuseum.org June 3–August 27
The nonprofit organization Oil Painters of America (OPA) is co-hosting its 31st National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils at Colorado’s Steamboat Art Museum this season. More than 1,000 professional artist members from across the U.S. and Canada vied for only 200 spots on the show’s checklist. Among the OPA “Master Signature” artists participating are Daud Akhriev, Kathy Anderson, Kenn Backhaus, Cindy Baron, Roger Dale Brown, Ken Cadwallader, John Michael Carter, James Crandall, Nancy S. Crookston, Louis Escobedo, Albert Handell, Nancy Howe, Robert Johnson, Jeff Legg,
A NEW DAY IN TAOS LA LUZ DE TAOS Couse-Sharp Historic Site Taos, New Mexico LaLuzdeTaos.org and couse-sharp.org May 20–22
In 1915, six American-born, European-trained artists founded the Taos Society of Artists (TSA) to promote American and Native art of the Southwest. Their group grew to include 12 active members and several more associate and honorary members. Among the founders were E.I. Couse and J.H. Sharp, whose names endure through the Couse-Sharp Historic Site in downtown Taos, now owned and managed by the Couse Foundation. Here visitors have long enjoyed exploring Couse’s home and studio, the garden designed by his wife, Virginia, the workshops of his son, Kibbey, and Sharp’s two studios. After a multi-year fundraising and construction process, the site recently unveiled its Lunder Research Center (LRC), named for philanthropists Peter and Paula Lunder of Portland, Maine. This handsome 5,000-square-foot facility contains portions of Sharp’s former home, as well as a stateof-the-art exhibition space named after TSA scholar Dean A. Porter. Also here are the site’s new archive, collections storage, research library, and curatorial and office space. Finally, gathered in one place for future scholars’ convenient access, are sketchbooks, documents,
116
DAVID MUELLER (b. 1963), Summer Festival, San Gimignano, 2022, oil on canvas, 40 x 28 in.
and photographic materials related to TSA members, as well as to the Native American art and ethnographic items they collected. The Porter Gallery’s inaugural show is La Luz de Taos, which presents recent works by 39 artists employing various media including painting, pottery, sculpture, jewelry, and fashion. Dedicated to the memory of Kang Cho, an esteemed artist who passed away last December, the exhibition will be moved in mid-May to the El Monte Sagrado Resort nearby for the site’s gala and art sale. The opening weekend will kick off on May 20 with a VIP celebration of the LRC. The next day, after a lecture by TSA scholar Michael Grauer, registrants will head to the resort, where the exhibited artworks will be sold at fixed prices via a live draw. The day will culminate with the 90th birthday party of art historian Virginia Couse Leavitt, Couse’s granddaughter and the site’s guiding light, including the unveiling of a bust of her created by Ed Smida. Finally, on May 22, the site’s open house will feature a demonstration by the nationally known artist, and devoted Taos resident, Sherrie McGraw. Illustrated here is an unforgettable sculpture in the selling exhibition created by Paul Moore, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. He writes, “The Spanish arrived in what is now New Mexico in 1598 and imposed strict religious, economic and political control over the pueblos. After years of brutal rule, the people finally had enough; led on by a holy man, Popé, they plotted to overthrow the Spanish in 1680. Popé sent knotted ropes to all the pueblo leaders with instructions to untie one knot each day and the day the last knot was undone they were to attack in unison, M A Y / J U N E
PAUL MOORE (b. 1957), The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, 2021 (unique), mixed media (polymer, wood, tin, gold leaf), 49 1/4 x 22 x 23 1/2 in.
killing all the priests and Spanish individuals they could find. The revolt drove the Spanish south to the El Paso area for 11 years. Upon their return, they had to change their approach toward the pueblo people, treating them and their religious beliefs with respect, which helped ensure the survival of their culture. This was the only successful uprising against colonization in North America.” Everyone is welcome to register online for the gala, or at least to register to purchase its artworks. All proceeds will support the mission of the Couse-Sharp Historic Site — “Bringing the Legacy of Taos Art to Life.” 2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
HALF A CENTURY YOUNG PRIX DE WEST National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Oklahoma City nationalcowboymuseum.org/ prix-de-west June 2–August 7
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is set to launch its 50th annual Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition & Sale, always one of the field’s highestquality events. Opening on June 2 will be a display of more than 300 paintings and sculpture created by nearly 100 invited talents, including special guest artists Grant Redden and D. LaRue Mahlke. Their works depict landscapes, wildlife, figures, portraits, and momentous moments in Western history and lore. Prix de West is the museum’s largest annual fundraiser, with last year’s revenues totaling more than $2.8 million. This year the accompanying catalogue has been expanded to include an in-depth history of the project’s first half-century. The action really gets underway on the weekend of June 17–18, when collectors in person and online will enjoy a range of seminars, workshops, receptions, dinners, award presentation, and of course the live auction. About to participate in his 40th Prix de West, artist Gerald Balciar was invited to design this year’s commemorative bolo (tie), which
dedicated attendees wear throughout the opening weekend. To make reservations, see the full schedule, or arrange to bid by proxy, please visit the museum’s website.
SHERRIE MCGRAW (b. 1954), Twilight on the Pueblo, 2022, oil on canvas, 23 x 28 in.
Scott Burdick (b. 1967), The Hand of Creation, 2022, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. DEAN MITCHELL (b. 1957), Frontline, 2022, acrylic on board, 15 x 10 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
117
BY JANET WHITMORE
H I S T O R I C M A S T E R S
REFLECTIONS OF REALITY
THE GABRIEL AND YVONNE WEISBERG COLLECTION
C
reating an art collection often begins with the purchase of a single work that is particularly appealing. For Gabriel and Yvonne Weisberg, it was a charcoal drawing by François Bonvin (1817–1887) they found in a London gallery in 1970. That image of an elderly ragpicker engaged their attention not only because of their ongoing scholarly research into the origins of French realism, but also because of the artist’s evident compassion for the humanity of those who struggled to survive in poverty. Now, 52 years later, Reflections of Reality, an exhibition on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) from May 14 through December 10, showcases the depth of the collection that grew from that initial Bonvin drawing. From the outset, the Weisbergs chose to purchase drawings because they were affordable for a young couple establishing their art-historical careers, and because drawing was often the first step in an artist’s creation of a larger work. Over many decades the Weisbergs have written countless books and articles, curated exhibitions, and encouraged others to collect 19th-century art. Their professional objective has always been to learn more about the complexities of 19th-century European art — beyond the most famous names and movements. Their tireless work ethic has spurred them to scramble through attics and museum storerooms, drive through French villages tracking down the homes of their favorite artists’ descendants, and toil away in archives and libraries. Understanding a historical artist becomes easier when you can closely study his or her
118
LOUISE CATHERINE BRESLAU (1856–1927),
Portrait of Yves Österlind, 1901, pastel on brown
cardboard, 32 1/4 x 38 1/2 in., Minneapolis Institute of Art, gift of Dr. Gabriel and Yvonne Weisberg in loving memory of Michael D. Michaux, 2019.115.1
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
CHARLES MILCENDEAU (1872–1919), Women and Children at Ouessant, 1898, graphite, black pencil, charcoal, and stump with a few highlights of red chalk on paper, 16 1/4 x 26 in.
work, preferably something as intimate as a drawing, and preferably one that you own yourselves. Though he has taught art history at several universities, Gabriel’s longest stint (32 years) was at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis-St. Paul, which explains the Weisbergs’ devotion to the MIA. In 2008 they announced they would ultimately donate their drawings to that superb museum. At the time they owned approximately 125, and now that number has risen by more than 100. DRAWINGS AS PRELUDES In the 19th century, the curriculum of Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and of most art academies around the globe, typically began with the study of drawing. This was the foundational skill on which painting, sculpture, and architecture were built, and it often provided the starting point for a composition or design in any of those fields. When the Weisbergs began collecting, drawings were reasonably priced and the relatively overlooked artists they admired were often individuals whose work they had come to know through scholarly investigations. Louise Catherine Breslau’s Portrait of Yves Österlind exemplifies the freshness of a preliminary drawing done in preparation for a painting. The Weisbergs discovered this piece at Paris’s largest flea market, the Marché aux Puces, on the assumption that it was a genuine Breslau. Later examination established its legitimacy and subsequent conservation returned it to a more stable condition. The sitter was the son of the painter Allan Österlind, who was a friend of the artist. Yves sits at a drawing board sharpening his chalk and gazing dreamily into the viewer’s space — or perhaps at Breslau as she tries to capture the scene. The freshness of
EMILE CLAUS (1849–1924), Ernestine, n.d., sanguine and lavis on paper, 18 1/2 x 12 1/4 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
119
(LEFT) JULES ADLER (1865–1952), Seated Woman, n.d., charcoal on paper, 13 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.
(RIGHT) BERNARD BOUTET DE MONVEL (1881–1949), Seated Old Lady (La Mère
Caillot), n.d., graphite pencil on paper, 17 3/4 x 12 1/2 in.
the pastel, together with the haphazardly scattered drawing tools and papers on the table, create a sense of immediacy that is missing from the finished oil version, where everything is more obviously staged. Women and Children at Ouessant by Charles Milcendeau may be a study for a larger composition as well, although the presumed painting has not yet been identified. In 1897 and 1898, the artist enjoyed extended stays in coastal Brittany, where he painted scenes of local life. This drawing depicts a large group of women and children waiting for their men’s fishing boats to return to port before a storm begins. Anxiety is evident in both their faces and body language; most of them stand very still, as if their steadfast concentration on the ocean will help guide their loved ones home. Milcendeau’s emphasis on these faces underscores his compassion for the hardships of rural life and the everpresent danger of earning a living at sea. The Weisbergs have led the way in art historians’ rediscovery of Milcendeau, and their 14 drawings by him constitute what is almost certainly the largest holding outside the museum dedicated to him in Soullans, France. Conversely, the drawing of Ernestine by the Belgian Emile Claus was created as a finished work and presented to his friend and fellowartist José Engel. Ernestine is shown with her hands folded demurely in her lap and her gaze directed downward. The carefully drawn head with its casually fly-away hair and detailed facial features contrasts sharply with the minimal outline of her dress and torso. Ernestine appears to be a servant, but why Claus inscribed this drawing to his friend remains a mystery. Was she Engel’s daughter? Or simply a model who was friendly with the artist? Regardless of her relationship to Claus or his friend, Ernestine is a compelling presence, evoking the lives of many young women for whom working as a servant was all that could be expected.
120
ENDURING REALIST TRENDS In their early years of collecting, the Weisbergs sought examples of realist art in keeping with their scholarly interests and with the availability of then relatively unknown artists of the movement. Over time, they expanded their studies to include subsequent generations of artists who worked within the framework of social justice concerns and the depiction of the contemporary world that was central to mid-19th century realism. Today the collection reflects the remarkable persistence of this philosophical approach well into the 20th century. Seated Woman is one of the many charcoal studies Jules Adler made while traveling around his native France. This one was done in the Breton town of Le Faouët, home to a thriving lumber industry. Although Adler is best known for paintings of strikes and political upheaval, it was the working people of France who were always at the heart of his art. Here the woman seated in a straight-backed chair pays careful attention to her needlework, probably a piece of Breton lace. Her dress — especially her blue-tinged cap — identifies her as a woman from this region of Brittany. Adler offers little detail about the room in which she works, instead emphasizing the dignity of his sitter. Bernard Boutet de Monvel’s drawing Seated Old Lady makes use of a nearly identical pose. In fact, the Weisbergs’ collection contains a much earlier Bonvin drawing of an old woman shown in profile sitting in a straight-back chair, and, of course, James McNeill Whistler, whom Bonvin befriended when the American arrived in Paris in the 1850s, famously painted his own mother in this position in 1871. Boutet de Monvel’s image was developed early in his career, perhaps in the early 20th century. Like Adler’s work, this simple outline drawing directs our scrutiny to the woman as she sits calmly in a kitchen, M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(LEFT) LÉON FRÉDÉRIC (1856–1940), Peasant Interior, n.d., charcoal on paper, 24 1/2 x 18 3/4 in.
(RIGHT) GEORGES D’ESPAGNAT (1870–1950), Yvette Guilbert Singing, n.d.,
black crayon, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 17 1/4 x 11 1/2 in.
resting from her work or possibly contemplating what her next task should be. The Belgian Léon Frédéric was best known for large-scale paintings — some in a traditional triptych format — and for his Symbolist approach. His drawing Peasant Interior, however, offers a very different perspective. This is a study for Panel 11 in the Blé et Lin (Wheat and Flax) series he undertook in the late 1880s. Here Frédéric has employed conventional compositional strategies: one-point perspective directs attention to the sack of grain resting on a chair in the middle ground, while the handling of light and shadow poses no challenge to standard academic practices. What is remarkable, however, is the complete absence of people. The room itself is the subject, and the simplicity of both its furnishings and architectural structure informs the conditions under which the basic necessities of life (food, clothing, and shelter) are produced. A drawing by Georges d’Espagnat, Yvette Guilbert Singing, captures a completely different way of life. Now the scene has shifted from rural France and Belgium to the café-concerts of Paris, where Guilbert was a widely acclaimed performer. Her trademark elbow-length gloves suggest that she is on stage, as does her face’s stark white coloring. From the early 1870s such cabaret performers began to appear in the imagery of artists like Edgar Degas, who sought to capture the working life of performers as well as the spirit of modern Paris. Several decades later, d’Espagnat continued that theme in keeping with the impressionists’ preference for recording a moment in time. F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
The ongoing interest in realist perspectives is expressed in Lucien Ott’s 1918 watercolor and gouache A Tanner Smoking His Pipe. As a young artist in the 1890s, Ott absorbed the ideas of Paul Gauguin during a stay in Brittany and was introduced to Japonisme by his friend Henri Rivière. Much of his oeuvre reflects these influences, and yet, in this later piece, he explores the realist theme of the urban worker in a composition that shows little evidence of either Japan or Gauguin. Undoubtedly, this is a result of his having drawn so many fellow soldiers during World War I. The solitary figure of the tanner is lost in thought, surrounded by the implements of his employment, yet seemingly unaware of them. Likewise, Ott paid little attention to the avantgarde currents swirling through Paris at this time; this scene is resolutely focused on the image of a working man in the aftermath of war. SYMBOLIST MOODS In addition to the many figural compositions in the Weisbergs’ collection, there is also a significant number of landscape drawings and watercolors dating from the 1860s into the early 20th century. Two recent acquisitions illustrate the couple’s evolving interests, particularly symbolism as practiced by Belgian and Dutch artists. First is Barnyard with Old Tree, a 1903 watercolor by the little-known Dutchman Simon Moulijn. Here he has depicted an ordinary farmyard with thatch-roofed buildings and a wooden fence, but he has positioned a large tree directly in front of the smallest outbuilding. It takes center stage, with its bare branches writhing across the surface and forming a decorative
121
LUCIEN OTT (1870–1927), A Tanner Smoking His Pipe, 1918, pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 23 3/4 x 18 in.
122
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
SIMON Barnyard
MOULIJN with
Old
(1866–1948), Tree,
1903,
watercolor on paper, 11 x 14 3/4 in.
pattern against the sky. This reminds us of Vincent van Gogh, particularly his olive trees, though there is no documentation suggesting Moulijn was familiar with his countryman’s art. The exaggerated scale of the tree, its deliberately awkward position, and the image’s overall blue tint draw our attention to the twisting form, creating a sense that something untoward is about to happen. Moulijn was primarily a decorative painter and portraitist, but he also created a number of landscape drawings on his travels. It is in these drawings that his personal moods seem to have been expressed. A second example is an enigmatic scene of Houses in the Moonlight by Ernest-André Andreas, a Paris-based artist. What little is known of
him comes from his association with Dr. Paul Gachet, the doctor who treated van Gogh in the months before his death. Andreas was also a patient at Gachet’s residential facility in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he ultimately took his own life. It is likely that Houses in the Moonlight is based on a view of Auvers from his window. Van Gogh’s painting Vineyards at Auvers (1890) illustrates a similar grouping of houses and larger structures he observed during his stay there. Andreas rendered his nocturnal subject in pastels, imbuing the scene with an almost magical aura of softness and ambiguity. The line between the reflections in the water and the buildings and trees on shore is hard to define. Above it all, the moon casts a shimmering light onto the rooftops, putting the humble streetlight to shame. Andreas was 31 when he died in 1899, and although he left an admired body of work depicting Parisian cabarets, much remains to be discovered about his life and career. CONTINUING TO COLLECT Scholarship and collecting have gone hand-in-hand for Gabriel and Yvonne Weisberg over the years. At the heart of their project, however, has been the depiction of ordinary people going about their daily activities. They have already donated most of their collection to the MIA, and they are still acquiring works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Weisbergs encourage others to do so, too, because opportunities in this field abound, as do the joys of discovering previously unappreciated artists. Information: artsmia.org. The Minneapolis Institute of Art is producing a digital catalogue of the exhibition, to be posted on its website when it opens on May 14. A second exhibition featuring more works from the Weisbergs’ collection will open at the MIA on March 4, 2023.
ERNEST-ANDRÉ ANDREAS (1868–1899) Houses in the Moonlight, n.d., pastel on paper, 22 3/4 x 18 in.
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
JANET WHITMORE is an art historian specializing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She recently completed the catalogue raisonné for Julien Dupré (1851–1910) in association with Rehs Galleries, Inc. (New York City).
123
I N S I D E T R A C K
BY VERN GROSVENOR SWANSON
FAREWELL, JOHN H. SCHAEFFER
T
Because John’s collection was so his article is a tribute to large, I will discuss only some of his 253 my dear friend John H. British works, leaving for another time his Schaeffer, who was born 140 Continental pieces and 110 Australian in Amsterdam in 1939 ones. Even so, I can illustrate only 11 magand died in his adopted nificent paintings and sculptures, mostly city of Sydney in 2020. At the request from the Victorian era (1837–1901). When of John’s partner, Bettina, and his I asked how a Dutchman came to love daughter, Jo, I am honored to recount Britain so much, John replied gaily, “The the art-related adventures of this Orange Revolution!” referencing William fine man, who had been placed in an of Orange, who in 1689 was brought from orphanage during the Nazi occupathe Netherlands to rule Britain with his tion of the Netherlands, adopted by English-born wife, Mary. an elderly couple, and then hired as a I have known only a few collectors penniless cabin boy on a ship headed with the aesthetic acumen and steely Down Under. Through intelligence determination to purchase masterpieces and determination, John became without being pushed by their expert Australia’s second-largest corporate consultants. Few have the inclination employer and its greatest art collecor resources to acquire truly significant tor. I entered his life during his professional heyday and was fortunate The late John H. Schaeffer with Frederic Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python works, which are often expensive, large, and challenging in theme or condition. to work with him closely for 23 years. (illuminated blue for a special occasion) In the field of Victorian art, the leaders John’s achievements in business have been my friends Frederick C. Ross, and culture were justly rewarded, Christopher Forbes, John H. Schaeffer, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. including a knighthood in the Order of Australia and the naming of galleries for him at each of Australia’s principal art museums. Such Horatio Alger THE JOURNEY BEGINS ascents happen regularly, but rarely do their protagonists seek beauty and By the time we met, John already had a connoisseur’s eye and was acquirsolace in fine art or feel the urge to acquire some of the greatest mastering fine Australian and then fin-de-siècle European Symbolist paintings, works ever created. My story highlights a collector who willed himself, mostly through the London dealer Adrian Mibus. Less than a year before, often beyond his means, to acquire the very best. To do so required a blend he had wisely acquired John William Waterhouse’s seven-foot-wide oil of courage, intellect, passion, and foolhardiness. John did not just buy study for Flora and the Zephyrs (1897). My involvement with this force of pictures; he adopted them, giving each the best conservation and framing, nature, who self-deprecatingly nicknamed himself “Muggings,” began on then lending or donating them to museums worldwide.
124
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
it is displayed prominently. Indeed, John ultimately ensured that roughly 60 of his works found their way into prestigious museum collections worldwide. Eventually, he bought another three Stanhopes, including the poignant Patience on a Monument Smiling at Grief (1884). From the same Christie’s auction in June 1997, John bought Frederic Leighton’s last painting, Clytie (1896), which he later helped enter the collection of his beloved Leighton House Museum in London. On our first meeting, John asked if I had seen the Alma-Tadema exhibition at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery (1996–97); I replied that I was accompanying my client there the next day. Delighted, John said he was going, too, so maybe we could talk some more. After a tense train journey, these two competitive collectors and I enjoyed marveling at that glorious show.
JOHN RODDAM SPENCER STANHOPE (1829–1908), Love and the Maiden, 1877, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 55 1/2 x 81 in., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (California Palace of the Legion of Honor)
June 4, 1997 at Christie’s King Street (London) during its preview of a Victorian auction. A tawny-haired, blue-eyed man approached and asked softly, “Are you Dr. Vern Swanson, who wrote the books on Lawrence Alma-Tadema and J.W. Godward?” He continued, “If you don’t mind my asking, what would you say is the most significant work in this auction?” Given that my American client had already rejected it, I pointed and whispered, “The John Roddam Spencer Stanhope painting Love and the Maiden.” He agreed, and two evenings later, without hesitation, John won this beautiful allegory, which is now considered Stanhope’s greatest work. This was just the first of many pictures about which I heard John say, “It has my name on it.” Fortunately, Love and the Maiden now resides in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
JOSHUA REYNOLDS
(1723–1792),
The
Archers:
Colonel John Dyke Acland and Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney, 1769, oil on canvas, 94 x 72 1/2 in., Tate Britain, London
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
125
FREDERIC LEIGHTON (1830–1896), The Syracusan Bride Leading Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana, 1865–66, oil on canvas, 53 1/4 x 167 1/2 in., private collection, photo courtesy Nevill Keating Pictures Ltd., London
John and I realized we had a connection, and so it became my honor to spend the next two and a half decades traveling, scheming, and collecting with him. In 1999, John and I visited the American collector Frederick R. Koch’s palatial residence at Sutton Place, an estate south of London. I remember well the bucolic drive from the gate to the manor itself — straight out of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, when the last turn reveals the impressive view of Manderley. We had come to see Koch’s collection and specifically several Victorian masterpieces John lusted after (and felt his name was written on). Koch was not present for our visit; in fact, it is said he never spent a night at Sutton Place. He was selling the estate and preparations for his departure were underway. Interminable negotiations commenced over a key work by Leighton, John’s favorite artist — the 14-foot-wide oil Syracusan Bride Leading Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana. Inspired by a passage in Theocritus’s Second Idyll, this splendid 26-figure panorama features people moving, frieze-like, from right to left, surrounded by spectators and wild cats. I often wonder who else but John would have wanted this unwieldy painting; indeed, he had a penchant for difficult pictures, having already purchased William Blake Richmond’s 16-foot-wide Song of Miriam in 1995. Among the Koch treasures that ultimately came to John was the superb 1896 Portrait of Baronne Madeleine Deslandes by Edward Burne-Jones. This elegant French writer fancied herself a sybil, so we see laurel trees in the background and a crystal ball on her lap, both emblems of prophecy. (This painting is now at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.) John also acquired from Koch the fashionable German artist F.X. Winterhalter’s stunning 1837 genre scene La Siesta à Naples, as well as other fine works that greatly enhanced his collection’s gravitas. John was never intimidated by a difficult acquisition process if he knew the artwork being sought would become a keystone of his collection. He repeatedly accepted Koch’s prices, only to have them raised again; Koch thought that if you accepted his first offer, it must be too low. But John prevailed in the end, purchasing the Koch paintings for a total sum he was embarrassed to utter. Having wheedled it out of him, I was shocked but swore myself to secrecy. John carried most of his hard-won booty back to Rona, his 45-room Victorian mansion overlooking Sydney, where the pictures became objects of his aesthetic worship. GLORY DAYS One unforgettable day in June 2000, John visited Christie’s to view its upcoming auction. There he was stunned to learn that Joshua Reynolds’s celebrated 1769 double portrait, The Archers: Colonel John Dyke Acland and Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney would be offered two days later. I told John I had sketched this
EDWARD BURNE-JONES (1833–1898), Baronne Madeleine Deslandes, 1895–96, oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 19 in., National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
126
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
picture in the fourth grade, when Reynolds was my favorite artist, and here it was before our very eyes! Mesmerized, John stood frozen before the painting and whispered, “It has my name written on it.” Knowing that it was slightly outside John’s collecting parameters and that it might go for several million (British) pounds, I thought no more of it. This icon was certainly out of John’s reach. But soon I learned never to underestimate him: as Nicolas Barker wrote of the late Victorian art dealer Jeremy Maas, “[He] put his money on what his eyes chose.” Sadly, the Reynolds was then housed in a maudlin frame and covered with coats of tough, darkened floor varnish. Even so, it was obviously a masterpiece. John sensed a possibility and immediately learned that conservators believed the varnish could not be fully cleaned away. Undeterred by this report and the estimate of £1,500,000–£2,500,000, he pondered how he might win this prize. In fact, we both thought the estimate had been set low because the picture could never be properly restored. For this reason, Tate Britain had already declined to pursue it, knowing that another Reynolds, the famous Portrait of Omai, was coming up for sale soon. John remained resolute and purchased The Archers for a “bargain” price of £1,653,750. From the London framer Arnold Wiggins he promptly bought a magnificent period frame (for £75,000) that utterly transformed the portrait’s appearance. After Omai sold for a record £10,343,500 the following year, Tate’s director Nicholas Serota perplexed John by asking him, “If we paid £60,000 toward restoring The Archers, would you put in £60,000, too?” Serota explained that an experimental technique might succeed in fully cleaning John’s painting: it involved a tiny oscillating hammer that would actually chip away the crystallized varnish without dangerous solvents. John agreed and entrusted the canvas to “Mr. Microscope” — Simon Howell of London’s renowned Shepherd Conservation studio. After roughly two years’ work, the result was hailed by all as a success, and The Archers has graced the walls of Tate Britain since the museum purchased it from John. On the morning of June 14, 2000, at the London auctioneers Phillips, John purchased two outstanding paintings both created in 1894 — Waterhouse’s Ophelia and Leighton’s The Bracelet — for well below their estimates. (This is not to say they came cheaply; the collapse and recovery of Victorian art prices during the 20th century is a fascinating tale, and I myself once met the man who had acquired these then-unfashionable Waterhouse and Leighton pictures on a postman’s salary during the Great Depression.) Almost unbelievably, it was also on June 14, 2000 that John acquired Reynolds’s Archers at Christie’s. Looking back from the vantage of 2022, it is clear that John was one of a handful of deep-pocketed collectors who made the market for Victorian art hum just before the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. He did so not because he had the money (he didn’t), but because he was totally seduced by the art’s beauty, quality, and iconic status. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, John could resist anything except temptation. Because he was known to overpay, masterpieces were offered to John regularly, sometimes only to him. In the heady late 1990s and early 2000s, John perhaps over-relied on the premise that “Today’s retail price will be tomorrow’s wholesale price.” More often than not, however, he acquired his 19th-century artworks at reasonable prices. In the auction world, another great picture always comes up, so John continued to buy. On June 13, 2001, Christie’s offered J.M. Strudwick’s superb Ten Virgins, which had first won acclaim at the 1884 Grosvenor Gallery exhibition. Though John was not particularly religious and was baffled by this work, he felt he should acquire some sacred art (“for my soul,” he would say). In this scene he was particularly fascinated by the five foolish virgins at left, asking, “What will happen to them?” I recommended he read Matthew chapter 25, and not too quickly: “Savor every line and you’ll know.” That same year, Sotheby’s offered the large portrait of Richard Arkwright Jr. with His Wife Mary and Daughter Anne, painted in 1790 by Joseph Wright of Derby, who is better known for his innovative nocturnal scenes. John immediately saw it as an ideal pendant to his similarly sized Archers, and so he bought it for £883,500. But he also perceived the Derby as worthy of a museum, and indeed two years later he F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE (1849–1917), Ophelia, 1894, oil on canvas, 49 x 29 in., private collection
sold it, as a partial donation, to the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, in the very town the artist called home. WEATHERING THE STORM It was in 2002 that John hit rock bottom due to the global financial crisis, personal debt, and an expensive divorce. Soon he was compelled to sell many of his “crown jewels” and also Rona, with its contents, in 2004. Facing a very public case of personal insolvency, John sold his stake in Tempo Services, the office-cleaning and security corporation he had built from the ground up. Of course, many people relished watching a big collector get taken down. Bettina and I tried to hold John back, but he could not stop collecting. In 2008, he explained, “The art world is at its best wonderful and exciting, and at its worst a dark and mysterious world in which one can become lost.”1 John revealed his deep integrity by refusing to go bankrupt, instead selling most of what he owned in order to pay creditors. Fortunately, he
127
JOHN MELHUISH STRUDWICK (1849–1937), The Ten Virgins, c. 1884, oil on canvas, 29 x 60 in., private collection, photo courtesy Christie’s, London
ran out of debt before he ran out of art. Scholar Neal A. Maxwell once wrote, “Sometimes our finest hours are during or just following our darkest hours.” One might wonder how John could cope with losing almost everything, but he realized that he had never fully “owned” his art. Rather, he had been its caretaker for posterity, possessing it only for a brief moment. He took solace in the fact that he had gathered so many beguiling works, which would always remain his through their provenance. John’s maneuvers in 2003 were counterintuitive, as he was selling artworks to pay creditors while buying new ones. A particular stroke of genius was his snapping up, at bargain prices, of the crème de la crème of the outstanding Forbes Collection at Christie’s in February 2003. There he shrewdly purchased 26 pieces, which could then be sold to pay off debts and buy yet more art. These included Waterhouse’s largest painting, Mariamne Leaving the Judgment Seat of Herod (1887), which features the modern brushwork techniques from the Breton and Newlyn schools that anticipated the artist’s famous Lady of Shallot the following year. This ostensibly esoteric scene of Herod’s unfortunate wife did not mark the end of Waterhouse’s classicism so much as the beginning of his plein air naturalism and ultimately his unique take on Pre-Raphaelitism. John rightly saw Mariamne as the key work of this “between” phase, so alive with possibilities and emotional power. After Mariamne, John saw the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt’s Il dolce far niente (1859–67) as his prize acquisition from the Forbes sale. In addition to Hunt’s scintillating “Venetian” atmosphere, he deeply appreciated what he called the female model’s “attitude.” (The artist started the face as that of his model, Annie Miller, but finished it with his wife, Fanny.) This masterwork now hangs at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. John credited his London-based art agent Angela Nevill for making this and other transfers happen, but later he also relied heavily on Martin Beisly, the London dealer who once headed Christie’s Victorian department.
JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE (1849–1917), Mariamne Leaving the Judgment Seat of Herod, 1887, oil on canvas, 105 1/4 x 72 3/4 in., private collection
128
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
FREDERIC LEIGHTON (1830–1896), Athlete Wrestling with a Python, marble, 1888–91, 70 3/4 in. high, Art Gallery of New South Wales JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY (1734–1797), Richard Arkwright Jr. with His Wife Mary and Daughter Anne, 1790, oil on canvas, 96 x 62 1/2 in., Derby Museum and Art Gallery, photo courtesy Nevill Keating Pictures Ltd, London
The most important sculpture John ever owned came from the Forbes sale — Leighton’s mighty marble Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1888–91). When it was first exhibited in 1877 as a life-size bronze, this work was immediately recognized as the opening salvo of Britain’s New Sculpture movement. Leighton’s figure is imbued with the spirit of the antique (Laocoön is the obvious source), yet is also strikingly modern. Here the flaccid conventions of neoclassical idealism were replaced with a thrilling torsion that relies on the artist’s careful anatomical observations. From the Forbes Collection John also acquired E.J. Poynter’s heartrending painting Return of the Prodigal (1869), now in Utah’s Brigham Young University Museum of Art. Here the father spies his black sheep of a son and runs out to embrace him — the key moment in the Biblical parable’s themes of repentance and forgiveness. Likewise, John’s painting by Thomas Faed, Worn Out (1868), is, in my view, one of art history’s greatest depictions of a father’s love and devotion. Later, when John was compelled to sell his ex-Forbes artworks, he was careful to credit Christopher (“Kip”) Forbes of New York as the genius who had first gathered them from the 1960s onward. Moreover, he shared in his fellow collector’s pain at having to deaccession the fruits of his F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
“magnificent obsession.” Indeed, John always cited the Victorian holdings of Kip Forbes and Andrew Lloyd Webber as far superior to his own. (Yet once he quipped wryly, “My collection of Australian art beats their britches.”) In 2009, John acquired two works including a very tall Solomon J. Solomon, Eve’s Creation (1908), which Tate Britain wanted but was not permitted to pursue because it was painted after Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. This was followed by Anna Lee Merritt’s poignant Remorseful Eve (1885), and in 2014 we visited Sweden to acquire Leighton’s long-lost oil Whispers (1881). After it failed to sell at Christie’s in 2014, John bought another great Holman Hunt, Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867–68), at a record price for this artist. (It subsequently made its way into the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.) Three years later, John purchased Henry Nelson O’Neil’s Queen Esther (1850), which ultimately went to the BYU Museum. FINAL THOUGHTS Some people may have seen John as a buttoned-down, humorless pedant, but this was far from the case. When together we became “young again,” with jokes and silliness in abundance. John once told a friend, “Vern doesn’t say much — but he talks a lot.” For years he would utter “Tutta bullah bukka nussi,” which I took to be some kind of Dutch slang. Only recently did I learn it is Indonesian for “Stop talking and eat your rice” — or in American, “shut up.” (Had he wanted me to be quiet, he needed to
129
WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT (1827–1910), Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1867–68, oil on canvas, 23 7/8 x 15 1/4 in., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (California Palace of the Legion of Honor)
be more direct.) John also had a “special power” he demonstrated often: enchanting bird whistles and an amazingly loud whistle that could draw attention instantly. If you got separated in a crowd, he would blast forth and you would reconnect immediately. I remember well the day in 2020 when tragedy befell John. I heard Bettina’s sullen voice on the telephone from Sydney explaining that John had just been struck by a service vehicle and was now in a coma with no hope of recovery. She just wanted to have John say goodbye to her one last time. “I cannot get him to respond,” she said, “but maybe you can. Please say something that might awaken him for a moment.” Tears were in my eyes and my mind went blank. Pulling myself together, I exclaimed in a strong, enthusiastic voice, “John, I just found a painting with your name on it!” VERN GROSVENOR SWANSON is a southern Oregon native who was schooled in Utah before receiving a Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London). He was the director of Utah’s Springville Museum of Art for 32 years, and is the author of 18 books.
130
SOLOMON JOSEPH SOLOMON (1860–1927), Eve’s Creation, 1908, oil on canvas, 122 1/8 x 55 7/8 in., private collection
Endnotes: 1 Julie Checkoway, “Art Lover’s Ups and Downs Shape Story behind Victorian Collection,” The Salt Lake Tribune, 23 March 2008
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
BY MILÈNE J. FERNÁNDEZ
BEHINDTHESCENES
THE HUDSON RIVER FELLOWSHIP
CONNECTING WITH NATURE AND EACH OTHER
F
cliffs, their paintings will become beautiful. Ideally, these artists and their beautiful representations of nature will help to lead the culture back to a stronger connection with the landscape. The fellowship seeks to make a contribution to both the art world and the conservation movement.
ew artistic subjects are as universal or deeply felt as nature. During the mid19th century, the highest aspiration of the Hudson River School painters — who formed America’s first original art movement — was to convey the transcendent quality of nature; together they depicted their country’s landscape with a nod to the divine hand they believed had shaped it. Today their paintings still inspire many viewers to live in harmony with nature, yet some of us might consider the beliefs underlying them as strictly of the past. In fact, the desire to depict nature’s beauty as a way of nourishing the souls of both artists and viewers is timeless. The idea of artists painting outdoors together — every day, rain or shine, sunrise to sunset, basking in nature’s grandeur, encouraging each other — may also conjure an idyllic, bygone era. But this tradition is developing in fresh ways through the Hudson River Fellowship (HRF), a three-week-long summer program administered by New York City’s Grand Central Atelier (GCA). In their call for applicants, its organizers declare:
EARLY DAYS HRF was created in 2007 by GCA’s founder, the artist Jacob Collins, with his artist colleagues Edward Minoff and Travis Schlaht. That first summer, approximately 20 artists stayed on a property in Hunter, New York, near the former site of the Catskill Mountain House, a resort hotel revered by the Hudson River School’s more than 70 artist members. As if retracing the footprints of such forerunners as Thomas Cole (1801–1848), Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), and Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), those inaugural HRF participants painted such now-familiar vistas as Kaaterskill Clove, Kaaterskill Falls, Catskill Creek, North Lake, and Sunset Rock. Minoff recalls, “We actually found a rock on which [Sanford R.] Gifford had carved his name. That was cool.”
By bringing back the skills and spirit of the pre-Impressionist landscape painters, the program will give much-needed direction to the new generation of painters. As they learn to study carefully and reflect on the trees and clouds and blades of grass and F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
Jacob Collins at Wethersfield, June 2021; photo: Milène J. Fernández
2 0 2 2
131
Two fellows at Wethersfield, June 2021: Kevin Müller Cisneros (left) and Kate Donovan (right); photos: Milène J. Fernández
HRF emerged from a specific, urgent need. Minoff explains, “In the mid-2000s, there was a big appetite for trying to understand how the Hudson River School painters worked. That was great [because] if you have a team of people trying to solve a problem, you get a lot further. We were all making studies in plein air, but when we got back to our studios to create bigger paintings, we realized that we didn’t have enough information about what we had seen on site. So we were having to disguise what we didn’t know by making brushy paintings.” During HRF’s early years, its participants — Lauren Sansariq and Eric Koeppel especially come to mind — focused very much on trying to figure out their forerunners’ techniques, style, and spirit. After their Catskill Mountains property was damaged by Hurricane Irene in 2011, the HRF team headed northeast to the area around Jackson Falls in New Hampshire’s scenic White Mountains. By then, their own style
had started to change: the focus shifted from emulating the Hudson River School to expanding upon what they had learned in the process. Eventually New Hampshire became too long a trip, especially for New York City-based artists with families, so HRF considered relocating to a Connecticut boarding school, but those plans fell through and then were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2021, the program relaunched at the Wethersfield Estate and Gardens, 95 miles north of Manhattan. This 1,200-acre property was developed atop Dutchess County’s highest hill as the country home of the investor, philanthropist, and conservationist Chauncey D. Stillman (1907–1989). According to the chair of its board of trustees, Tara Shafer, Wethersfield “was built upon a reverence for the land and practices of good land stewardship. The partnership between Wethersfield and the Grand Central Atelier aligns perfectly.”
ERIKA DEMETRIOU (b. 1990), Pond Rim, 2021, oil on mounted panel, 6 x 10 in., available through the artist
132
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
(ABOVE) JACOB ISAAC GABRIEL (b. 1996), Sunrise over Wethersfield, 2021, oil on aluminum panel, 6 x 8 in., available through the artist
(RIGHT) LORENZO TORRES
NARCISO (b. 1996), Wethersfield Trails, 2021, oil on linen panel, 11 x 14 in., available through the artist
This spring HRF received more applications than ever before (nearly 70), and soon 17 talented artists from a range of backgrounds — not all of them associated with GCA — will be painting together at Wethersfield. Last summer its scenery inspired a lively mix of up-and-coming and established participants. From the classically inspired garden they enjoyed panoramic views of the Catskills to the west and the Berkshires to the north. At closer range, they painted terraced gardens — framed by clipped hedge allées, topiary, weeping beeches, and statuary — with accents of rhododendron, lilac, and mountain laurel. They also meandered the estate’s 20 miles of trails and unmanicured wilderness to draw and paint foliage, ponds, and wetlands. In the evenings they drew further inspiration inside the 1930s-era mansion, with its Palladian windows and colorful frescoes by the Italian master Pietro Annigoni (1910–1988). One of the 2021 fellows, Tyler Moore, is right in recalling that “Wethersfield is a place of timeless beauty and also a safe haven for artists.” CHANGE & CONTINUITY While the look and feel of the fellows’ paintings now differ somewhat from those of the early years — and even more so from the Hudson River School F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
— the dedication to slowing down and studying scenery over a long period of time endures. Today’s fellows use a similar, if not the same, approach to composing, taking liberties to invent and edit the landscape, while observing, drawing, and painting numerous studies. By carefully observing the parts that make up the whole — e.g., breaking down elements of form, value, and color into individual steps — the artists create various
133
studies before incorporating them all into the (sometimes much) larger paintings they make back in the studio. Their numerous studies from life form an arsenal of materials with which to interpret and invent their final pictures, sometimes in consultation with the clients who commission them. Moving beyond technique, the fellows’ humility and respect for their predecessors is noticeable. Although the Hudson River School’s championing of Transcendentalism — the belief that everything in nature is an expression of the divine — is not explicitly discussed during the program, “It is,” according to Jacob Collins, “kind of in the background — an underlying expectation.” On HRF’s final day in June 2021, the artists revealed the paintings they had just created in an outdoor exhibition. During its celebratory reception, Lauren Sansariq observed, “Any time artists have the ability to focus only on their work and nature without disturbances, it can really take their art to the next level. How much time you spend with nature is like being in a relationship with a person: the longer you spend time together,
134
(ABOVE) DAN BUNN (b. 1991), Foliage Study, 2021, oil on wood panel, 12 x 16 in., available through the artist (LEFT) MARY JANE WARD (b. 1983), Archway through the Hedge, 2021, charcoal and graphite on paper, 12 x 9 in., available through the artist
the deeper it becomes.” (Happily, Sansariq could not finish her thought because she was interrupted by an enthusiastic collector asking to buy one of her new paintings.) HRF 2021 fellow Kevin Müller Cisneros, who teaches at GCA, felt humbled by the connections across time with the Hudson River School, especially “the tradition of going into the landscape and having the discipline to observe nature.” He said, “There is something so special about allowing yourself to go to the same place at the same time every day. I could tell you a story about every one of my paintings: I can remember how that day was, the conversations I was having, my thoughts and feelings.” Fellow Kate Donovan added, “I honor what the Hudson M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
PATRICK OKRASINSKI (b. 1996), Wethersfield Twilight, 2021, oil on linen, 20 x 30 in., private collection
River School painters did because their skill is so evident. I know it was only through hours of dedication that they could make such wonderful paintings. I want to continue that, so here I am.” Erika Demetriou, another 2021 fellow who usually paints figures, explained what inspired her at Wethersfield: “In the context of the climate crisis and especially the pandemic, what I wanted to explore is humanity rediscovering the earth, what surrounds us, and how wonderful this home is. I’m in absolute reverence of landscape painting, in a way I hadn’t even considered before. I want to see people outside in nature.” Transcendental idealism recognizes the limits of human knowledge while trying to reach beyond them. By observing and wanting to see beyond what is immediately present in the landscape, artists find a place within it and within their hearts. This is how their paintings, however small or humble, communicate that the world has a meaning greater than what we usually notice. It is clear that the camaraderie at HRF facilitates these revelations. The program itself offers no instruction or formal critiques, only plenty of support, friendly competition, and encouragement. 2021 fellow Landon Clay noted, “HRF is not structured as you might expect, but that doesn’t make it any less intense. Everyone is doing their own thing, yet feeding off of everyone else’s enthusiasm and passion.” Pointing to his colleague Jacob Isaac Gabriel’s paintings at the 2021 exhibition, fellow Dan Bunn expanded upon the idea of seeing beyond: “Jacob’s landscapes are special. In some ways they feel surreal because the scenery is recognizable but almost dreamlike. In some ways, they are really from his mind, rather than from painting the specificity of an actual place. You can juxtapose all of these [studies] and turn them into something more grandiose, or something simpler.” MOVING FORWARD Jacob Collins considered HRF 2021 a complete success, with its “beautiful property, talented artists working hard, riffing off each other. You F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
could just see them being influenced by each other, including myself, becoming better.” He continued, “There’s so much historical precedent for this; working very intensely together produces something different from what an individual [can create].” Now Tara Shafer and her Wethersfield colleagues are looking forward to HRF 2022: “To see the hills come alive at sunset with young painters determined not to waste one moment of light was a thrill,” she recalls. “Equally, to watch the creative magic lift everything and everyone up was unforgettable. In addition, the opportunity to have the artists exhibit their work for members of the community was deeply rewarding. Wethersfield envisions continuing to support rising young talent who are eager to capture landscape painting in the tradition of the Old Masters, but with a 21st-century interpretation.” This year’s edition of the Hudson River Fellowship will take place in Wethersfield June 3–24. Although the public cannot participate, the program will again conclude with a public selling exhibition of the paintings produced there. For details on that show, please check the Grand Central Atelier website closer to the time. Information: grandcentralatelier.org/opportunities/hudson-riverfellowship, wethersfield.org MILÈNE J. FERNÁNDEZ is an arts writer, editor, and former staff member of The Epoch Times. She has also contributed to Canvas: The Online Magazine for Artists by New Masters Academy, edited the third edition of Glenn Vilppu’s acclaimed Drawing Manual, and written a foreword for artist Thomas Kegler’s book, The Spirit and the Brush (2020).
135
O F F T H E W A L L S
A RT I ST S & G A L L E R I E S
Santa Fe
lewallengalleries.com through May 14 On view at LewAllen Galleries is City Rhythms, an exhibition of new paintings by the San Francisco-based artist Eileen David. Her urban views and street scenes capture the play of light and shadow in relation to the geometries of architecture, all enhanced with heightened color to convey a slightly dreamlike quality. An avid swimmer, David has included a group of pictures that depict figures swimming in San Francisco Bay, which she calls “a wilderness experience in the city.”
Frank de Wit (b. 1973), Girl with a Horse by the Sea, 2019, oil on linen canvas, 11 x 10 2/3 in.
Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), A Flower Still Life, 1748, oil on panel, 11 2/3 x 9 1/2 in.
London
colnaghi.com through June 24 The gallery Colnaghi is presenting the exhibition Forbidden Fruit: Female Still Life. As its title suggests, a range of women from across Europe painted nature morte (French for “dead nature”) during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Illustrated here is the final painting by the Dutch botanical artist Rachel Ruysch, who was 84 when she made it; Colnaghi has a long history of handling her works.
Grace Athena Flott (b. 1990), Tub Time, 2022, oil on linen, 44 x 28 in.
William Hook (b. 1947), Light Rail Construction Study 5, 2021, acrylic on illustration board, 20 x 16 in.
Seattle
Online only
Figure | Ground Art Gallery is presenting Exposure Therapy, the first solo show ever devoted to Grace Athena Flott, a Spokane native who trained at Seattle’s Gage Academy of Art. Although she makes still lifes, Flott is better known for scenes that highlight the human body in varying states of undress, set within interiors that suggest intimacy. Some of her models return the viewer’s gaze, while others give no indication they mind being studied. All seem to retain their dignity, essentially consenting to being seen.
Founded in Seattle in 1939, the Northwest Watercolor Society has launched its annual Waterworks Unlimited exhibition online. It features watermedia works created by 60 NWWS members, chosen from 362 entries by juror and awards judge Mike Hernandez. Available for purchase are landscapes, portraits, animals, abstracts, and other scenes; 75 percent of the sale price goes to the artist.
figuregroundgallery.com May 5–June 1
Wilrijk, Belgium berkenveld.be May 28–July 3
Eileen David (b. 1952), Satellite Dishes, 2021, oil on panel, 20 x 16 in.
136
The Dutch-born, Antwerp-based artist Frank de Wit is exhibiting his latest works at Galerie Berkenveld under the title Human Light. He is best known for expressively brushed oil paintings, primarily depicting animals and human figures outdoors, as well as portraits, cityscapes, and interiors.
nwws.org through June 30
New Orleans
rauantiques.com through May 28 On view at M.S. Rau is the exhibition Au Naturel: The Art of the Female Form. It features paintings and sculpture depicting women, a subject that has long fascinated artists ranging from Brueghel to Renoir to Magritte. Illustrated here is a superb work by the American impressionist Frederick Carl Frieseke, who thrived for almost 20 years in the artists’ colony at Giverny, close to Monet’s famous studio house and garden.
neoclassical sculpture, Antonio Canova’s long-lost Recumbent Magdalene. Commissioned by a British prime minister and widely exhibited in 19th-century England, this exquisitely carved marble depicts Mary Magdalene in ecstasy and was completed shortly before the artist’s death. It passed down from one rich Briton to another, but in 1920 somehow its attribution to the Italian master was forgotten, so it ended up adorning the garden of a London house, completely unrecognized as a Canova. Now it is expected to fetch between 5 million and 8 million pounds ($5,974,000–$9,558,000).
Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939), At the Mirror, 1922, oil on canvas, 32 3/4 x 32 1/4 in.
New York City tefaf.com May 6–10
For the first time since 2019, the art fair TEFAF New York will occur in person, bringing 91 dealers from 14 countries back to the historic Park Avenue Armory to offer the best in modern and contemporary art, jewelry, antiquities, and design. The event is a satellite of the world’s greatest fair (The European Fine Art Fair), which will be held again in the Dutch city of Maastricht later in the spring than usual (June 25–30). On view at the New York event will be the Montefiore Mainz Mahzor, a rare Hebrew illuminated prayer book from medieval Germany, acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2018. Now a decade old, the TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund has awarded the Houston museum a grant that will allow its conservators to stabilize this once heavily used volume for posterity.
B O OK S
Daniel Celentano (1902–1980), Pelham Bay, c. 1935, oil on canvas, 12 1/4 x 16 in.
David Bellamy (b. 1943), Fiery Sky over a Minaret, 2021, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in.
London
osg.uk.com May 17–28 Osborne Studio Gallery is presenting recent watercolors by David Bellamy, an intrepid traveler who has again concentrated on the Middle East for his latest exhibition and 20th book, both titled Arabian Light. On view are 50 works that depict desert and mountain scenery, ancient ruins, and urban street life, ranging geographically from Oman to Lebanon. Having first visited the Middle East in 1963, Bellamy cites J.M.W. Turner as his greatest aesthetic influence, along with various 19th-century Orientalist painters.
On January 27, New York City’s Swann Auction Galleries (swanngalleries.com) scored a hit with its second annual Artists of the WPA sale. Six of the firm’s departments gathered items as diverse as paintings, prints, photographs, mural studies, posters, flyers, and political cartoons for a total of 247 lots, 209 of which were sold. The final tally of $647,891 was within the sale’s estimate and handily exceeded last year’s ($478,990). Coordinator Harold Porcher noted, “The New Deal was groundbreaking in its scale and vision, giving employment to many who in turn gave us lasting riches in art, architecture, and engineering that have endured.” The sale’s highest price ($55,000) was paid for Daniel Celentano’s painting of a crowded New York City subway car, illustrated here. The first Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE, was once a world power extending from the borders of Greece to northern India. The Greeks saw Persia as an existential threat and were delighted when Alexander the Great conquered it in 330 BCE. (In fact, two of its dynasties, the Parthians and Sasanian, re-established themselves later.) On view through August 8 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is the first major exhibition to fully explore the political, intellectual, religious, and artistic relationships between Persia, Greece, and Rome. It features sculpture, jewelry, silver luxury vessels, coins, gems, and inscriptions borrowed from museums around the world, all illustrated and described in the accompanying catalogue produced by Getty Publications (getty. edu), Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World. Edited by the Getty’s own Jeffrey Spier, Timothy Potts, and Sara E. Cole, this handsome 432-page volume contains 409 color illustrations and groundbreaking essays by international scholars.
AU C T IO N S & FA I R S
Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Recumbent Magdalene, 1819–22, marble, 29 1/2 x 69 1/4 x 33 1/4 in., estimate £5,000,000–£8,000,000
London
christies.com July 7 Christie’s will sell a major rediscovery in the field of F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
One of the 299 leaves inside the Montefiore Mainz Mahzor, c. 1310-20, ink on calf vellum, 16 x 11 in., Museum of Fine Arts Houston
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
137
loriputnam.com
The Windmill, 14x18, oil on linen
MARCIA HOLMES IAPS/EP PSA-MP
Taos Water Lilies, 12 x 12 in., oil on linen
For first look at new work available, upcoming shows and workshops: marciaholmes.com
138
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
TRISH SAVIDES Studio and Gallery
137 Via Naranjas Boca Raton, Florida www.trishsavides.com | trishsavides1@comcast.net
Stonington Harbor, CT 24 x 36 oil on linen $4800.00
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
139
Tim Oliver NWS, WFWS www.timoliverart.com tim@timoliverwatercolors.com Old Spanish Trail Gallery www.oldspanishtrailgallery.com A Beautiful Mess Antiques and Gallery (806) 407-5895 Broadway Contemporary Fine Art Gallery www.broadwaycontemporary.com
Cole Harbor Elevator 13x22” Watercolor
LUKE ANDERSON GALLERIES:
Meyer Gallery Park City, Utah Visions West Contemporary Bozeman, Montana
lukeandersonfineart.com IG: @lukeandersonfineart
“Chasm” 24 x 24 inches, oil and collage on canvas
140
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
RICHARD RUSSELL SNEARY www.richardsneary.com | richard@richardsneary.com |(816) 655-4911 Green House, 10 x 20 in., watercolor - Grand Prize, Lighthouse ArtCenter Plein Air Festival
“The swamps, woods, fields, and marshes of the Lowcountry, I could paint it forever and not get tired of it.” “The light and color of the big sky, the calls of the birds, the smell of the marsh, and the breeze off the ocean..”
To see more visit marygilkerson.com Rice Fields, Summer Sky, oil on panel
MARYBE NTZ G ILK ERSO N STUDIO@MARYGILKERSON.COM | 803.386.1702
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
141
Mendocino Art Center
Mendocino Open Paint Out September 19-25, 2022
A Plein Air Festival on the picturesque northern California coast • Daily Wet Paint Sales with Works by More than 60 Artists • Featured Artist Demonstrations • Quick Draw Competition • Awards Ceremony & More
Featured Artists
Ryan Jensen • Carolyn Lord • Maeve Croghan © Ryan Jensen
MendocinoArtCenter.org/mopo
800.653.3328
Sponsors:
Painting the National Parks
See the new PBS Utah Documentary “Call of the Canyon”
www.rolandlee.com
“A Glimpse of Heaven” Watercolor
142
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Paula B. Holtzclaw a i s , awam , opa
AIS Impressions Small Works Showcase
Wilder Nightingale Fine Art, Taos, NM May 12 - June 19, 2022
NOAPS “Best of America” Small Works Show
Beverly McNeil Gallery, Birmingham, AL April 28 - May 27, 2022 ANDERSON FINE ART GALLERY St. Simons, GA CHERYL NEWBY GALLERY Pawleys Island, SC HIGHLANDS ART GALLERY Lambertville, NJ HUGHES GALLERY Boca Grande, FL MARY WILLIAMS FINE ARTS Boulder, CO PROVIDENCE GALLERY Charlotte, NC
After Glow 12 x 18 Oil
www.paulabholtzclawfineart.com
J EAN S C H WAR T Z w w w. j e a n s c h w a r t z p a i n t i n g s . c o m
Lost Horizon 15x18 oil on linen panel
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
143
CAROLYN LINDSEY
The South Porch 20” x 16” oil
UPCOMING EVENTS: OPA NATIONAL SHOW AIS SMALL WORKS SHOW
CAROLYNLINDSEY.COM LINDSEYCJ@PLATEAUTEL.NET
144
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
www.bethclaryschwier.com
Signature Member American Impressionist Society NOAPS Online Merit Award 2021 AIS Small Works 2021 OPA Salon 2021 AIS -Online 2021 NOAPS Best of America 2021
Fine Art • Workshops Instructional Videos
www.nicolestudio.com nicole@nicolestudio.com (919) 210-3101
Carriage in Queue - 24 x 30 oil on linen F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
145
THE ART OF ALAN FETTERMAN Alan Fetterman Fine Art American Artist Bucks County’s Artist in Residence Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal of Honor with over 40 solo exhibitions Specializing in large-scale plein air & studio artwork Contact info: alanfetterman.com 215-345-7769 “Sun Casting”
16 in. x 20 in.
Oil on Linen
BRIAN KEELER Vernal Lawn Light 42 x 46 oil on canvas
North Star Art Galler y 743 Snyder Hill Rd Ithaca, NY 14850
607.323.7684 www.northstarartgaller y.com info@northstarartgaller y.com
146
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
NANETTE FLUHR AWA PSA OPA
A Lotus Grows in Mud, Oil on Linen, 30” x 24”
Featured at the
WAUSAU MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Winner of Manhattan Arts International “HerStory” 2022
Custom Portraits and Fine Art Honoring Individual, Family and Corporate Legacies
TO COMMISSION OR PURCHASE PAINTINGS
W W W. N A N E T T E F L U H R .C O M 631-327-5553
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
147
FUEL YOUR PASSION Free Newsletters from Streamline
Fine Art Today is a weekly newsletter brought to you by Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. Fine Art Today brings you high-level content while providing you with timely developments, late-breaking stories, and recently announced events from the art-collecting world. Sign up for free at FineArtToday.net.
If you want to keep up on the plein air world as a painter or collector, PleinAir Today is a free daily newsletter that chronicles the plein air movement worldwide. Including the stories of painters, events, painting tips, artist profiles, and more. Sign up at PleinAirToday.com.
For those of us who make art, we seek inspiration and direction. Inside Art is your passport to an art world that’s bigger, wilder, and more beautiful than you may know. It’s about opening your eyes to a world humming with imagination and creative potential. Published to your email box daily. Subscribe now at InsideArtToday.com
Accelerate your art by studying from the finest artists in the world. Realism Today is the free weekly publication for the realism movement, because Realism Matters. Sign up for free today at RealismToday.com.
Like the watercolor medium itself, American Watercolor flows through a variety of subjects and is designed to inspire and inform your watercolor passion, including your passion for painting outside. Dropped into your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday, with tips, techniques, artist profiles and demonstrations from top watercolor artists, plus inventive watercolor hacks, and more. Sign up for free today at AmericanWatercolor.net.
148
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
AIDA GARRITY Member of the prestigious Salmagundi Art Club, National Arts Club, The Players Club, and The Portrait of America Society
The Whisper, 30x24, Oil
d as a daily ement ers, more.
Please see website for availability and purchasing
w w w. a i d a b g a r r i t y. c o m 614-832-1422 | aida.garrity@gmail.com
Left: © September Vhay, Two is a Pair—detail, 2010. 2010 Western Visions Trustees Purchase Award, National Museum of Wildlife Art Right: Rox Corbett, Windfall—detail, 2015. 2015 Western Visions Trustees Purchase Award, National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Harriet Corbett WILDLIFEART.ORG
e y is sm gn .
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
149
wayne art center 2022
14th Annual
May 9–14, 2022 Juror: Kathryn Stats
Award-Winning Utah-Based Plein Air Painter
Collector’s Preview Party & Sale: May 14
Artists’ Workshop with Kathryn Stats: Working with Shapes and Patterns
Plein Air Exhibition & Sale: May 16– June 25
Tim Kelly, Since 1921 Best in Show 2019 Brian Keeler, May Sunrise
Participating Artists:
May 16–18
Visit
Abby Ober, Vintage
waynepleinair.org for calendar of events and additional details.
Beth Bathe, Nanny Trio
413 Maplewood Ave, Wayne, PA 19087 n 610-688-3553
150
M A Y / J U N E
Marc Anderson, WI Beth Bathe, PA Barbara Berry, PA Thomas Buchs, WI Henry Coe, MD Valerie Craig, PA Eileen Eder, CT Randall Graham, PA Palden Hamilton, MD Qiang Huang, TX Neal Hughes. NJ Charlie Hunter, VT Fred Jackson, PA Ken Karlic, MD Brian Keeler, NY Tim Kelly, MD
2 0 2 2
Allen Kriegshauser, MO Patrick Lee, PA Christopher Leeper, OH David Lussier, NH Mick McAndrews, PA Alison Menke, PR Charles Newman, NJ Kathie Odom, TN Elise Phillips, PA Edmond Praybe, MD Antwan Ramar, FL J. Stacy Rogers, DE Cynthia Rosen, VT John Slivjak, PA Troy Tatlock, WI Samuel Wyatt, VT
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
ALBERT HANDELL www.alberthandell.com AlbertHandell@msn.com 1109 Don Gaspar Ave. Santa Fe, NM 87505
STUDIO VISITS WELCOMED!
Cell 505/603/1524 November Air, oil, 24” x 24” Available at my Studio/Gallery
Gayle Madeira www.gaylemadeira.com gayle@gaylemadeira.com 7 18.34 4.9804
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
@gaylemadeira gayle-madeira
2 0 2 2
151
LEARN FROM HOME WITH TOP PASTEL ARTISTS
More artists to come!
AUG. 17-20 Stream on any device
Sign up today at PastelLive.com or call (561) 655-8778
152
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
,
WILLIAM A. SCHNEIDER Revealing the Soul AISM, OPAM, PSA-MP, IAPS-EP
Hold the Door of Darkness, original etching on paper, 5.8 x 8.3 inches, 2022
Nights in White Satin 24 x 18 Oil on Linen Panel Available at McBride Gallery
Let’s help Ukraine together!
Annapolis, MD (410) 267-7077 www.mcbridegallery.com
Buy this etching and we will support Ukrainian artists and their families in need. Here is how:
Visit www.anikis.com/ukraine
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
Please see website for blog and workshop information
WWW.SCHNEIDERART.COM
153
Kitchen Conversation oil 12 x 12 (AIS Showcase)
NOAPS
Best of American Small Painting Exhibition Beverly McNeil Gallery 4/28-5/27
GR E
OL AT C
LEC
TOR
S | H
ES OR S
P | RA
HAE
AL L | G
L ERY
WA L
JOH LS |
PETO N F.
AIS
Small Works Showcase Wilder Nightengale Gallery 5/12-6/19
E 19 ISSUE
154
20 22 VOLUM
410-253-3641 Studio: Easton, Maryland
APRIL
www.nancytankersley.com
A PR
22 IL 20
2
Subscribe Today FineArtConnoisseur.com | 800.610.5771 M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Gary Alsum Bronze Sculpture Bringing collectors’ visions to reality in bronze for over a quarter century
Jazz 79”H 64”W 46”D – National Sculptors’ Guild Commission – Available
Gallery Partners:
Nationalsculptorsguild.com (NSG Fellow since 1992) Knoxgalleries.com
garyalsum.com gary@garyalsum.com
The cure for claustrophobia.
T TMEN CHAN ME XICO OF EN E TO NE W LANDTIST’S GUID ON S LE SS
D AN T PO RT S LE ARNE ST IM HA 10 MO AN PE KE L IN S HE RM WATK ON Y OW SS E-L , AN TH ISS ON RO LY N HE EY WH , CA UE ISS CO LL PU TN AM TIO N LO RI NV EN AIR CO PLEIN
AN AR
N E Z I G A M A
Bring the outside into your home. 800-610-5771 | pleinairmagazine.com In Dreams We Walk, Australia, Colley Whisson, 2021, oil, 12 x 14 in., plein air, available from Montville Art Gallery F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
155
2 0 2 2 20 22 MAY
T F E L S T A E S 5 2 AN A Painter’s Paradise Like No Other; H T S an Adventure of a Lifetime. LES
Join PleinAir magazine for the painting trip of a lifetime. All inclusive other than air fare. Limited to 47 people. Learn more and sign up at
156
paintingnewzealand.com M A Y / J U N E (561) 655-8778
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
d i r e c t o ry o f a d v e rt i s i n g Alan Fetterman Fine Arts............... 146 Alexander, Rich.............................. 47 American Tonalist Society............. 22 American Women Artists............... 39-45 Anderson, Luke.............................. 140 Anikis, Nik....................................... 153 Arenas, Heather............................. 58 Art Renewal Center........................ 26 Beam, Jacalyn A............................. 48 Beauregard, Chula......................... 46 Bennett Prize, The.......................... 2-5 Beth Clary Schwier Fine Art........... 145 Boylan, Brenda............................... 60 Brenda Coldwell On Track Studios..........159 Byrne, Michele............................... 147 C.M. Russell Museum..................... 34 California Museum of Fine Art....... 12 Camhy, Sherry................................ 59 Cassells, Laara............................... 54 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, Inc.....50 Chadwick, Gloria............................ 53 Cobb-Kelleher, Sherry.................... 54 Coleman, Barbara.......................... 46 Couse Foundation.......................... 18 Dede Russell Fine Art..................... 17 Drewyer, Christine......................... 40 DuPratt, Leslie................................ 51 Fluhr, Nanette................................. 147 Garrish, Mary.................................. 57 Garrity, Aida................................... 149 Gary Alsum Bronze Sculpture........ 155 Gilkerson, Mary.............................. 141 Grillo Laird, Theresa....................... 61
Handell, Albert............................... 151 Harms, David.................................. 46 Hassard, Ray................................... 139 Hildreth, Margie............................. 53 Hitt, Karen Ann............................... 37 Hockaday Museum of Art.............. 27 Holmes, Marcia.............................. 138 Howard, Julie.................................. 38 Huse Skelly Fine Art Gallery........... 25 Illume Gallery of Fine Art............... 21 Jaenicke, Barbara........................... 6 Jenny Buckner Fine Art.................. 10 Jill E. Banks Art, LTD....................... 14 Kelly, Jo Ridge................................ 56 Kling, Chris..................................... 47 Knight, Sheryl................................. 54 Laguna Plein Air Painters Association.......23 Lee, Roland.................................... 142 Lindner, A.C.................................... 61 Lindsey, Carolyn............................. 144 Mackerman, Dan............................ 150 MacLeod, Lee................................. 48 Madeira, Gayle............................... 151 Mangi, Johanne.............................. 49 Marrucchi, Alessandra................... 58 Marty, David................................... 13 Matteson, Susan Hediger .............. 52 Mehta, Lynn.................................... 48 Mendocino Art Center................... 142 Meyer Gallery, Santa Fe................. 19 Morris, Suzanne............................. 152 Mutti, Linda.................................... 61 National Cowboy & Western Heritage
Museum.......................................... 28 National Museum of Wildlife Art.... 149 National Oil & Acrylic Painters’ Society..........31-33 Nearon, Linda................................. 48 Noble, Laura Mae (The Tributary Arts)...58 North Star Art Gallery.................... 146 Oliver, Tim...................................... 140 Park, Pokey..................................... 51 Paula Holtzclaw Fine Art................ 143 Pollak, Laura................................... 11 Pollie, Elizabeth S........................... 47 Portraits, Inc................................... 144 Putnam, Lori................................... 138 Rehs Contemporary Galleries, Inc........8-9 Royal Talens North America, Inc.... 30 Sahar, Alayne................................. 51 Savides, Trish................................. 139 Schneider, William A. .................... 153 Schwartz, Jean............................... 143 Sneary, Richard.............................. 141 Springville Museum of Art............. 35 Steamboat Art Museum................. 36 Strock Wasson, Carol..................... 55 Tankersley, Nancy.......................... 154 Taylor, Jennifer Stottle .................. 60 Teare, Brad..................................... 15 Turner, Kathryn Mapes .................. 160 Walker, Nina Cobb.......................... 53 Wayne Art Center/Wayne Plein Air Festival ......152 White Kennedy, Nicole................... 145 Wood, Fay....................................... 61
GO INTO DETAIL
PORTRAIT · STILL LIFE FIGURE · LANDSCAPE & MORE!
LEARN AT HOME FROM TOP REALISM ARTISTS · STREAM ON ANY DEVICE · MORE FACULTY TO BE ANNOUNCED
3RD ANNUAL
NOV. 9-12 2022
Hosted by ERIC RHOADS & PETER TRIPPI
Sign up today at RealismLive.com or call (561) 655-8778 SPONSORED BY:
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
157
C L A S S I C
S HARO N P O MALE S TO U S E Y (b. 1970), Greed ( S e l f - P o r t r a i t ), 2 0 1 6 , o i l o n p a n e l , 3 6 x 2 4 i n .
158
M A Y / J U N E
2 0 2 2
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
BRENDA COLDWELL
Unexpected View 20x24 oil on linen canvas
brendacoldwell.com
On Track Studios | on-track-studios.com | 615-794-4828
KathrynMapesTurner.c om • TurnerFineArt.c om
