ART IN THE W EST | SANDR A SANCHEZ | MAR IO MOOR E | PROVINCETOW N | IBEX COLLECTION
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Lori Putnam James Richards
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), The Large Horse, 1505, etching on paper, 6 1/2 x 4 3/4 in., private collection
How beauty is to be judged is a matter of deliberation. One must bring it into every single thing, according to circumstances, for in some things we consider that as beautiful which elsewhere would lack beauty. — Albrecht Dürer, 1512–13 F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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Miguel Peidro
“Running River,” Oil on Canvas, 22 x 18”
Lotton
GALLERY
900 North Michigan Ave. Level 6 Chicago, IL 60611 (312) 664-6203 www.lottongallery.com
Summer Roses, 30” x 28” oil on linen
Dear art lover, On your next visit to Taos , plan on making an appointment with me to visit my home/studio and gallery. In the meantime, please see available works on my website.
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575.758.4042 • waltgonskeart@msn.com REPRESENTED BY | NEDRA MATTEUCCI GALLERIES • SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO | CLAGGETT-REY GALLERY • EDWARDS, COLORADO | | INSIGHT GALLERY • FREDERICKSBURG, TEXAS | SAKS GALLERY • DENVER, COLORADO | | OH BE JOYFULL GALLERY • CRESTED BUTTE, COLORADO | THE ADOBE GALLERY • RUIDOSO, NEW MEXICO |
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JILL BANKS
A S S O C I AT E P U B L I S H E R
Capturing Life in Oils
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Chance of Sprinkles oil 20x16
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The Muse oil 40x30
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Market Square oil 16x20
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Evening Serenade Oil 11 x 14 Oil Painters of America Virtual Juried Salon Show August 13 - October 3, 2020 www.oilpaintersofamerica.com 010
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Copyright ©2020 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.
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Favorite: Aaron Mertz on Winslow Homer, by David Masello
157 Off the Walls 194 Classic Moment: Robert Meredith
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ARTISTS MAKING THEIR MARK: THREE TO WATCH
Allison Malafronte describes the talents of Carmen Drake, Arthur Haywood, and Gustavo Ramos.
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THE NATIONAL WATERCOLOR SOCIETY TURNS 100 By Matthias Anderson
098 106
By Peyton Skipwith
136 139 140
ART IN THE WEST: AN AUTUMN LIKE NONE BEFORE
GREAT ART NATIONWIDE
SANDRA SANCHEZ: “ALL IN” FOR CLASSICAL REALISM By Daniel Grant
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Discover seven top-notch projects happening this season.
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PROVINCETOWN RISES TO THE CHALLENGE
MARIO MOORE: ASKING POWERFUL QUESTIONS THROUGH ART By Charles Moore
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By Jeanne Schinto
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ON FIFTH AVENUE, A CONNOISSEUR’S TAKE ON AMERICAN ART & HISTORY
ADAM MILLER & SALVATORE GUERRERA: WHEN ARTIST & PATRON GO BIG
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REDISCOVERING RICHARD EURICH
By Kelly Compton
By Max Gillies
Scott Ponemone (b. 1949), M & P: 1st Pandemic Pair (detail), 2020, watercolor on paper, 32 3/4 x 18 1/4 in. (overall), on view in the National Watercolor Society’s 100th International Open Exhibition. For the full image and the exhibition, see page 96. For the artist, see scottponemone.com.
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GET YOUR ART APPRAISED
LOOK UP
ON THE COVER
5
By Michael J. Pearce
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By Peter Trippi
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THE IBEX COLLECTION: ART “MATRONAGE” By Peter Trippi
EMILIO SANCHEZ AND THE CARIBBEAN VERNACULAR By Victor Deupi
Fine Art Connoisseur is also available in a digital edition. Please visit fineartconnoisseur.com for details. S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
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Stephen Scott Young
Lace and Light
P H E N S C OT T YO U N G S TSETPEH E N S C O T T Y O U N G
Tomato Lady Tomato Lady
Dry Brush, 52”Watercolor X 30 1/2” 29.75” x 22” 29.75” x 22” Watercolor
Celebrating 50 Years of Fine Art in the Lowcountry. Celebrating 50 Years of Fine Art in the Lowcountry.
TheThe RedRed Piano ArtArt Gallery Piano Gallery 40 Calhoun Street • Suite 201 • Old Town Bluffton 40 Calhoun Street • Suite 201 • Old Town Bluffton 843.842.4433 • redpianoartgallery.com 843.842.4433 843.247.2049 •• redpianoartgallery.com redpianoartgallery.com
P U B L I S H E R ’ S
READY TO LIVE REALISM LIVE
A JOSHUA LAROCK (b. 1982) Portrait of Publisher Eric B. Rhoads 2018, oil on linen, 16 x 12 in.
irplane seats and hotel rooms are no longer my weekly routine, and I’m thrilled about it. Never again do I want to spend that level of intensity “on the road,” and I may even end up hosting fewer events because of it. Change was brought upon my business without even asking my permission. We don’t always get a say in things. Yet adapting to change is our only chance of survival. This autumn our team was set to host the fourth annual Figurative Art Convention & Expo, but the pandemic ruled out that, of course. Now we have turned our attention to Realism Live (October 21–24, 2020), the first virtual art convention that teaches realism through painting and drawing portraits, figures, landscapes, flowers, other still lifes, and more. By press time we had secured some of the top artists in the field — including Juliette Aristides, Rose Frantzen, Daniel Gerhartz, Joshua LaRock, Graydon Parrish, and Daniel Sprick — and by now you will find even more sterling names posted at realismlive. com, including renowned international artists. Presented by Fine Art Connoisseur and RealismToday.com, this event is for artists
L E T T E R
and enthusiasts at all levels of experience, from the highly accomplished to those just starting out. Our Beginner’s Day on October 20 will help the latter get to the next level, opening their eyes and enhancing their confidence in their ability to paint and draw. Realism Live will encompass art instruction demonstrations, talks on the principles and history of art, critiques, and roundtable discussions among artists and other experts. Our participants will use Streamline Publishing’s sophisticated community platform to interact, and live painting from live models will be offered to all attendees. For all sorts of reasons (not just pandemicrelated ones), the art world is going digital in a big way. The reviews for our PleinAir Live online convention in July 2020, which involved participants from 30 countries, revealed that the participants made friends, felt a powerful sense of community, and learned volumes. Magi Hernandez, a Texan who lives in Saudi Arabia, wrote that she enjoyed “more content on the first day than an entire year of university courses,” while Pennsylvania’s Patricia Lippert felt that “this is definitely going to help my art. If you do it again, I will be there.” I am thrilled to report that when we announced Realism Live to our PleinAir Live audience in July, more than 600 of them signed up right away. We are expecting a recordbreaking turnout, and the beauty of it all is that everyone can participate safely from their own homes and studios. Please visit realism live.com now, and see you this October.
B. ERIC RHOADS Chairman/Publisher bericrhoads@gmail.com 561.923.8481 facebook.com/eric.rhoads @ericrhoads
P.S. If you can’t make the actual “live” dates (October 21–24), don’t worry: replays are available to all who sign up (but not to those who don’t).
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AMERICAN IMPRESSIONIST SOCIETY 21ST ANNUAL NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION AND SALE OCTOBER 22 – NOVEMBER 21, 2020 • ILLUMEGALLERYOFFINEART.COM ALL OF THE PAINTINGS WILL BE HANGING IN ILLUME GALLERY OF FINE ART AND HER SISTER GALLERIES: AUTHENTIQUE GALLERY AND THE MISSION GALLERY IN ST GEORGE, UTAH. THE SHOW MAY ALSO BE SEEN VIRTUALLY BEGINNING OCTOBER 22 AT: ILLUMEGALLERYOFFINEART.COM JUDGE OF AWARDS: AIS MASTER WILLIAM SCHNEIDER OPENING RECEPTION AND AWARDS PRESENTATION: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22ND
WILLIAM SCHNEIDER AISM "WE ARE ALL DANCING THROUGH TIME" 30” X 24” OIL ON LINEN ON PANEL
29 WEST 200 NORTH, ST GEORGE, UT 84770 | 435-313-5008 ILLUMEGALLERYOFFINEART.COM
Carol Strock Wasson PSA • AWA • CPPM
Spring Thunderstorm 24x36 pastel
Winter Haze 2 30x40 oil
Warm Cloud 24x36 pastel
Yellow Sky and Flooded Fields 26x36 pastel
Winter Haze 1 30x30 oil
A signature member of American Women Artists, Pastel Society of America, a Master member of Chicago Pastel Painters and has achieved Master Circle Status with International Association of Pastel Societies. Her work encompasses the genre of the rural area she lives in, focusing on color, shape, and design in the plein air tradition as well as in the studio. Her work can be seen and purchased at www.carolstrockwasson.com. Studio visits are welcomed. Online workshop spots available on her website, individual class, or group classes.
Strock Wasson Studio 317 N Columbia Union City, IN 47390 www.carolstrockwasson.com 937.459.6492 Cell Phone
AIGERIM BEKTAYEVA
“With my son”, Oil on canvas, 68*90 sm
“Aishabibi”, Oil on canvas, 68*102 sm
“Yersultan”, Oil on canvas, 68*95 sm
“Aruka”, Oil on canvas, 45*68 sm
@aigerim.bektayeva | b_aya86@mail.ru | +77752718952
P U B L I S E H D E I TR O ' SR ’ LS E N T O T E T R E
TURNING LEMONS INTO LEMONADE
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appears on the cover of this issue. How much more “of this moment” could Scott Ponemone’s depiction of two masked ladies be? (For its details, see page 96.) Many thanks, as ever, for your encouragement and collegiality. P.S. Heads up… We have some recurring names in this issue. Historic Master Emilio Sanchez and Today’s Master Sandra Sanchez are unrelated by family connections. Ditto for Today’s Master Mario Moore and the author of the article about him, Charles Moore. Happy coincidences!
TRIPPI PHOTO: FRANCIS HILLS
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hese are extraordinary times, and we hope that you and yours are staying safe, healthy, and productive. My colleagues and I believe that you will find inspiration while exploring the bumper crop of articles in this issue, and we look forward to receiving your feedback whenever you have some. I was recently reminded of artists’ impressive creativity and adaptability when I received an upbeat e-mail from Karen Blackwood (karenblackwoodfineart.com). She wrote that the “small painting campaign I’m pursuing is drawing lots of collectors who are eager to buy, but in smaller 6 x 8-inch sizes. I even had one collector ask to buy one sight unseen because they are so popular; they were selling within minutes of my newsletter going out. Lately I had been feeling a lack of focus, as have many other artists, so these small unframed studies have helped me keep my creative juices flowing in a scaled-down format and will then serve as studies for larger pieces.” Naturally I congratulated Karen on her initiative, and I mention it here as further evidence that the anxiety and economic upheaval caused by the pandemic need not discourage us from pursuing the positive strategies that remain in our wheelhouses. This pertains both to true artists — who should always express their aesthetic visions without constraint — and to true collectors, who always seek out beauty and inspiration whatever the economic circumstances may be. Some call this turning lemons into lemonade, and however you describe it, it’s a fact that visual artists are unusually well positioned to weather the storms that have beset the world. There are plenty of challenges, to be sure, but what an advantage to focus on the next project in one’s own studio, perhaps even to pursue creative possibilities that had to be pushed off previously because there were too many distractions. Please rest assured that there are still plenty of admirers and buyers out there rooting for you. We are eager to see what’s coming out of artists’ studios this year, and one key example
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celebration of fine art
visit celebrateart.com Live Event:
Jan. 16-MaR. 28, 2021 | Open Daily 10am-6pm Loop 101 & Hayden rd, Scottsdale, Az 480.443.7695 For Tickets:
celebrateart.com
Learn about our juried artists, view their work and add to your collection by experiencing our show virtually at celebrateart.com. Where Art Lovers & Artists Connect
Erin Berrett, Eye Candy, 48 x 36 in.
AARON HAZEL aaronhazel.com | hazel.aaron@gmail.com
Compton Cowboy 30x40 Oil on Canvas
FAC From Above Ad 2020 TEST.pdf
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WRIT TEN BY DAVID MASELLO
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AARON MERTZ
Director, Aspen Institute’s Science & Society Program Photo: Timothy Naftali
The Studio WINSLOW HOMER (1836–1910) 1867, oil on canvas, 18 x 15 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Samuel D. Lee Fund, 1939
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hen Aaron Mertz first encountered this Winslow Homer painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he heard it as much as he saw it. “I’m an amateur cellist with, admittedly, more enthusiasm than talent,” says Mertz, who plays a professional role as director of the Aspen Institute’s Science & Society Program, a division whose goal, he explains, is “to elevate public trust in science and to help foster a more diverse and engaged scientific workforce.” As someone who travels the world (132 countries to date) and who admits to having visited the Met virtually every weekend since moving to New York City in 2014, Mertz is confident in stating, “This is one of the very few paintings I know that captures the experience of chamber music accurately. I related to the scene immediately.” Mertz, who over the years has played in chamber ensembles, understands well the casual nature of the setting depicted here, as it reflects the kind of Manhattan apartments in which he performs with friends on Sunday afternoons. He points to the non-traditional space in which this cellist and violinist play — easels serving as music stands, sheet music scattered on the floor, coats hung on chairs. “This looks very much like our sessions today, though many of my fellow musicians play from iPads,” something Mertz cites as especially helpful during the pandemic lockdown when he and others had no access to printers. Though it is impossible to know what piece of music this duo is playing, Mertz found the work’s visual melody especially poignant during lockdown. “One of the most disappointing parts of that time for me was that we had to cancel our music sessions. That activity of being with others was put on hold, but as the city entered Phase 2 in June, three friends and I met in a spacious living room, masked, six feet apart. For three hours we played Mendelssohn and Beethoven.” Because Homer’s work was completed in 1867, it’s possible these two musicians knew the works Mertz and his group did. Mertz regards chamber music as the most intimate of musical encounters, as well as a metaphor for something larger. “Chamber music is a powerful venue for interpersonal relationships — a whole universe is recapitulated in a string quartet or piano trio or duet.” He notes the inherent intimacy of these two Homer figures,
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how they sit side by side, their bodies aligned and parallel, how they sport similar goatees. “What is their relationship, I wonder?” Mertz asks rhetorically. “Are they long-standing friends, lovers, is this their first time playing together?” Growing up in suburban Chicago, Mertz remembers his first instrument as the piano, starting at age 6. But by fifth grade, when he was offered the chance in public school to learn an orchestral instrument, he considered the cello. His mother, Shirley, played the instrument, one that her father had given her as a girl. “She played it in the house and the resonant sounds of it were always in my head.” By the time Mertz was in high school, his mother gave him her instrument, which he continues to use. “She and I still treasure going to concerts together, whenever she visits New York and whenever I go home to Chicagoland.” Being a good son, Mertz cashed in some frequent-flyer miles last year to bring them both to Vienna to hear Yo-Yo Ma play the six Bach suites for solo cello. “I’ve not yet shown this painting to my mother, but I will next time she visits,” he says, though she knows the work well already because Mertz has it as his screen-saver image.
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927 Fifth Avenue, Apartment 9th Floor New York, New York Elegant and rare with panoramic Central Park views, 55’ on Fifth Avenue, 4 exposures, 14 large rooms, approximately 5,500 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 3 fireplaces.
Louise C. Beit, Senior Global Real Estate Advisor 917.544.5515 | 927fifthavenue.com EAST SIDE MANHATTAN BROKERAGE | 650 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10022 | SOTHEBYSREALTY.COM © Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. All rights reserved. Sotheby’s International Realty® is a registered trademark. Operated by Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. Real estate agents affiliated with Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. are independent contractor sales associates and are not employees of Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. Equal Housing Opportunity.
Eustaquio sEgrEllEs Opening Reception Friday, September 11, 2-6 pm
Eustaquio Segrelles, La Recollida de Verano - Valencia Espana, 29” x 36” Oil on Canvas
September 11 - OctOber 4, 2020
225 canyOn rOad
infO@manitOugallerieS.cOm
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Jennifer McChristian
BARCELONA BLUES, OIL ON PANEL, 14X18�
www.jennifermcchristian.com | 323.913.0652 | jennifer.mcchristian28@gmail.com
AMERICAN T ONALIST S OCIET Y Fostering the Tradition and Art Form of Contemporary American Tonalism
karen Vance
‘‘Autumn’s First Snow” The Continental Divide from the Colorado Fraser River Valley Oil on linen 20” x 36”
Karen Vance Studio and Gallery Winter Park Ranch, Colorado, P.O. Box 212, Winter Park, CO. 80482 970-726-5837 KarenVanceArt.com
“January Evening at Ranch Creek” From the Devils Thumb Ranch Collection Oil on linen 18”x 24”
“Emerging Spring” The Bowen/Baker Gulch Oil on linen 24”x 22” The Whitney Western Art Museum
Visit the 2020 Online Juried Showcase Exhibit at www.AmericanTonalistSociety.com
Fine Art Down Home right.qxp_Layout 1 7/13/20 2:06 PM Page 1
Down home oil 30x 30 in.
DON WELLER For available oil and watercolor paintings, galleries, shows, and our book: Tracks, A Visual Memoir, visit: d o n w e l l e r . c o m tel: 801.455.4740
Christine Lashley
C hristine L ashley & K yle S tuckey Two-Person Exhibition
June 2020
BOLD BRUSH Award
Hibiscus and Oleander by Christine Lashley
Principle Gallery Charleston / 125 Meeting St. Charleston, SC 843.727.4500 art@principlegallery.com Principle Gallery Alexandria / 208 King St. Alexandria, VA 703.739.9326 info@principlegallery.com
Lowcountry Patterns
Mark Kelvin Horton 2021 Featured Artist
Southeastern Wildlife Exposition represents over 100 premier painters and sculptors. New work is released in bi-monthly installments of Fresh Off the Easel. To receive updates, please visit sewe.com.
SUZANNE SIMINGER CONTEMPORARY REALIST LANDSCAPES
Canyon Solitude, oil on board, 50 x 83 inches (15 panels)
www.suzannesiminger.com
suzanne.siminger@gmail.com | 415-384-8038
PEREGRINE O’GORMLEY WWW.PEREGRINEOGORMLEY.COM
BAINBRIDGE ISLAND MUSEUM OF ART AUGUST- DECEMBER SOLO EXHIBITION WWW.BIARTMUSEUM.ORG
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WILDLIFE ART SEPTEMBER 12- OCTOBER 18 WESTERN VISIONS WWW.WILDLIFEART.ORG
LEIGH- YAWKEY WOODSON ART MUSEUM SEPTEMBER 2- NOVEMBER 29 BIRDS IN ART WWW.LYWAM.ORG
WOOLAROC MUSEUM OCTOBER 2021 RETROSPECTIVE AND SALE WWW.WOOLAROC.ORG
ANGELORUM BRONZE EDITION OF 9 11 X 8 X 21 INCHES
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
RS Hanna Gallery • 830.307.3071 • info@rshannagallery.com
KAAREN LUNDEEN Brevard, North Carolina
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Morning Mist 18 x 26 x 1 in., oil on canvas kaarenl@comporium.net kaarenlundeenfineart.com Represented by RS Hanna Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX.
Represe Oh Fine Li
OIL PAINTERS OF AMERICA
29TH NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION HOSTED BY
RS HANNA GALLERY
FREDERICKSBURG, TEXAS AUGUST 17-SEPTEMBER 19, 2020 FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO SEE WORKS IN THE SHOW BY THESE AND OTHER EXHIBITING ARTISTS, VISIT WWW.RSHANNAGALLERY.COM OR CALL 830.307.3071.
VIRTUAL INTERNATIONAL WET PAINT COMPETITION & CONVENTION OPEN TO ALL OIL PAINTERS WORLDWIDE VIRTUAL WET PAINT COMPETITION — SEPT 11 & 12 VIRTUAL WET PAINT AWARDS — SEPT 17 VIRTUAL CONVENTION — SEPT 17–19 REGISTRATION REQUIRED WWW.OILPAINTERSOFAMERICA.COM
LISA KOVVURI Durham, New Hampshire
Blue, 12 x 16 in., oil on wood Available through RS Hanna Gallery lisa@lisakovvuri.com • 603.397.0703 • lisakovvuri.com
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
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SHELBY KEEFE
OPA
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee Roads 24 x 30 in., oil on canvas Available through RS Hanna Gallery shelbykeefe@tds.net 414.687.6241 studioshelby.com X. Represented by Meyer Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Oh Be Joyful Gallery, Crested Butte, CO; Fine Line Designs Gallery, Door County, WI.
QIANG HUANG OPA Cedar Park, Texas
Symphonic Water Lilies, 24 x 30 in., oil on canvas Available through RS Hanna Gallery qhart002@yahoo.com • 512.864.5441 • qh-art.com Represented by InSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX; Studio B Art Gallery, Easton, MD.
POPPY BALSER Digby, Nova Scotia
Dawn Over the Wharf, 11 x 14 in., oil on panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery poppy@poppybalser.com • 902.247.1910 • poppybalser.com Represented by Camden Falls Gallery, Camden, ME; Amicus Gallery, Chester, NS; The Flight of Fancy, Bear River, NS.
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
RS Hanna Gallery • 830.307.3071 • info@rshannagallery.com
STEVEN S. WALKER Hahira, Georgia
Next to Kevin’s 11 x 14 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery steven@stevenwalkerstudios.com 614.264.7666 stevenwalkerstudios.com Represented by Hagan Fine Art, Charleston, SC; Lovetts Gallery, Tulsa, OK; Howard Mandville Gallery, Woodinville, WA.
DARCIE PEET OPA Tucson, Arizona
Change in the Air — Glacier National Park, 24 x 30 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery darcie@gmhotel.net • darciepeet.com Represented by Settlers West Gallery, Tucson, AZ; K.Newby Gallery, Tubac, AZ; The Broadmoor Galleries, Colorado Springs, CO; A. Banks Gallery, Bozeman, MT.
SUE FOELL OPA Durham, North Carolina
White Out, 12 x 12 in., oil on canvas panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery suefoell@att.net • 919.428.6486 • suefoell.com Represented by Anderson Fine Art Gallery, St. Simons Island, GA; Cortile Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Hughes Gallery, Boca Grande, FL.
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
ER
RICK DICKINSON Southport, Maine
Red, White & Blue, 22 x 27 in., oil on linen Available through RS Hanna Gallery rick@dickinsonart.com • 207.350.5772 • dickinsonart.com
ille, WA.
VICTORIA CASTILLO OPA The Woodlands, Texas
My Father in the Garden, 10 x 8 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery victoriaroach@yahoo.com • victoriacastillo.com
KURT ANDERSON OPA
YVONNE BONACCI
Springfield, Virginia
Wilton, California
Erich, 13 x 17 in., oil on canvas Available through RS Hanna Gallery kurt@kurtanderson.net • 520.400.5110 • kurtanderson.net Represented by Reinert Fine Art, Charleston, SC; Beverly McNeil Gallery, Birmingham, AL; Cutter & Cutter Fine Art, St. Augustine, FL.
Ladies Night Out, 12 x 12 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery yvonnebonacci@gmail.com • yvonnebonacci.com
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
RS Hanna Gallery • 830.307.3071 • info@rshannagallery.com
DEBORAH ALLISON Grapevine, Texas
Commuters 22 x 28 in., oil on canvas Available through RS Hanna Gallery deborahallison@hotmail.com • deborahallisonstudio.com Represented by Holder Dane Gallery, Grapevine, TX.
WILLIAM ROGERS
PAVEL SOKOV
Figuring It Out, 24 x 20 in., oil on canvas Available through RS Hanna Gallery billrogers@eastlink.ca • 902.872.1156 • williamrogersart.com
Sadhu at the Holy Manikarnika Burning Ghat in Varanasi 30 x 20 in., oil on linen Available through RS Hanna Gallery pavelsokov@gmail.com • pavelsokov.com
Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Montreal, Canada
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
BARBARA COLEMAN Albuquerque, New Mexico
Crackling Cold on the Rio, 12 x 16 in., oil on linen panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery barbaracolemanartist@gmail.com • barbaracoleman.com
ANN GOBLE Gainesville, Georgia
La Mirande, 30 x 20 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery goble@charter.net • anngoble.com Represented by Reinert Fine Art, Charleston, SC.
JEANNE REAVIS Houston, Texas
Ice Scape, 11 x 14 in., oil on linen panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery jearea@att.net • jeannereavis.com
JING ZHAO Frisco, Texas
A Guatemalan Girl, 24 x 20 in., oil on linen Available through RS Hanna Gallery jingzhao54@gmail.com • 214.686.6267 • jingzhaoart.com
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
RS Hanna Gallery • 830.307.3071 • info@rshannagallery.com
ROMONA YOUNGQUIST Dundee, Oregon
Midsummer 24 x 24 in., oil on panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery info@rshannagallery.com romonayoungquist.com Represented by Art Elements Gallery, Newberg, OR; Mockingbird Gallery, Bend, OR; Bonner David Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Howard Mandville Gallery, Woodinville, WA; Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT; Arts on the Boulevard, Vancouver, WA.
KRYSTAL W. BROWN Spring, Texas
Possibilities, 8 x 16 in., oil on linen Available through RS Hanna Gallery kwbrownfineart@gmail.com • 281.224.5759 • krystalbrownfineart.com Represented by Marta Stafford Fine Art, Marble Falls, TX.
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
ROBIN WILLIAMSON Sugar Land, Texas
In the Spotlight, 12 x 16 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery rgwilliamson@comcast.net • robinwilliamsonfineart.com
CHARLES DAVID ALEXANDER Hickman, Kentucky
Cheers!, 20 x 16 in., oil on canvas Available through RS Hanna Gallery chasdalex@gmail.com • 901.517.6001 • charlesdavidalexander.com
DAVID HARMS
LINDSEY BITTNER GRAHAM
Centennial, Colorado
Denver, Colorado
Lone Trail to Odessa Lake, 30 x 24 in., oil on canvas Available through RS Hanna Gallery nharmswy@yahoo.com • 720.218.8636 • davidharms.com Represented by Wild Horse Gallery, Steamboat Springs, CO.
Distinguished Gentleman, 20 x 20 in., oil on linen panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery lbittnergraham@gmail.com • lindseybittnergraham.com Represented by RS Hanna Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX.
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
RS Hanna Gallery • 830.307.3071 • info@rshannagallery.com
CHRIS KLING Stuart, Florida
Gallery Family 24 x 18 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery cbkling@bellsouth.net • 772.285.7826 • chrisklingartist.com Represented by Kling Gallery, Wine & Decor, Stuart, FL; Palm City Art & Frame, Palm City, FL.
AMANDA LOVETT
KAREN BUDAN
Chasing Sunrise, 18 x 36 in., oil on linen Available through RS Hanna Gallery amanda@amandalovett.com • amandalovett.com
Playing with Black and White, 20 x 16 in., oil on panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery karen@karenbudan.com • karenbudan.com Represented by ArtqWest, Scottsdale, AZ.
Gainesville, Georgia
Scottsdale, Arizona
2020 National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
ANN LARSEN OPA
Edinburg, New York
Winter on the South Platte 20 x 24 in., oil on linen panel Available through RS Hanna Gallery larsenstudio@roadrunner.com • annlarsen.com Represented by Northlight Gallery, Kennebunkport, ME; Mary Williams Fine Arts, Boulder, CO; The Laffer Gallery, Schuylerville, NY.
ALINE ORDMAN SHELLEY SMITH Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Eat, Drink and Be Cherry, 34 x 30 in., oil on linen Available through RS Hanna Gallery shelley.smith@spunkybohemian.com • spunkybohemian.com
White River Junction, Vermont
Pontoon Boat, 9 x 12 in., oil Available through RS Hanna Gallery aordman@sover.net • alineordman.com Represented by Camden Falls Gallery, Camden, ME; Blue Heron Gallery, Wellfleet, MA; Little Mackinac Gallery, Mackinac Island, MI.
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21st Annual National Juried Exhibition October 22—November 21, 2020
AIS MASTER ARTISTS Carolyn Anderson Kenn Backhaus Clayton J. Beck, III Roger Dale Brown Scott Burdick Nancy Bush Betty Carr Scott L. Christensen Kim English Jerry Fresia Lois Griffel Albert Handell Quang Ho Peggi Kroll-Roberts Calvin Liang Weizhen Liang Huihan Liu Kevin Macpherson Ned Mueller C.W. Mundy Camille Przewodek William Schneider Zhiwei Tu Dawn Whitelaw
Judge of Awards William Schneider AIS Master
St. George, Utah 435-313-5008 www.illumegalleryoffineart.com
Thursday, October 22 Opening Reception and Awards Presentation 6 pm
AIS FOUNDERS Charlotte Dickinson Pauline Ney Marjorie Bradley William Schultz
Friday, October 23 Educational Events 10 am—5pm Painting Demo by William Schneider 6 to 8pm
AIS Officers Debra Joy Groesser, President/CEO Cheryl St. John, Vice President Don Groesser, Treasurer Doreen St. John, Secretary
Illume Gallery of Fine Art
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Saturday, October 24 All Member Paint Out Wet Wall Exhibit and Sale Subject to change or cancellation.
American Impressionist Society was founded in 1998 with the mission to promote the appreciation of Impressionism through exhibitions, workshops and educational events.
2019 Best of Show Jing Zhao
Artist memberships are open to American Impressionist artists. Supporting memberships are open to anyone who would like to support our mission. AIS is a 501 (c)(3)organization. For more information, contact Liz Ahrens, AIS Executive Director aidirector1@gmail.com 231-881-7685
www.americanimpressionistsociety.org
DEBRA JOY GROESSER AIS
AIS PRESIDENT/CEO
Ralston, Nebraska
Tea Time in the Garden 12 x 16 in., oil on linen panel
Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT debra@debrajoygroesser.com 402.592.6552 www.debrajoygroesser.com Represented by The Mission Galler y, St. George, UT Montgomer y Lee Fine Art, Park City, UT SouthWind Art Galler y, Topeka, KS Mar y Williams Fine Art, Boulder, CO Debra Joy Groesser Fine Art, Ralston, NE
CAROLYN LINDSEY
Cuer vo, New Mexico Bakery, 14 x 18 in., oil on linen Available through the artist lindseycj@plateautel.net www.carolynlindsey.com
ROBIN WEISS
Poulsbo, Washington Hope Springs Eternal, 11 x 11 in., oil Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT robinweiss@earthlink.net | 360.779.3940 www.robinweissfineart.com Represented by Cole Galler y, Edmonds, WA Roby King Galler y, Bainbridge Island, WA Oh Be Joyful Galler y, Crested Butte, CO
CELESTE McCOLLOUGH
Atlanta, Georgia The Bowery, 14 x 18 in., oil Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT celeste@tupelostudio.com | www.tupelostudio.com Represented by allison sprock fine art, Charlotte, NC
BRIENNE M. BROWN
Julian, Pennsylvania Burning Leaves, 14 x 10 in., watercolor Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT bmb@briennembrown.com | 801.755.4933 www.briennembrown.com Represented by The Mission Galler y, St. George, UT
ORIT REUBEN
Orlando, Florida Nude Figure, 18 x 12 in., pastel on paper Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT oritreuben@yahoo.com | 612.860.9053 | www.oritreuben.com Represented by Passport Pop-Up Galler y, Winter Park, FL Be On Park, Winter Park, FL | Artscapes, Clermont, FL
LINDA MUTTI
Santa Barbara, California Hearts Afire, 12 x 16 in., pastel Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT mutti4art@gmail.com | www.lindamuttifineart.com Represented by Santa Barbara Fine Art, Santa Barbara, CA Park Street Galler y, Paso Robles, CA | Bronze, Silver & Gold, Cambria, CA
MARY GARRISH
Merritt Island, Florida
Pine Forest with Full Moon Rising 30 x 30 in., oil on linen Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT 321.698.4431 Represented by J.M. Stringer Fine Art, Vero Beach, FL Hagan Fine Art Galler y & Studio, Charleston, SC
DAVID BOYD, JR.
Newnan, Georgia Late Light, 12 x 24 in., oil Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT boyd@davidboydjr.com | www.davidboydjr.com Represented by Spalding Nix, Atlanta, GA; Hagan Fine Art, Charleston, SC | The Boyd Galler y, Newnan, GA
RADHIKA SRINIVAS
Devon, Pennsylvania Paris Cafe, 14 x 11 in., watercolor Available sradhika13@yahoo.com 610.551.2228 www.radhikasrinivas.com
VANESSA MILLER
CHRISTINE DEBROSKY
Clarkdale, Arizona Crimson Sundown, 24 x 20 in., soft pastel Available christine@christinedebrosky.com | 928.679.0357 www.christinedebrosky.com Represented by S-Scape West Studio Galler y, Clarkdale, AZ
Huntsville, Alabama Sunlit Chair, 11 x 14 in., oil on linen Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT millerart@hotmail.com | 256.468.5176 www.vanessamillerfineart.com Represented by The Little Green Store Galler y, Huntsville, AL The Huntsville Museum of Art Gift Store and Galler y, Huntsville, AL The Chameleon, Huntsville, AL Heartfelt Expressions at Lowe Mill, Huntsville, AL
MICHELE BYRNE
Santa Fe, New Mexico Cinque Terre Sunlight, 20 x 16 in., oil on linen panel Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT michele@michelebyrne.com | 610.698.3372 www.michelebyrne.com
NANCY BOREN
The Colony, Texas Red Kimono, 20 x 16 in., oil on linen Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT nancy@nancyboren.com | www.nancyboren.com Represented by Southwest Galler y, Dallas, T X Davis & Blevins, The Main Street Galler y, Saint Jo, T X LA Thompson Galler y, Clifton, T X
PATRICK MEEHAN
Escondido, California Sheba, 14 x 11 in., oil on linen board Available through Illume Galler y, St. George, UT patrickmeehanpaints@gmail.com 619.508.5688 | www.patrickmmeehan.com
CAROUSEL RABBITS “Paying homage to the Carousel Rabbits we all rode on as children!” 72 “ H x 61 “ W x 27 “ D Bronze Rabbits on Stainless Steel Base
T HE ART OF S CULP T URE 803-824-9123 | Aldie, Virginia | dreuterwi@aol.com
www.bronzed.net
Joe Anna Arnett Cindy Baron Carl Bretzke Saim Caglayan Bill Davidson Rick J. Delanty Don Demers Jed Dorsey
Bill Farnsworth Mark Fehlman Kathleen Hudson Debra Huse Calvin Liang Daniel Marshall David Marty Jim McVicker Terry Miura
Michael Obermeyer Jason Sacran Anthony Salvo Patrick Saunders Aaron Schuerr Jeff Sewell Michael Situ Barbara Tapp
 Â? Â? Â? Â?  ÂÂ? € €  ‚  ‚ Â? Â? Â?Â?  Â? ƒÂ? „…
20th Annual Juried Exhibition Marietta Cobb Museum of Art Marietta, Georgia MELANIE FERGUSON Roswell, Georgia The Artist and the Messenger, 14 x 13 x 12 in., sgraffito through layered underglaze on stoneware New from the “Storytellers” series Available through Cavin-Morris Gallery • info@cavinmorris.com
July 11- September 6, 2020 mariettacobbar tmuseum.org (770) 528-1444
www.melaniefergusonceramics.com Represented by Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York, NY
ELOISA GALLEGOS HERNANDEZ Acworth, Georgia Portal to Nature, 18 x 14 in., tea on cold press Arches watercolor paper www.elogallhdz.wordpress.com
LARS FINDERUP Marietta, Georgia Caress, 24 x 15 x 9 in., cold cast bronze Available through the artist larsfinsculpture@gmx.com • 770.980.0550 • www.larsfinsculpture.com
JIM GREENWOOD Acworth, Georgia
NANCY SANDERS Atlanta, Georgia
In the Hour of the Pearl, 30 x 30 in., oil on canvas
The Ferryman, 34 1/2 x 34 1/2 x 2 in., encaustic archival pigment print on panel
Currently on display at the Metro Montage XX Exhibition at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, Marietta, GA
Available
jim@jimgreenwood.com • 404.695.9006 • www.jimgreenwood.com
nanzsanders@gmail.com • www.nancysandersart.com
Also exhibiting through our U.S. Department of State and its Art in Embassies program in the ambassador’s residence at the American Embassy in Banjul, The Gambia.
KEVIN CHAMBERS Atlanta, Georgia Poise, 1/3 life-size, bronze Available through dk Gallery kevinsculpture@gmail.com www.kevinchambersart.com Represented by dk Gallery, Marietta, GA Anderson Fine Art, St. Simons, GA.
LAUREN CHAMBERS Atlanta, Georgia Portrait of a Meerkat, 21 x 31 in., photography Available through the artist lauren@klcstudiosinc.com www.laurenchambers.com
SUZY SCHULTZ Atlanta, Georgia Reach, 72 x 48 in., acrylic and oil on birch panel Available through the artist suzy@suzyschultz.net www.suzyschultz.net
LEAH HOPKINS HENRY Atlanta, Georgia Butterfly, 30 x 15 in., oil on canvas Radiant Son, 36 x 30 in., oil on linen Both available through the artist leah@leahhenry.com 404.295.6088 www.leahhopkinshenry.com
ULLA STRICKLAND Sharpsburg, Georgia Tender Moment, 16 x 13 in., pencil Available through the artist ulla_str@hotmail.com 404.388.4097 www.ullastricklandstudios.com
ERIK DURANT New Bedford, Massachusetts Prometheus, 18 x 10 1/2 x 10, Bronze Available through the artist erik@erikdurant.com 508.971.8120 www.erikdurant.com
DOUG PISIK Atlanta, Georgia The Cure, 12 x 7 x 11 1/2 in., maple, maple burl, found wood, acrylic paint, solid surface Available through the artist pisikwood@bellsouth.net 404.307.2185 www.dougpisik.com Represented by High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; WOW! Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; High Country Art, Blue Ridge, GA.
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Photo: Assemblage Wallcovering, Courtesy of HOLLY HUNT.
Sponsored by:
Nicole MoNĂŠ
Head Study of Matthew Innis (detail) - 18 x 36 inches Oil
I feel like I can really be myself with you. www.nicolemone.com |
@nicolemonefineart
ADAM SMITH
“The Surveyor” 24”x37” acrylic
“Cool Crossing” 17”x32” acrylic
These paintings available at Trailside Galleries • www.trailsidegalleries.com • (307) 733-3186
www.adamsmithwildlifeart.com (406) 579-3957
CHRIS KRUPINSKI
“Caramel Apples”
Transparent Watercolor
30” x 22”
Dynamic Still Life www.chriskrupinski.com | chris@chriskrupinski.com
JACOB DHEIN A Retrospective
July 30 - October 3, 2020 Figurative, portrait, and cityscape paintings from undergraduate & thesis to current works in a breathtaking visual timeline of a painter’s evolution.
Painting the Figure Now III October 8 - December 12, 2020
“ In curating this show I looked for works that were not only technically excellent, but also captured my attention in a different way, and made me think beyond the represented figure…that delivered a view of existence in today’s world.” - F. Scott Hess, Guest Curator
309 McClellan Street Wausau, Wisconsin 54403 http://www.wmoca.org
Victor Wang, “Losing the Battle”, 48” x 60”, Oil, 2019
This new piece from Blair is being shown at the Prix de West in Oklahoma City as well as the Buffalo Bill show in Cody Wyoming. To see more of Blair’s work, contact Legacy Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. and Wilcox Gallery in Jackson Hole, WY.
Bronze
A Mother’s Love
bl air buswel l .com
22” x 9”
JEFF MATHISON
Centre Hall, Pennsylvania The Return, 20 x 15 in., watercolor on paper Available through the NWS Exhibition jcmaps@mac.com www.artbymathison.com
CAROLYN LORD Livermore, California
Coastal Tidepool, 22 x 30 in., watercolor on paper Available at California Watercolor sales@californiawatercolor.com 760.723.9270 Represented by California Watercolor, Oceanside, CA.
NationalWatercolorSociety.org
SUSAN M STULLER
NWS TWSA Midlothian, Virginia A Magical Moment, 21 x 29 in., watercolor Available through the artist, also as giclĂŠe susanmstuller@gmail.com www.susanstuller.com Represented by Crossroads Art Center, Richmond, VA; Jennifer Kirby.
NationalWatercolorSociety.org
Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel (1876-1954), Ojai Valley, c. 1912.
Watercolor, 20 x 32 in.
Kim Lordier (b. 1966) , Cypress Grove Fringe, 2020. Pastel, 27 x 40 in.
Rieser Fine Art
Historical and Contemporary California and American Fine Art www.rieserfineart.com (831) 620-0530 Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA
Golden Autumn
30x40
Wing & A Prayer
40x40
DVD & Download
landscapes • animals • instruction www.kathleendunphy.com • 209.743.1417
cynthieart@gmail.com | cynthiesoriginals.com
“Truculence�, 39 x 26 x 12 mixed media
"Pandemonium!", 48 x 60"oil on canvas
ROBERT STEINER
Point Lobos 16x24 Acrylic on canvas Giclees on canvas available
Red Rocks 16x24 Acrylic on canvas Giclees on canvas available
Land Sea and Sky Gallery | 415-387-9754 | www.landseaandskygallery.com
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Nelson Boren Art Ad.indd 1
8/3/20 4:55 PM
WESTERN ART SHOWCASE
I
t’s been nearly 20 years since a good friend invited us to tour the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming. Unknown to us, the annual Fall Arts Festival was happening all around us, with galleries exhibiting paintings of vast landscapes, muscular horses, and of course, lots of images of cowboys and Indians. Despite living in the East, I had been exposed at an early age to E.I. Couse, Joseph H. Sharp, and the rest of the Taos Eight through my father’s love of the “out West” spirit of freedom and soulfulness. Jackson Hole rekindled that longing for a road trip and the wide open air of the West. Years later, while working at Zion National Park, there were countless opportunities for me to talk with tourists who came from every corner of the earth. All came to experience the allure of “the West” they’d seen in movies, paintings, museums, and history books. Just the way the paintings of Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Charlie Russell influenced New Yorkers to pack their bags and travel west with the expectation of endless skies and high mountain peaks, so artists today breathe that same air and have the same enthusiasm while painting or sculpting the landscape and lifestyle still present in Western states. Their studios and foundries can be found tucked in every state, some in reclaimed log cabins or small bedrooms and others on huge ranches with breathtaking views. Subjects within the Western genre are much more than cowboys on horseback and Indians by the campfire. Professional illustrators such as Frank Hagel and Ed Mell turn to their roots to paint the landscape and people in various ways. The impressionistic landscapes first explored by numerous historic artists are still present in the work of Scott Christensen and Kathy Wipfler. Graphic interpretations of a Western ethos are evident in the paintings of Mark Eberhard and Kevin Red Star. The portraiture of Krystii Melaine and John Coleman creates such a close connection with the viewer that one feels the intricacies of their subjects’ native dress are palpable. The “storytelling” art of Z.S. Liang, Michael Dudash, and Don Oelze come from days camped out with live models posing on horseback in full regalia. The very contemporary depiction of wildlife by Julie Chapman, Carol Hagan, and sculptor Joshua Tobey appeals to many, while others love the almost lifelike work of Dustin Van Wechel and John Potter. The illusionism of trompe l’oeil in still life work by William Acheff and Kyle Polzin tricks our eye into seeing the ephemera of Old West material culture. Romantic portrayals of the West by Bill Anton and Steve Seltzer are reminiscent of Frank Tenney Johnson’s nocturnal beauties. And for sculpture enthusiasts, the rodeo riders of Curt Mattison, the rough symbolist mammals of Mark Edward Adams, and the lifelike depictions of Walter Matia and Sandy Scott create a three-dimensional excitement. Over many years, Fine Art Connoisseur has proudly sponsored and promoted many of these live events, so whether you have the opportunity to visit Cody in September for the Rendezvous Royale or sit on your couch and watch the live auctions in Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Jackson, Great Falls, and Big Horn, the virtual Western art world is just a click away. Anne W. Brown Associate Publisher
MITCH CASTER OPA Denver, Colorado
Cowgirl Respite, 20 x 10 in., oil Available at Oil Painters of America Western Regional Exhibition Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT Morning in the Trough, 18 x 24 in., oil info@mitchcasterfineart.com • www.mitchcasterfineart.com Represented by: Heritage Fine Arts, Taos, NM Marta Stafford Fine Art, Marble Falls, TX Castle Gallery Fine Art. Fort Wayne, IN
MARK EDWARD ADAMS
San Diego, California
Thunder Road 15 x 9 3/4 x 4 1/4 in., bronze Available through the artist markedwardadams@gmail.com www.markedwardadams.com Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale
TOM SAUBERT Kalispell, Montana
Horse Power Effigy, 36 x 36 in., oil on linen Available through Underscore Art, Whitefish, MT thomasbsaubert@gmail.com • www.tomsaubert.com The Russell at the C.M. Russell Museum Represented by: Underscore Art, Whitefish, MT • Mountain Trails Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM • Montana Trails, Bozeman, MT
SANDY SCOTT Wyoming The Strut sandyscott@wyoming.com 307.332.9121 • www.sandyscott.com Prix de West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Birds in Art at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum
KIM CASEBEER Manhattan, Kansas
Tranquility, 24 x 30 in., oil on linen Available through Mountain Trails Gallery, Jackson, WY Exaltation, 30 x 36 in., oil on linen Available through SNW Gallery, Manhattan, KS kim@kimcasebeer.com • 785.409.8949 • www.kimcasebeer.com Represented by: Mountain Trails Gallery, Jackson, WY FourSquare Art, Mesa, AZ • Brandon Jacobs Gallery, Kansas City, MO Reuben Saunders Gallery, Wichita, KS • Eisele Gallery of Fine Art, Cincinnati, OH Grapevine Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK • SNW Gallery, Manhattan, KS
LINDA S RAYNOLDS Cody, Wyoming
Crescent Horse, 30 1/2 x 25 x 4 in., bronze Limited edition copies available through Big Horn Galleries lsr00@tritel.net • www.bighorngalleries.com/raynolds.htm Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale
JOEL R. JOHNSON Vero Beach, Florida
Rushing Waters, 28 1/4 x 18 in., transparent watercolor Private Collection 772.234.1200 • www.artistjoeljohnson.com Prix de West at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum
ECHO UKRAINETZ Great Falls, Montana
Willie Holy Frog and Big Turnips, 32 x 30 in., batik with golf leaf First Strike Auction at The Russell eukrainetz@mac.com • www.echoukrainetz.com Visit website for galleries and shows
RON UKRAINETZ Great Falls, Montana
Cheyenne, 36 x 24 in., polychromatic engraving Available through The Briscoe Museum ronukrainetz49@gmail.com • www.ronukrainetz.com Visit website for galleries and shows
MIKE BARLOW Billings, Montana
Slew Foot 22 x 30 x 14 in., bronze Available through the 2020 Jackson Hole Art Auction and Astoria Fine Art, Jackson, WY mike@mikebarlow.com 406.223.1064 www.mikebarlow.com Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival The Russell at the C.M. Russell Museum Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale
MICHELE USIBELLI Woodway, Washington
The Maestro, 14 x 11 in., oil on panel Private Collection micheleusibelli@gmail.com • www.micheleusibelli.com The Russell at the C.M. Russell Museum Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale Mountain Oyster Club Contemporary Western Art Show & Sale Big Horn Rendezvous at The Brinton Museum
SUSIEHYER
Evergreen, Colorado Ceremonial Buffalo Skull 20 x 16 in., oil on masonite susiehyer1@yahoo.com • 303.670.3609 • www.susiehyerstudio.com
NATE CLOSSON Whitefish, Montana
Beneath the Peaks, 60 x 60 in., oil on panel nateclosson@gmail.com • 406-471-3466 • www.nateclosson.com Represented by Underscore Art, Whitefish, MT.
BROOKE WETZEL
Bitterroot Valley, Montana
Eclipsed by Glory, 48 x 60 in., oil on canvas Available brooke@brookewetzel.com • www.brookewetzel.com The Russell at the C.M. Russell Museum
There is a lot of superb art being made these days. This column by Allison Malafronte shines light on a trio of gifted individuals.
CARMEN DRAKE (b. 1964), Weathering the Storm, 2018, oil on prepared panel, 48 x 60 in., private collection
CARMEN DRAKE (b. 1964) has an affinity for subjects with a unique origin and a storied history. As a nature lover and former owner of a North Carolina shop (C.R. Drake Mercantile) that specialized in primitive antiques, reproduction furniture, and her own artwork, this painter instinctively responds to the valuable visuals that life offers in simple, quiet, and sometimes forgotten places. Drake’s passion for art presented itself at an early age, and when she was 19, she enrolled at Paier College of Art (Hamden, Connecticut). Becoming a wife and mother at 22, she decided to focus on her family and nurtured her artistic interests in any spare moments she could find. This included creating decorative furniture and custom work for a boutique in Pinehurst, North Carolina, while continuing to develop her own paintings. In 2008, Drake was awarded the Special Operations Fund Scholarship, which allowed her to attend D. Jeffrey Mims’s Academy of Classical Design in Southern Pines, North Carolina. She studied with Mims and Paul S. Brown for nearly three years before continuing her education through workshops with other classically trained painters. In Drake’s art, we typically see subjects with layers of meaning, such as antique umbrellas, worn-out work boots, or a stoic portrait of an old soul. Treasures from outdoors — flowers, fruit from the farm, and birds’ nests — are also favorite themes. Drake’s nest paintings are F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
particularly poetic and can be viewed as reassuring metaphors during times that require resilience and rebuilding. For instance, in Weathering the Storm, we see a small nest still attached to its tree branch, despite the branch’s having been severed during a storm. “We were making our way around the farm the morning after a hurricane, and we found this,” the artist recalls. “These birds must have been quite the engineers for this nest to have survived. Two little birds gathered all these bits of twig, grass, and moss and wove them together intricately to make a home for their babies. What I find fascinating is that birds don’t teach their young to make this art; it’s all instinctual. Seeing that this tiny home survived the storm was a humbling reminder of the power of perseverance.” Today Drake resides at Oak Hollow Farm and Studios, a 1901 homestead near Carthage, North Carolina. Surrounded by antiques, flower gardens, farm animals, and nature, she continues to find inspiration for her artistry. The studio serves not only as her main creative outpost but also as a space for hosting workshops led by a roster of nationally recognized instructors. DRAKE is represented by Collins Galleries (Orleans, Massachusetts). 2 0 2 0
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GUSTAVO RAMOS (b. 1993) is a Brazilianborn artist who moved to Phoenix at the age of 15 and taught himself to communicate through careful observation and the language of drawing. During his difficult adolescent years, when Ramos spoke little English, he relied on reading such nonverbal cues as facial expressions and body language. This experience would ultimately inform his future career as a realist portraitist. “Equipped with a heightened sensitivity to the subtleties of facial and other physical gesticulations because of that time in my life, I became motivated to depict the figure in pencil,” he explains. “Today, those formative years aid me in my practice as a way to explore emotion through oil paint and depict figures as agents in their own stories.” The 26-year-old artist has made a career of painting people’s stories through portraiture that explores a range of emotions. In the work illustrated here, Infinity, Ramos has depicted his wife at a time when she was battling anxiety. “My wife was struggling with a faith crisis and having panic attacks related to the fear of death,” the artist shares. “Seeing her wrestle with the mystery of life after death and the concept of eternity fueled the making of this painting. It was not an attempt to find answers to these questions, but rather an exploration of how one can live without a perfect knowledge of all things.” In addition to portraits of his own choosing such as Infinity, Ramos has recently started exploring the realm of commissioned portraiture. “A large percentage of my all-time favorite paintings from the past were, in fact, commissioned,” he explains. “Even though our contemporary art scene exalts self-expression, when taking on private commissions I feel an added sense of connection to my favorite portraitists, such as Van Dyck, Velázquez, and Sargent. I aspire to match their depth of emotion with the brush, so that my paintings will become part of portraiture’s rich tradition, too.” Primarily self-taught, Ramos has relied on studying and copying these and other Old Masters. Another significant influence has been Rembrandt. “He created the sense of real people who had real experiences,” says Ramos. “I too hope to create works of timeless beauty and project authentic human experiences through my paintings.”
GUSTAVO RAMOS (b. 1993), Infinity, 2019, oil on panel, 24 x 18 in., private collection
RAMOS is self-represented.
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The Pennsylvania-based artist ARTHUR HAYWOOD (b. 1990) creates large-scale murals illustrating classic literature and ancient cultures that have become veritable posters for literacy and learning. For that reason, the most appropriate home for the type of work he creates is in the permanent collections of institutions such as libraries, museums, and schools — where they can excite viewers young and old alike to explore the worlds of history, fiction, and folklore. Haywood is particularly passionate about using his art to champion youth literacy because he remembers the powerful impact that books had on him as a child. “I always read to escape into another fascinating world,” he recalls. “Youth literacy is important to me because it creates opportunities for individuals and expands their knowledge. Addressing the literacy rate in America had been a core issue for my mother, who serves as a school board president in addition to being an attorney, and for my father, a Pennsylvania state senator who runs reading camps to ensure that students do not fall behind. Using my art to share the excitement of reading is both fun and fulfilling for me.” Haywood brings each story he remembers from childhood, or has discovered as an adult, to life using realist techniques that allow him to present otherworldly scenes in believable ways. The imagery is inspired by everything from children’s classics such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to the grandeur of ancient civilizations. The painting Cosmic Tales, for instance, is based on Brandon Sanderson’s bestselling sciencefiction series Skyward, in which a girl is determined to fulfill her dream of becoming a starship pilot in an alien-invaded society, despite the odds against her. Haywood’s painting shows one of the moments readers love most, when an astronaut makes a grand entrance into their own world. Haywood got his start in art by earning a B.F.A. in illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore) and went on to refine his classical drawing and painting skills at the Cambridge Street Studios (Philadelphia) and Grand Central Atelier (New York City). Since then he has painted for Mural Arts Philadelphia (including a stint as a project painter for Amy Sherald’s massive mural portrait downtown), the Sprocket Mural Festival, and Space and Time magazine. Last year Haywood published The Great Library, a book he wrote and illustrated about antiquity’s largest library in Alexandria, Egypt. This October he will begin a nine-month stay in Paris after having won the Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship at the Fondation des États-Unis. While there Haywood will work with students at the Lycée Paul Lapie to develop murals that inspire a love of learning and appreciation of diverse cultures.
ARTHUR HAYWOOD (b. 1990), Cosmic Tales, 2020, oil on canvas, 6 x 4 ft., available from the artist
HAYWOOD is self-represented.
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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
THE NATIONAL WATERCOLOR SOCIETY TURNS 100
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he National Watercolor Society is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, a milestone that makes it one of America’s oldest nonprofit artist-led organizations. Founded as the California Water Color Society, it changed its name to California National Watercolor Society in 1967. Eight years later, it dropped “California” to reflect the fact that its members were living all over the country. In 1999, NWS purchased its own headquarters building in San Pedro, 22 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Today that facility encompasses offices, workshops, a gallery, and storage for the society’s permanent collection of award-winning works acquired from its annual exhibitions, many of which have been loaned to museum exhibitions over the years. Now led by president Denise Willing-Booher, a lifelong resident of Michigan, the society’s 700 Signature and 1,110 Associate members live throughout the U.S. Their collective mission is best summarized by the phrase Celebrate and Elevate, which underscores the significance of encouraging innovation in water media through education, outreach, and exhibitions, often undertaken with organizational partners worldwide. A fine example of this global perspective is the 100th International Open Exhibition, which is being held online this year due to the COVID19 pandemic. More than 1,000 submissions were received from NWS
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YONG CHEN (b. 1965), My Father, 2019, watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 in., on view in the 100th International Open Exhibition
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(TOP) REX BRANDT (1914–2000), Summer at 29th Street, 1945, watercolor on paper, 22 1/2 x 30 1/4 in., NWS permanent collection
(RIGHT) NICOLAS LOPEZ
(b. 1984), Freedom Spaces, 2020, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in., on view in the 100th International Open Exhibition
members and non-members around the world, though just over 100 were selected. All were juried in by artists Katherine Chang Liu, Dean Mitchell, and John Salminen, and will be on view from October 1 through January 10. During a virtual reception on October 17, awards judge Mary Whyte will present more than $40,000 in prizes. Viewable online now through September 19 is another collegial project, the 50 Stars Exhibition, for which NWS partnered with regional water media societies located throughout the U.S. Each of its 71 works was juried in by the relevant home state society, and all were eligible for the awards bestowed recently by NWS member Bruce Bobick. Assuming that the resurgence of COVID-19 in Orange County can be flattened in time, the Hilbert Museum of California Art will soon host another intriguing exhibition, NWS: The First F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M
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(TOP) PASQUALINO FRACASSO (b. 1973), Work in Progress, 2019, watercolor on paper, 19 x 30 in., on view in the 100th International Open Exhibition
(ABOVE) MYRNA WACKNOV (b. 1942), Reflections on Turning
65, 2006, watercolor on paper, 15 x 21 in., on view in the 50 Stars Exhibition
(RIGHT) SCOTT PONEMONE
(b. 1949), M & P: 1st Pandemic Pair, 2020, watercolor on paper, 32 3/4 x 18 1/4 in., on view in the 100th International Open Exhibition
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(LEFT) PETER V. JABLOKOW (b. 1963), Reykjavik Ship, 2019, watercolor on paper, 30 x 19 in., on view in the 100th International Open Exhibition
(RIGHT) DENNY BOND (b. 1952),
Time Slot, 2019, watercolor on paper, 38 x 25 1/4 in., on view in the 50 Stars Exhibition
100 Years. Scheduled to be on public view from November 14 through February 20, this show will feature works by NWS members only. All members are also looking forward to next spring, when the Annual Members Exhibition will return. In this era of social distancing, NWS has enhanced its two websites with additional artists’ interviews and gallery walks of members’ work. Also noteworthy is a resource page that provides contact information for the impressively large number of water media societies active nationwide. Information: nationalwatercolorsociety.org, nwsexhibition.com. Learn more about watercolors by signing up for the free e-newsletter American Watercolor Weekly, and through the video workshops at lilipubsorders.com/collections/watercolor. MATTHIAS ANDERSON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
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BY MAX GILLIES
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
LOOK UP T
hroughout this extraordinarily challenging year, nature has provided invaluable solace and joy to people around the world. One unanticipated benefit of the lockdown has been remarkably clear air due to the falloff in vehicular traffic, commercial aviation, and industrial output. In many places this has resulted in spectacular sunrises and sunsets, as well as crystalline air that allows for longer-distance viewing across many miles. The character of the sky and its clouds has always affected the way we see (and feel about) the landscape below. This year, then, has offered many of us new experiences while looking at nature — how much bluer our
bodies of water have been, and how much more brilliant the reflections upon terrain between us and the setting sun. With all of this in mind, our team set out to find outstanding examples of landscape painting that emphasize the skies above. We congratulate the selected artists on their achievements, and we invite everyone to appreciate the sky — even more — next time they head outdoors.
MAX GILLIES is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
NATASHA ISENHOUR (b. 1961), Rhapsody in Blue, 2019, oil on canvas, 16 x 40 in., Ventana Fine Art (Santa Fe)
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(TOP LEFT ) KRYSTAL W. BROWN (b. 1968), Always New, 2019, oil on linen, 12 x 16 in., Marta Stafford Fine Art (Marble Falls, Texas) (TOP RIGHT) LOUIS COPT (b. 1949), Approaching Storm, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in., available from the artist
(ABOVE) ROB
COMPTON (b. 1974), Last Light over Turtle Cove, 2020, oil on canvas, 15 x 30 in., available from the artist
(LEFT) BILL CRAMER (b. 1960),
Breaking Through, 2020, oil on panel, 12 x 24 in., aavailable through the Oil Painters of America’s Virtual Salon Show (through October 3)
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) CHRISTINE GRAEFE DREWYER (b. 1954), Violet Interlude, 2020, oil on linen, 18 x 18 in., available from the artist
LINDA GLOVER GOOCH (b. 1956),
Camelback Blues, 2019, oil on linen on stretched canvas, 20 x 30 in., Mountain Trails Galleries (Sedona, Arizona) DAVID HARMS (b. 1960), Day’s Last Glory, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in., private collection
KAREN ANN HITT (b. 1960),
Mile Marker 212, 2020, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in., Hughes Gallery (Boca Grande, Florida)
CHARLES HILDEBRANDT (b. 1967),
Jaws of Fall, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 in., available from the artist
LINDA HARTOUGH (b. 1964), The 17th Hole,
Seminole Golf Club, 2019, oil on linen, 24 x 42 in., available from the artist
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) JILL BANKS (b. 1958), Bay Watch, 2019, oil on linen-lined panel, 24 x 12 in., private collection
ELLEN HOWARD (b. 1965), Going to the Light,
2020, oil on linen panel, 8 x 16 in., available from the artist PAULA B. HOLTZCLAW (b. 1954), Meditations, 2020, oil on linen panel, 35 x 45 in., Hughes Gallery (Boca Grande, Florida)
JOEL R. JOHNSON (b. 1950), Spring Thaw, 2019,
transparent watercolor on paper, 20 x 29 in., available from the artist
BARBARA JAENICKE (b. 1964), A Higher Calling,
2017, oil on linen, 20 x 24 in., Mockingbird Gallery (Bend, Oregon)
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(ABOVE) BRIAN KEELER (b. 1953), Summer Tempest: Nocturne over Keuka, 2020, oil on linen, 36 x 40 in., West End Gallery (Corning, New York)
(LEFT)
JAMIE KIRKLAND (b. 1951), Lavender Virga, 2019, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in., private collection
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(TOP ROW, L–R) MIGUEL PEIDRO (b. 1950), Alpine Splendor, 2019, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 in., Lotton Gallery (Chicago)
OBER-RAE STARR
LIVINGSTONE (b. 1949), A Good Evening, 2020, oil on panel, 6 x 6 in., private collection
CHRISTINE LASHLEY (b. 1967), From the Far Shore,
2020, oil on linen, 20 x 20 in., on view at Charleston’s Principle Gallery (September 4–30) in a two-person exhibition featuring this artist and Kyle Stuckey
(MIDDLE ROW, L–R) TODD BAXTER (b. 1954), Edisto
in December, 2016, oil on canvas, 11 x 14 in., available from the artist MATTHEW PAOLETTI (b. 1966), Golden, 2020, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in., available from the artist
(BOTTOM ROW, L–R) LORI PUTNAM
(b. 1962), Tim’s View, 2020, oil on linen panel, 9 x 12 in., private collection (BELOW) ROBERT STEINER (b. 1949), Red Rocks, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 24 in, available from landseaandskygallery.com
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) TOM LINDEN (b. 1959), Homage: Dvorak Quintet in G Minor, Op. 77, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in., available from the artist
SARA JANE REYNOLDS (b. 1948), Holy Night, Alaskan Sky, 2019,
oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in., private collection
HILLARY SCOTT (b. 1979),
Summer Haze, 2020, oil on panel, 12 x 12 in., private collection
RICHARD
RUSSELL SNEARY (b. 1940), Coffee Plantation, 2017, watercolor on paper, 11 x 19 in., available from the artist
STUART ROPER (b. 1953), Turkey Cove
Sunset, 2016, oil on linen panel, 8 x 10 in., private collection
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(TOP) NANCY TANKERSLEY (b. 1949), A Glimmer of Hope, 2020, oil on panel, 12 x 24 in., available from the artist (MIDDLE ROW, L–R) DEBORAH TILBY (b. 1955), The Solitary Tree, 2018, oil on wood panel, 24 x 24 in., private collection
JILL STEFANI WAGNER (b. 1955), Moment, 2016, pastel on board, 24 x 18 in., collection of the artist
(RIGHT) JIM WODARK (b. 1958), Clouds and Sea, 2018, oil on linen panel, 20 x 24 in., Vanessa Rothe Fine Art (Laguna Beach)
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BY DANIEL GRANT
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
SANDRA SANCHEZ
“ALL IN” FOR CLASSICAL REALISM
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ime seems to have stopped in many of the paintings created by Sandra Sanchez (b. 1995). Her figurative subjects — heads, busts, and fulllengths — often appear lost in thought, not so much preparing for their next move as immobilized by competing thoughts. Maybe they’re just zoning out. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa strikes many viewers as having something specific in mind, while Diane Arbus’s photographs suggest the sitter and artist were locked in a battle of wills. Sanchez’s subjects, on the other hand, have a faraway look even when gazing directly at us. There is a story behind that look, though we don’t know what it is or if it is significant. This 25-year-old artist is clearly accomplished, but what may be most remarkable about her (so far) is that she made a pair of major decisions about her life and career while very young. Raised in Anaheim, California, Sanchez opted to (1) forgo college upon graduating high school in order to study at New York City’s non-degree-granting Grand Central Atelier, which (2) exclusively teaches the approach to drawing and painting known as classical realism. (Some call it academic realism or traditional realism.) How many 18-year-olds know what they will be doing an hour from now, let alone for the rest of their lives? That’s why college in general, and studio art degree programs in particular, offer a wide variety of options — so that students can try things to see what they like. It is common for students to enter college with one idea of what they will become and then leave with very different plans. That, however, is not the Grand Central Atelier, which provides “a pre-Impressionist French academic training, and where students learn to draw and paint in a slow, patient way, where progress is based on accomplishment rather than structured on the basis of semesters,” according to Jacob Collins, its founder (and one of its instructors).
Mary, 2018, oil on linen, 24 x 18 in., courtesy of the artist
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Mopelola, 2019, oil on linen, 10 x 10 in., private collection
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CLASSICAL REALISM NOW One might say that time seems to have stopped for practitioners of classical realism, a term that encompasses artistic training, subjects, and techniques developed before the rise of “Modern Art� circa 1900. There is a growing number of nondegree-granting art schools like Grand Central Atelier that teach what some today consider anachronistic skills. Classical realist training stresses traditional subjects (the figure, still life, landscape), traditional media (painting, printmaking, sculpture), and traditional skills. It prioritizes how to make art rather than how to think about it, the latter now being a higher priority in many (if not most) Bachelor or Master of Fine Arts programs. The ateliers emphasize craft, which requires accurate drawing, dramatic use of chiaroscuro, and skillful application of darks and lights to suggest volume and texture.
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Andrea, 2018, oil on linen, 11 x 14 in., private collection
There can be blowback in the academic world, as some artists have experienced. Suzy Kitman of Portland, Oregon, who earned a B.A. at Kenyon College and then took atelier-type classes at the New York Academy of Art, National Academy of Design, and Art Students League of New York before being accepted to the M.F.A. program at the University of Montana (Missoula), was told by an admissions counselor that “my craft would be a deterrent to grad school acceptance, and I suspect that it was at some schools. One department head looked at my portfolio and said, ‘You are very able, very able.’ Then he looked at me and asked, ‘Why paint portraits? What do you hope to do that will ever be better than Rembrandt?’” Because classical realism may seem so removed from the contemporary art world, its practitioners often find themselves on the defensive,
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and Sandra Sanchez, like many of them, has a response ready. “Nobody’s asking that about a martial arts studio,” she says. “Nobody’s saying, ‘Oh, people have been doing kung fu for thousands of years. Why are you still trying to perfect it?’ But if you don’t continue the tradition, and if other people don’t continue it, it will be on the brink of extinction, and we will end up where we were in the mid-20th century, when a lot of this language was lost because many people rebelled against it.” “Classical realism” is a term developed in the 20th century to describe the return to principles seen most often in art of the 16th through 19th centuries. This isn’t to say that prominent movements in new art over the past 150 years have no relationship to good draftsmanship and technique, just that many people during that period saw technique as being in service of the artist’s ideas and
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Pechocho, 2017, oil on board, 12 x 9 in., private collection
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Grapes in a Basket, 2018, oil on linen, 5 x 7 in., private collection
self-expression. Picasso certainly could paint realistic subjects, but chose not to. Sanchez does not reject modernism and believes her work updates a centuries-old tradition. “If I did reject modernism,” she explains, “my work would not look the way it does. It would look almost exactly like a replica of the Renaissance, of Neoclassicism. Modernism is a part of our world, and I embrace it, but it’s not the style I work in.” What appeals to Sanchez about classical realism is the “commitment to the medium that I don’t find on the contemporary scene.” She says, “Yes, there is some sort of magic visible in many works at MoMA, the Whitney, or the Guggenheim, but they really can’t compare technically to what artists were doing before modernism.” The traditional and the contemporary “are equally valid forms of art, but if I have a choice, I definitely want to participate in something that has been going on for generations. Preserving that tradition was definitely something I wanted to pursue even at a young age.” Art history doesn’t have straight lines, but the customary story of modern art traces a series of developments from Manet to Cézanne to Picasso to Pollock, one artist influencing another, who schools the next. The artists who had the most powerful influence on Sanchez are more of a jumble, united perhaps by similar moods and painting styles. These include Dutch artists of the 17th century, particularly Rembrandt for the darkened settings against which his figures are set off, and Vermeer for his women lost in thought. Also inspiring her are several Americans including Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, and William McGregor Paxton, as well as the Italian Antonio Mancini. Sanchez practices what is called the “window-shade” method of painting, which entails working a canvas from top to bottom, as though one were pulling a window shade to expose the scene behind it. (The more customary method is to develop the entire image at one time.) She
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starts with a highly structured line drawing, with limited shading of the figure, then begins painting from the top of the canvas, from the forehead to the eyes, then the nose down to the mouth. Artists using this method usually start at top left and finish at bottom right, largely because most are right-handed and working in this direction minimizes smudging. AN EARLY AWAKENING Sanchez dates her interest in older styles to a book her father gave her when she was nine or 10. It was a catalogue of highlights at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. “As soon as I realized what artists in the past were making, it completely opened my eyes to what humans are capable of, and I wanted to pursue that. I started making more trips to the Getty, because I grew up in the Los Angeles area, so my mind shifted from seeing art through cartoons and movies into this world I hadn’t realized even existed.” At such a young age, “I just made that commitment. I’d find the resources and do whatever I could to explore the world of classical realism.” It’s true that the J. Paul Getty Museum has a lot of historical masterpieces, but there is far more contemporary art available in Southern California, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, and numerous commercial galleries. Sanchez recalls, “Inevitably I did look at a lot of them because that’s what was available. We also had several film studios nearby; they all inspired me to see how people can get creative and dive deep into that conceptual world. But I knew, even from an early age, fine art was my path.” Receiving an art book from her father might seem surprising given that both of Sanchez’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico, working in blue collar jobs and never attending college. “My father works as a traffic signal technician,” she explains, adding that he attended a technical training school to learn to do that. “I think he realized that, OK,
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Confections, 2018, oil on linen, 16 x 18 in., courtesy of the artist
to make it in the U.S., a degree could really be helpful, but he found his way without one and earned a comfortable living.” Immigrants often have a powerful drive to make a better life for their families and to see their children succeed, which often means securing the college education they weren’t able to get. One can imagine Sanchez’s parents were skeptical of her decision not to attend college, and her father might even have regretted giving her that Louvre publication. “At first,” she remembers, “they were always pressing me to be that child of immigrants who would maybe become a doctor, dentist, or lawyer, the typical lifestyle. I guess my mother was a little more supportive of my ideas, and that ultimately brought my dad over.” That’s often the way it works with parents. Fathers want their children to do well, while mothers want them to be happy. Sanchez notes, “My mom’s argument was, yes, you want to give your kids better opportunities and to have comfortable lives, but the prospect of being an artist is one of those opportunities — one that could provide a more fulfilling life than the typical career route.” The standard B.F.A. program did not appeal to Sanchez. “I visited some of my colleagues in their studios. It seemed fun, and they let me watch a lot of their contemporary process.” Fun, at times interesting, but “it really did not fascinate me as much as realism for my own work. I didn’t want to spend so much time thinking about why my art looks the way it does. I always wanted it to represent things I see and people I meet — to capture their emotion, spirit, or soul, whatever you may call it. I was drawn to something more tangible.” PROS AND CONS Sanchez is not alone in her skepticism about those university programs. To be sure, a degree in studio art, most often the M.F.A., is a veritable union card for teaching in higher education, and many students enroll for that benefit alone. Gallery owners, on the other hand, judge incoming artists on the quality of their work and on the interest it raises among collectors, critics, and other artists — not on where they earned a degree. F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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“It wasn’t at all clear that getting a college degree would help my career any more than getting a certificate,” says Jennifer Frudakis, a sculptor in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, who enrolled in the four-year certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1980 directly out of high school and thus never earned a college diploma. “There’s no guarantee that a degree would make me a better artist or more likely to sell my work. At PAFA, I learned a trade, and I make my living as an artist.” Frudakis’s parents didn’t offer any objections to her plan, since her mother, a painter, had herself attended PAFA straight out of high school and met her stone-carving husband there. Their daughter believes that “College would have meant studying things I wouldn’t have been interested in, especially since I knew exactly what I wanted to do.” As with everything else, one must weigh the pros and cons. One factor is the price. Sanchez says her parents were reluctant to provide the tuition for a private art college, “which costs $50,000 or $60,000 a year. That was extremely steep, especially in the arts, where a job isn’t guaranteed after graduation.” Currently the annual tuition at Grand Central Atelier is $12,500, which does not include materials or food/ housing in New York City. Alas, its students are not eligible for federally backed support such as Pell Grants or Stafford Loans because the atelier is not accredited. It does offer a work-study program, however, as well as merit scholarships for first-year students ranging from $1,000 to $3,000. On the plus side for colleges and universities are the connections that students make with faculty members who can offer introductions to dealers and other influential colleagues. Sanchez recalls, “I knew that if I attended a university, there would be useful people who could get me into a gallery or maybe a teaching post.” But there are connections and then there are connections: “I found that the atelier system was the niche I wanted,” she says, “filled with just the kind of people I wanted to network with.” Not long after earning her certificate from Grand Central, Sanchez began teaching there alongside a number of colleagues who had shifted from student to instructor. Formerly her instructor, GCA’s Gregory Mortenson notes that Sanchez was “the superstar in my class. She is able to capture the humanity of her subjects. You not only understand what they look like — you can also feel their soul.” Teaching provides Sanchez with the bulk of her income, though she also sells her art through Eleventh Street Arts, the space adjacent to GCA (in Long Island City, Queens), as well as Manhattan’s Salmagundi Club. Her oil paintings are priced between $500 and $4,000, while her graphite and charcoal sketches range from $300 to $1,200. We look forward to seeing where Sanchez turns her keen eye next, and we encourage readers of Fine Art Connoisseur to visit her website and that of Grand Central Atelier. DANIEL GRANT is the author of The Business of Being an Artist and other books published by Skyhorse Press. Information: ssanchezf ineart.com, grandcentralatelier.org, salmagundi.org 2 0 2 0
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BY CHARLES MOORE
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MARIO MOORE ASKING POWERFUL QUESTIONS THROUGH ART
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ario Moore (b. 1987) credits one of his grandmothers, the education activist Helen Moore, with helping him shape his artistic vision. The Detroit native claims that her philosophy and politics, as well as her eagerness to bring her grandson along on marches throughout Michigan, laid the foundation for his solid education, interactive working process, and burgeoning career. Even a quick glance at Moore’s 2015 oil painting Queen Mother Helen Moore, acquired three years ago for the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, suggests the crucial role she has played in the lives of the three sons whose photographs she holds, and by extension in the artist’s life. I caught up with Moore by telephone during the COVID-19 lockdown this spring. “I’m still at Princeton University,” he told me, “and it’s much more work teaching online than in the classroom!” Moore had started the semester there teaching Introduction to Drawing courses, and he also held a guest critic post at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, for which he ultimately conducted graduate-level studio critiques via Zoom. Moore believes that the art world, indeed the entire world, is on the brink of change. The economy is shifting rapidly, so artists must adapt. “Few people understand what’s going to happen within the next year,” Moore confesses. “It’s going to be very different.” Fortunately, Moore has long embraced change. He had a window on the visual arts from an early
age thanks to his artist mother, with whom he shares his undergraduate alma mater, Detroit’s College for Creative Studies (CCS). “I got a lot of information and education from her,” he explains. “I was about 3 years old while she was still an undergrad, so I would go into the classrooms and studios with her.” There Moore met his mother’s friends, and later it was Richard Lewis, who got his M.F.A. at Yale and then a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who taught the high school student how to paint in oils. This summer experience between his sophomore and junior years was significant for Moore; Lewis’s guidance allowed him to embark on a lifelong journey of trial, error, and experimentation. Caravaggio has been another major influence on Moore. His mother kept a small library in their home that included books on
Marcus Garvey Knew, 2012, oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in., private collection, courtesy of the artist
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several Italian painters, the Harlem Renaissance, and the American artist William Merritt Chase. One of his teachers at Malcolm X Academy, Mr. Michaels, encouraged Moore to draw and gave him a copy of The Art Book, which showcases artists from different eras — and inside it was Caravaggio. As Moore grew older, he found himself fascinated by Michelangelo, especially his sculpture, followed closely by Rembrandt. “Rembrandt was powerful because I love the way he worked with lighting,” Moore explains. “It is something so three-dimensional, pulling you into the painting.” During his undergraduate studies at CCS (where he earned a B.F.A. in illustration), Moore traveled to Italy on a program that allowed him to experience Caravaggio’s art in person, and that really did it. Over Easter break the same year, he spent several days creating works inspired by Caravaggio. In 2011 Moore enrolled in Yale University’s M.F.A. program in painting. He mounted his first solo show across the street from the art school at a boutique hotel called The Study at Yale. “That went really well,” he recalls. “The hotel owner
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(LEFT) Supreme Green Grass, 2016, oil and gold leaf on linen, 72 x 48 in., courtesy of the artist
(BELOW) A Student’s
Dream, 2017, oil on canvas, 68 x 80 in., private collection
bought a very small painting, and a couple of other people bought some work. It was really exciting, but even before grad school I had been showing a lot in Detroit.” Moore had been curating group shows in Michigan all along, including one that began at a community center and quickly morphed into a traveling exhibition titled Great American Artists — all of them black. And so began Moore’s politically laced paintings that explore the nuances of people in everyday spaces. Marcus Garvey Knew (2012) — one of the paintings he showed at Yale — was inspired by observing homeless people on New Haven Green and “how we just step over those individuals.” Moore explains, “What I’m trying to convey is that American ideals — including the ideal of democracy — are something placed upon us, and that
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The Center of Creation (Michael), 2019, oil on linen, 72 x 60 in., Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
we African-Americans have had no say in it.” In Marcus Garvey Knew, a shadow looms over the face of the sleeping man. The worker’s boots near his head are just one of many symbols visible here. Also meaningful are the books scattered around the figure — one about Garvey himself, another on ancient Greek history, and a third illustrating Raphael’s famous School of Athens. More recently, Moore has been painting works on copper. “What’s interesting about the copper surface is that it creates a reflection,” he explains. “If you clean it well enough, you get a very small reflection of yourself.” The artist was inspired by the idea of double consciousness — of getting people to look at copper and view an ambiguous, or veiled, version of their reflection. “It’s almost putting the viewer’s body into the place of somebody else,” Moore adds. It’s fitting, then, that the first work he completed on copper was a self-portrait. Moore’s paintings generally begin with an idea. Throughout his scenes we see references to blue-collar life, history, slogans, book titles, and other telling details from which viewers can draw meaning. “It’s usually content before image,” Moore says. “I’m not trying to answer a question.” Instead, he invites viewers to answer their own questions. This is facilitated by Moore’s realistic technique: “The painting is either coming out or you’re coming in, so anybody can approach the work.” After Yale, Moore accepted a residency at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois (population 32,000). He wanted to involve the community in his process during a time when he could not help but reflect on the needless deaths of black people across the U.S. “Instead of [portraying] the media’s stock image of the mourning black
Light on Brother (Jalen), 2019, oil on linen, 33 x 62 1/2 in., David Klein Gallery, Detroit
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mother, I was thinking about women in my family,” Moore recalls. “How protective they are, how powerful they are. I wanted to highlight the image of them protecting their living sons.” As he planned Queen Mother Helen Moore, he asked his mother and grandmother to pose. Then he put out a call for members of Galesburg’s black community to pose holding photographs of their own living sons, and subsequently he completed a series of photographs, drawings, and copper paintings focused on this profound theme. Next Moore created works showcasing black women and touching on themes of power and gender in preparation for his 2016 solo exhibition at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan. By connecting the Civil Rights Movement with female sexuality, Moore’s large paintings clearly convey the power of black women, epitomized by his girlfriend’s fearless stance in Supreme Green Grass. “All of my work has a level of emotion and closeness to it,” Moore notes. “Some images unravel slower, so the viewer doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on with me.” Whether he is tackling such issues as white supremacy, women’s rights, or being black in America, his voice and commentary are fully embedded in the imagery. Created primarily during a residency at Connecticut’s Clyde Sky High, 2018, oil on linen, 60 x 72 in., Princeton University, New Jersey Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the works in Moore’s 2018 exhibition, Recovery, offer further evidence. In 2017, the artist had a seizure that required brain surgery. His recovery was long and arduous, but he came through. The following year, Detroit’s you’re not coping? Or when you’re not taking breaks in this capitalisDavid Klein Gallery featured Moore’s silverpoint drawings, large tic, workaholic society? What happens when you see black men and oil paintings (on both canvas and copper), and a video exploring his women dying on the news all the time?” experience as a black male in a medical setting. Inspired by a sketch 2018 and 2019 were significant, even instrumental, for Moore. he had completed one month before the seizure — depicting a black He used his Hodder Fellowship from Princeton’s Lewis Center for man lying on a table surrounded by doctors — Moore introduced this the Arts to paint security guards, cooks, and cleaners on the universame sense of trauma and strain to his art. It posed questions such sity campus. Clyde, a facilities worker, was the first person Moore as: “What happens to your body — physically and emotionally — when approached; he drew his subject in real time, on the spot, just after asking him where to find a barber. These portraits are the product of chance encounters and meaningful conversations — and many have now found a home in Princeton’s permanent collections. This spirit of diversity and interconnectivity is emblematic of our times, and we look forward to watching what Moore achieves next at Princeton and beyond. Information: mariomoorestudio.com, dkgallery.com CHARLES MOORE is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and a curatorial resident at Artis/International Studio & Curatorial Program. He is a regular contributor to Artnet and Artsy Editorial, and is not related to Mario Moore.
During and After the Battle, 2020, oil on linen, 68 x 80 in., Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans
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BY MICHAEL J. PEARCE
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
ADAM MILLER & SALVATORE GUERRERA: WHEN ARTIST & PATRON GO BIG
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n this historic year of elemental iconoclasm, when monuments to yesterday’s flawed heroes and Confederate generals alike are dishonored or ripped down, perhaps it is strange to speak of the importance of sharing humanity’s great ideas. Although it is easy to be discouraged by the graffiti, boarded-up windows, and overall mood of destructive anarchy, now — more than ever — we need to be reminded of the good ideas that have shaped us, and to prioritize them over those that are evil. Mobs tearing at the scabbed sins of history cannot erase its wounds, but their destructive zeal will change the aesthetic priorities of our shared cityscapes, sometimes perhaps for the better. After the spray paint and shattered stones have been removed, empty plinths will remind us that society once prioritized the evil of inequality, and now it does not. It is likely that decades will pass before new sculptures fill these empty spaces, for the fragile sphere of public discourse is too easily punctured by insensitive choices, and well-intentioned committees will slow their procedures to a crawl. All public art is political, and there is little chance of finding consensus in this divided time. Because public art is frozen, we will have to depend upon private patronage to nurture the big ideas of our time. But what are they? The Israeli scholar Yuval Noah Harari’s epic survey of the big ideas, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015), has inspired the brilliant painter Adam Miller (b. 1979) and his patron Salvatore Guerrera to produce an ambitious cycle of four 8-by-10-foot oil paintings. Together these scenes will span human history and reveal its most important strands: the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, the scientific revolution of 500 years ago, and the present. Conveying so complex a narrative on so massive a scale is an impressive challenge, but thanks to Guerrera’s financial support, Miller is now well into the process. Theirs is a beautiful relationship that is producing fine and fabulous work. Miller has completed the preliminary drawings and has almost finished the initial layers of his paintings.
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Salvatore Guerrera (left) and Adam Miller stand before Québec in 2017.
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Twilight in Arcadia, 2013, oil on linen, 72 x 96 in., collection of Salvatore Guerrera
His compilation of superbly drawn figures — composed as elegantly as a Raphael or Rubens, conceived with their subtle humanistic understanding, and equaling their technical skill — is a masterpiece in the making. The figures join together to create a tidal wave of rich ideas that demand close inspection; they are filled with symbolic details that inspire the imagination and affirm the simple idea that humanity is on an endless journey of self-discovery. This is truly art for our time. FIRST ENCOUNTERS Salvatore Guerrera owns the successful Montreal design build company SAJO, which works with such prestigious clients as Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Prada. He describes his first encounter with Miller in 2013: “Prior to meeting Adam at his studio in New York, I spent 10 years familiarizing myself
Québec, 2017, oil on linen, 105 x 118 in., collection of Salvatore Guerrera
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Orpheus and Eurydice, 2019, oil on linen, 78 x 56 in., collection of Salvatore Guerrera
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Untitled (Study for Sapiens #1), 2020, graphite on paper, 36 x 44 in., courtesy of the artist
with young figurative artists. I was a bit tired of this modernism where anything shared in a creative way was very inward. So I was looking for figurative art where you can get a sensation, because there’s not much that abstraction can tell you other than what is going on in the artist’s mind. I came upon a series of works Adam had produced, including Twilight in Arcadia. As I was attending a design show in New York, I called him up. When I first met him, I bought this beautiful piece that I had seen online, and finally I got a sense of real figurative art. In Adam I found someone I would like to work with. I don’t think he lives in these times; he’s an old soul, and a very gentle soul as well. He could have been around for a thousand years.” Guerrera knew he was in the presence of someone special, so he immediately commissioned Miller to create a huge painting. “I was really happy,” the artist recalls. “I had been working on a new, more ambitious body of works, but was not confident they would be successful. I initially had no idea what the new commission would be, or how large. When we met the next year and Sal presented the idea for Québec, I was daunted by its scale and complexity, but also excited, as I was convinced that monumental public art needs to be rehabilitated.”
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Miller immersed himself in the history of the Canadian province of Québec, working to compress the complexities of 450 years into one image. It was always intended to be unveiled in 2017, which marked Canada’s 150th anniversary, 225 years of parliamentary institutions in Québec, and Montreal’s 375th birthday. Guerrera says he chose this subject not only to mark these milestones, but also out of gratitude for Québec, which he believes has made his success in business possible. (His parents arrived there as emigrants from Italy in the 1950s.) This first commission took three years to complete. Québec is huge (nine feet high by 10 feet wide) and contains 145 figures. First unveiled in New York, it was then exhibited at Montreal’s McCord Museum and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts de Québec. Ultimately Guerrera negotiated its long-term loan to the National Assembly of Québec. Miller and Guerrera had so enjoyed collaborating that they soon began discussing another commission, Orpheus and Eurydice, which Miller finished painting in 2019. THINKING BIGGER Soon the two men began conceiving an even larger painting, so grand that it would encompass the entire history of humankind. They began reading and discussing Harari’s Sapiens, the works of Carl Jung, and Jordan B. Peterson’s Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. The dialogue between patron and artist became as subtle and important for the
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production of the masterpiece as the conversation between the artist’s hand and mind. Both men collaborated to serve the project’s grand idea. Guerrera says, “My journey with Adam has been to look at different historical events, what we understand and what we learn from them, and to try to interpret them for today. What’s living? We’re a living organism that has sensations. Art is one of those sensations, like music, literature, dance. A picture says a lot for us. Where are we headed? I was looking at the Book of Genesis. Where do we come from and where are we going? Eternity. Do things exist that are eternal? They must!” Like the Renaissance masters whom he and Guerrera admire, Miller mixed Christian and hermetic symbolism together in his preparatory drawings for the four canvases that will comprise his interpretation of Sapiens. Humanism is brought into the present. The artist explains, “It is essentially a mannerist allegory, very complicated, very elaborate, made to be read by people who have time and education and knowledge. I wanted to bring back a genre that’s considered a little bit elitist and out of touch now, but I think it’s really important. I am an elitist, so I’m embracing it and going with it. It is just what it is.” Guerrera admires Miller’s gift for expressing big ideas as allegories: “I love his mythologies. He interprets them well, and that’s what really hooked me — especially the characters he’s dreamed up.” Their patronage relationship has given Miller the time he needs to thoroughly develop the ideas the two men shape during long hours of conversation. He begins with imaginative sketches — essentially
first drafts of ideas — and then makes more detailed drawings of individual figures. Next he brings in models and recreates the drawn works from life. Some might say the patron-artist relationship is a regression, an anti-egalitarian return to the time when an aristocrat commissioned imagery that agreed with his worldview. But Miller points to great ideas and artworks created during the Renaissance when “you had a lot of princes and city-states competing on a small scale.” He says, “This allowed them to come up with a lot of interesting ideas artistically. I think we have to mine those ideas. We can’t just say we’re in a different time, so those ideas are invalid now, because then we’re going to end up with just one idea left — the contemporary idea — and that’s not going to work for a lot of people. So for the world to be more fair, you have to look to the past, and to the small scale.” Now that public art has reached an impasse and public discourse has been reduced to populism, we need enlightened patrons, Miller says: “Patrons who understand the work artists are trying to do — even beyond what they are currently able to do — who allow them to develop ambitious work that need not pander and lower itself to the tastes of undereducated curators. Who make it unnecessary to engage in cheap and tawdry gimmicks that grab the attention of cynical journalists. Working with Sal has been a great opportunity to make pieces for a discerning and generous patron of the kind that artists need to fulfill their greatest potential.”
Untitled (Study for Sapiens #2), 2020, graphite on paper, 36 x 44 in., courtesy of the artist
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Untitled (Study for Sapiens #3), 2020, graphite on paper, 36 x 44 in., courtesy of the artist
SAPIENS: ACT 1 The preparatory drawing for the first of the four Sapiens scenes is a cascading allegory of early civilization. At top left, a pair of monkeys in a tree begin the story of humanity in its primordial state. This is the innocence of the garden of Eden, before knowledge brings about our expulsion from it. Among the wonders of Miller’s artistry is that the composition flows quickly, dynamically, rolling like a wave of narrative, and yet we must look carefully at the drawing to grasp its many meanings. We see a cascade of moments captured from the human experience: the cosmic bull looking down from a cloud, rain, natural fertilization of the earth — a simple world before the development of consciousness. Then there is the invention of speech, parrots flying around the heads of wondering men, the repetition of ideas as a shared wisdom forms. At left is a kneeling man discovering time with an hourglass, and above him stands a man wearing a foliage coronet and holding a Janus-faced head that symbolizes the links between life and death: he does not notice the serpent biting his other hand, stealing his innocence. In the foreground is the archetypal first family: the bearded man has a bull on his coronet, echoing the bull god above. This virile man brings the seed of life as he and the mother protect their young children from a dragon in the water and from wild animals — threats that are part of nature. Before the mother lies the pearl of wisdom in its shell. Miller says he’s “making an argument that the family unit and the order of humanity are not really something that can be reimagined so easily; they’re built into our bones.”
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A sculptor works in the right foreground, shaping the beginning of spiritual beliefs. He is the origin of art. Miller says, “The arts are connected to spirituality, and always have been.” At far right two men trade at the dawn of commerce, watched nervously by Flora, the ancient goddess of fertility, who is sensibly apprehensive of what the implications of this might be. Following the flow of the curved composition we meet Bacchus, at top right, holding a grape vine growing up to the sky. This is the beginning of shamanism and magic. Beside Bacchus, hunters form pre-agricultural society, bearing the pregnant deer as the sacrificial price paid for that advance. SAPIENS: ACT 2 Moving forward into the second stage of man’s progress, Prometheus at left takes the crown following his capture of fire from the heavens: power has been taken from the old order and given to the new. An old man holds the pearl we saw at the feet of the family before. Now commerce and agriculture develop in tandem with the early religions that Miller represents with the cosmic figure flying at the top. At right is the priest, a hybrid of early mediators between man and the divine. Miller explains, “Part of my rationale for going back through time is establishing the place we came from, making the point that what we are today isn’t an accident. It is actually something very deliberately and logically structured to function in a certain way. It comes from our history and you can’t just remake it based on a whim.” The new king of heaven is
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Untitled (Study for Sapiens #4), 2020, graphite on paper, 36 x 44 in., courtesy of the artist
Jupiter — the god of power. Larger forms of government develop into a more recognizable vision of what we are now. SAPIENS: ACT 3 In the third scene, technology and industrialization develop. The sun king stands in the background at left, wearing the corona and with a kneeling disciple offering architecture for worship. He is the Colossus of Rhodes, and of imperial power. To his right Miller has drawn Trajan’s Column, the ancient Roman pillar symbolizing victory, dominance, and empire, and before it a flag-bearer; here we witness the rise of the nation-state. In the foreground, the seductive new order puts to sleep the old traditions of hunter-gatherers and farmers: at left a woman gives the oldest of them a pair of poppies, the flower of forgetfulness, which is humankind’s blessing and curse. The old man’s coronet has only a few leaves remaining. At center, drunken satyrs lead a female figure riding a pregnant sphinx in a futile attempt to outsmart fate, ignoring the previous lessons of humankind. She naively releases a dove of peace while a Medusa tries to restrain her hand. The taciturn sphinx is led by folly (a blindfolded child) and by deceit, who is crowned with a serpentine diadem. They trample over a third child, truth, who wears the all-seeing eye and holds a mirror reflecting this awful scene. This reckless group leads humanity toward the catastrophic, mechanized wars of the 20th century, symbolized by the cannon and the invention of gunpowder, seen above the trains and factories of the Industrial Revolution. At the bottom, another child plays with the sun contained in a display glass, the helix that harnesses the atom’s power. Death hovers at top right like a bird of prey waiting to feast. SAPIENS: ACT 4 The ruins of buildings seen in Act 3 reappear at the lower left of this fourth scene beneath the fallen victims of a battle for possession of the globe. This is a fight reaching up into space, where men struggle while straddling a Sputnik. At the bottom, Leda brings new ideas into this frightening world as children emerging from broken eggs, while men hold icons of a mask, apple, and little window representing three of the most dominant tech companies (Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft). These F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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symbols of the postmodern era are raised as offerings to three sensual goddesses crowning a baptismal monument, which is the fountain of youth, a comment on the technological quest to conquer death. Behind the fountain a helix reaches upward, the sky-tower that connects heaven and earth, inescapably linked to the fate of the biblical Tower of Babel. We are at the end of the cycle and we return to the monkeys among tombs of the past and the tree of knowledge (or of life?), an arcadian retreat to primordial times. Fortunately, the rainbow at top right recalls Jehovah’s promise never to eradicate humanity again. It is a rare privilege to witness a virtuoso artist’s process, and even rarer to see behind the curtain that usually shields the relationship between artist and patron. But this story will not reach its culmination until we see the finished paintings and can experience the presentation of these big ideas. Now the drawings are complete, and Miller is working on producing painted studies, working out the color balance of the compositions. In 2021 he will begin the full-size canvases. The small paintings will remain in Guererra’s personal collection, but he has decided to give the completed cycle of full-size works to an as-yet-unannounced museum, sharing access to this masterpiece of the great and good ideas. Two thousand years ago the philosopher Aristotle provided a list of the virtues of mankind; this spectacular example of philanthropy is itself an example of one of them. With it Guerrera demonstrates his liberality on a magnificent scale and personifies generous magnanimity. Most importantly, in this age of lies, Guerrera and Miller have had the courage to tell the truth. Information: All works illustrated here were created by Adam Miller (adam millerart.com). The Québec project is commemorated by a handsome 60-page book containing essays by François-Marc Gagnon, Alexandre Turgeon, and Donald Kuspit, as well as Clarence Epstein’s interview with the artist. MICHAEL J. PEARCE is the author of Art in the Age of Emergence. He is professor of art at California Lutheran University. 2 0 2 0
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BY VICTOR DEUPI
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EMILIO SANCHEZ AND THE CARIBBEAN VERNACULAR W hen we think of the great figures of 20th-century Cuban art, Emilio Sanchez (1921–1999) does not spring readily to mind. As a realist who specialized in painting the architecture and landscapes of the West Indies, Sanchez was attracted to Cuban folklore and to architectural scenes of everyday life (“the vernacular”) rather than the great historical narratives of Western civilization.1 Moreover, he did not experiment with abstract expressionism, which was in vogue during his formative years. Rather, his keen eye and remarkable ability to edit out incidental elements made him a creator of architectural enigmas with dreamlike effects, as if the buildings in his paintings, prints, and drawings existed only in his memory or imagination. One of the few Cuban-born artists of his generation to live and work primarily in New York City, Sanchez was a 20th-century Hispanic flâneur who keenly observed and recorded the vibrancy of the architecture, landscapes, and daily life of the Americas. His unorthodox — that is, traditional rather than avant-garde — experimentations suggest at the very least that Cuban modernism at mid-century can be seen as comprising several (somewhat divergent) avenues of practice.
A COSMOPOLITAN UPBRINGING Emilio Sanchez was born in the countryside of Camagüey (Cuba’s largest province) to an ancient Spanish family that was among the young country’s leading households in the sugar and cattle industries.
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Untitled (Ventanita entreabierta), 1981, oil and watercolor on paper, 35 5/8 x 43 3/8 in., Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Gift of the Emilio Sanchez Foundation, 2010.25.2
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His parents sent him to the U.S. in 1932 to escape the atrocities of Gerardo Machado’s presidency and to study at such exclusive boarding schools as Fessenden in Newton, Massachusetts (1934–35), and Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut (1935–39). After his parents divorced in 1937, Sanchez’s mother married the exiled Peruvian writer and painter Felipe Cossío del Pomar and relocated to Mexico, where the latter founded the School of Fine Arts in San Miguel de Allende.2 Immediately Sanchez’s travel routine came to encompass not only Cuba and the U.S. but also Mexico, and though he never enrolled in his stepfather’s art school, he was exposed there to the stimulating environment fostered by leading Mexican painters and sculptors. Young Sanchez was clearly impressed, but his father encouraged him to pursue an artistic career only after securing a proper college education, concerned that being an artist was a less than reputable profession in Cuba. After a brief stint at Yale University (1939–40), Sanchez transferred to the University of Virginia in the summer of 1941. He spent two years in Charlottesville, but the university cleared out in the summer of 1943 due to the Second World War. Despite having registered for the draft, he decided to enroll at the celebrated Art Students League of New York and pursue his dream of becoming a painter. Sanchez attended the League for four years while also taking summer courses at Columbia University. He eagerly absorbed the League’s traditional training in figurative art and draftsmanship, which was modeled on the French atelier system. Its mission was not to promote, in the words of critic Raymond J. Steiner, “poets in paint … but to make thorough craftsmen, good workmen, people, who, when they have thrust a thumb through a palette, know what to do with the other hand.”3 We know that Sanchez was taught at the League by such artists as Robert Ward Johnson, Reginald Marsh, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and at Columbia by Dong Kingman. Marsh, described by Emilio’s stepfather as “the most intrepid explorer of
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Emilio Sanchez and his mother, Estrella Fonts, in San Miguel de Allende, photograph taken c. 1941, Colleción Cossío del Pomar, M.A.
Untitled (Tug Boats in New York Harbor), late 1940s, watercolor on paper, 15 1/4 x 22 in., Queens Museum, New York, 2010.6.19
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(ABOVE) Atotonilco, Mexico, early 1950s, watercolor on paper, 14 1/4 x 11 in., Lillian Loewenbaum Collection, Austin
(TOP RIGHT) Photograph of an unlocated scene
in St. George’s, Grenada, 1954, ink on paper; photo courtesy: Art Services Papers, 1926–2009, Vasari Project, Special Collections & Archives, Miami-Dade Public Library System
(RIGHT) Photograph of Patio en Matanzas, 1953, ink on paper, photo
courtesy: Art Services Papers, 1926–2009, Vasari Project, Special Collections & Archives, Miami-Dade Public Library System
New York,” shared his passion for drawing and painting in situ with the young Sanchez.4 As a result, he would spend much of his career depicting architectural views of New York City, including endless vistas of sunrises and sunsets across the East and Hudson Rivers. Equally Marsh-like are his society ladies, harlequins, and cabaret scenes, which fascinated him as much as the cityscapes. Growing up, Sanchez would have appreciated the choteos (caricatures) particularly popular at all levels of Cuban society, and in New York he quickly grasped how certain artists such as Marsh sought to embrace modernism through this same lens. If Marsh taught Sanchez how to observe, the Japanese American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi taught him lithography and woodcut printing, while Ward Johnson instructed him in figure drawing and naturalist renderings. The Chinese American artist Dong Kingman taught Sanchez to paint brilliant watercolor cityscapes and landscapes in situ, depicting the moment as he saw it. Finally, Sanchez was well aware of the League’s impressive history and of the many realist artists who intersected with it. His stepfather wrote extensively on Thomas Hart Benton, and Sanchez became a lifelong friend of Will Barnet. Other masters such as Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, and Charles Burchfield inspired him to develop a kind of lyrical architecture that was often devoid of people or extraneous matter. While studying at the League, Sanchez developed a familiarity with New York City’s streets, people, and dramatic vistas. With pencil, pen, and brush in hand, he began to walk the city to draw and paint from street
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level, balconies, rooftops, and quays, often mingling with the vendors and bustling crowds. His approach was entirely representational, displaying a clear preference for realism over abstraction, but also using memory and imagination to draw a curious parallel between New York and Havana, between North America and Cuba. Sanchez was not particularly interested in the souvenir views that might normally delight other new arrivals, seeking out instead a deeply personal interpretation of New York City. In his essay in the Sanchez monograph Hard Light, John Angeline writes, “Sanchez has often been referred to as a Realist painter, but his is
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Beach House, 1950, oil on canvas, 30 x 45 3/4 in., Hugh Harrison Collection, West Palm Beach
Photograph of an unlocated watercolor of Colonia Jagey (“El Chalecito”),
1954; photo courtesy: Art Services Papers, 1926–2009, Vasari Project, Special Collections & Archives, Miami-Dade Public Library System
neither the realism of academic conservatism nor the socially engaged, activist art that is also suggested by the realist label. Rather, Sanchez occupies a uniquely American territory wherein modernist investigations meet vernacular subject matter.”5 The architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson notes in his essay “Learning from the American Vernacular” that the vernacular was “both conservative and radical, pragmatically based in experience but [also] a source for new architectural solutions.”6 Sanchez’s travels throughout the U.S. (primarily New England and the Mid-Atlantic region) allowed him to observe vernacular architecture that, in turn, likely inspired his later signature style, which one might call Caribbean vernacular. From 1948 to 1950, Sanchez took several trips to Europe, including England, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. His many sketchbooks are filled with drawings of castles, streetscapes, rooftops, interior scenes of hotels and restaurants, landscapes, and harbor scenes. In Europe he completed few finished works, so it seems the primary focus of these trips was to round out his education. During this period, Sanchez also began traveling more regularly to Cuba, which was then dominated by North American tastes and preferences. As a native, he could move quickly beyond its conspicuous consumerism in order to seek out true expressions of Cuban buildings, landscapes, and people. Sanchez’s Cuba sketchbook from 1949 shows how, from early in his career, he was observing architectural details in Old Havana. Colored windows (vitrales), fanF I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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lights (medio puntos), colonnettes, light posts, and balconies fascinated him, and the cathedral’s stained glass rated among his favorite ornaments in the capital. Sanchez also produced images of its lesser-known streets, plazas, and buildings, often highlighting the painful reality of poverty and the polarization of pre-revolutionary life. Sanchez was of course privileged, and travel allowed him to mingle with the elite throughout the island. Particularly strong was his love of the countryside and savannah landscapes of central and southern Cuba, where his family and friends owned large sugar plantations and cattle farms. Trips to Matanzas, Camagüey, Cienfuegos, and Trinidad allowed Sanchez to 2 0 2 0
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Cañaverales (Cane Fields), 1950s, lithograph on paper, 16 1/2 x 23 in., Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc., Gift of the Emilio Sanchez Foundation
explore both the aristocratic lifestyles and the vernacular dwellings of the campesinos (farmers). His watercolor views of Camagüey (late 1940s) present a series of rustic shacks with figures staring back at him with curiosity. As he explained during a Brooklyn Museum interview in 1965, “You see all these places that are completely stark, they’re unpopulated and the house carries itself, as if the house were a person; you can give it a lot of human quality. And you don’t see the people, but you can feel them, and you can hear them because they’re watching out of every window.”7 It was also in the late 1940s that Sanchez spent considerable time in San Miguel de Allende where his stepfather, Felipe Cossío del Pomar, had founded the Escuela de Bellas Artes in 1937. Conceived as the “Bauhaus of Latin America,” it served as both a vocational school for local artisans and a university center for those seeking inspiration in Hispano-American culture. Cossío del Pomar was himself a reputable painter who had studied in Paris in the circle of Picasso, Chagall, and Matisse. His faculty included such renowned Mexican artists as Rufino Tamayo, Carlos Mérida, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, all of whom taught there throughout the ’40s. It was through the lens of such painters, sculptors, muralists, and graphic artists that Sanchez captured the daily life of San Miguel and neighboring towns and monasteries with ink, graphite, and watercolor. He especially favored depicting their colonial buildings, campesinos, and statuary, as well as the folk dancers at the 18th-century sanctuary of Atotonilco just outside the city.
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ON THE MOVE At the start of 1950, Sanchez was approaching his 30th birthday and a new phase of his artistic career was about to dawn. Over the course of the decade, he traveled throughout Cuba and to various Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, Haiti, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and Grenada. Sanchez’s work from this period confirms his ongoing interest in the region’s vernacular architecture, and also many more prints and oil paintings. Rural buildings in the Vueltabajera region of Cuba (south of and around Havana) increasingly occupied his attention, and he produced his most well-known studies as the Cuban Revolution movement was gaining momentum (1953–59). Sanchez also created penetrating interior views of rural structures, often portraying their haunting and expressive emptiness. In these mostly one-point perspective graphite studies, deep views inside reveal the intricate contrast of materials and playful geometric properties. Admiring these works, it cannot surprise us that Sanchez had a fondness for Edward Hopper and the Ashcan School artists, and he collected books about them throughout his life. Isolated buildings, depopulated spaces, the destructive forces of nature, and the ephemeral nature of human artifice all appear in these works. Here there is no pretense or parody, just pure form. Throughout the 1950s, Sanchez exhibited his art in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Mexico, Paris, London, Miami, Philadelphia,
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El Ventanal (The Large Window), 1971/73, oil on canvas, 72 x 36 in., Edmundo Perez de Cobos Collection, Coral Gables, Florida
and of course Havana. He received a high degree of recognition in the press as a relevant, albeit unorthodox, voice alongside the better-known Cuban vanguard and abstract artists of his generation. Approaching the age of 40, Sanchez matured as an artist just as the Cuban Revolution was taking shape in the form of a new government. His compatriots were hungry for him to emerge as a bright new star of Cuban revolutionary art. That, however, was not his dream or concern. After two decades of regular visits and participation in the cultural life of the island, it was time for Sanchez to abandon his homeland, return to his apartment in New York, and start over. The years Sanchez spent in Cuba and the Caribbean in the 1940s and ’50s were undoubtedly fundamental to his development as an artist and as a representative of Latin American art in general. His relationship with Cuba was also reciprocal as he not only gained a great deal of inspiration by visiting the island, but also brought with him a New York sensibility and approach not represented by anyone else there. While proponents of this period refer to it as Cuba’s “Golden Age” and its critics as the “Mistress of Pleasure,” Sanchez was able to cut through the conspicuous consumption and tourism in order to curate a distinct vision of what was a truly sad and beautiful place. Sanchez would spend the next 40 years living in New York and touring the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, but he never visited Cuba again. In this sense, his art presents us with unique and complex insights into a mid-century modernist who specialized in architectural representation as a way of searching for a sense of cultural identity in a land to which he would never return, but which would remain in his soul forever. VICTOR DEUPI is a lecturer at the University of Miami School of Architecture. His book Emilio Sanchez in New York and Latin America was published by Routledge this July. His previous books include Architectural Temperance: Spain and Rome, 1700–1759 (Routledge, 2015), Transformations in Classical Architecture: New Directions in Research and Practice (Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, 2018), and Cuban Modernism: Mid-Century Architecture 1940–1970 (with Jean-Francois Lejeune, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2020). Dr. Deupi thanks Ann Koll ( former Director of the Emilio Sanchez Foundation) and Erik Stapper (Trustee of the Emilio Sanchez Estate) for their insights on this article. Information: All works illustrated here were created by Emilio Sanchez. For more information, visit emiliosanchezfoundation.org. Endnotes 1 For Sanchez’s life and work, see Ann Koll (ed.), Emilio Sanchez: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Prints (New York: Estate of Emilio Sanchez, 2001); and Ann Koll (ed.), Hard Light: The Work of Emilio Sanchez (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2011). 2 For the school, see Felipe Cossío del Pomar, La historia poco contada de San Miguel de Allende, ed. Maline Gilbert McCalla (Edmonton: Jane Anne Evans, 2017). 3 Raymond J. Steiner, The Art Students League of New York: A History (Saugerties: CSS Publications, 1999), 99. 4 Felipe Cossío del Pomar, La rebelión de los pintores (Mexico: Editorial Leyenda, 1945), 181. 5 John Angeline, “Emilio Sanchez: An American Modernist,” in Hard Light, 29. 6 Richard Guy Wilson, “Learning from the American Vernacular,” Architectural Review 180, no. 1077 (November 1986), 77. 7 Arlene Jacobowitz, “Listening to Pictures,” 1967, emiliosanchezfoundation.org/ interview.html.
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BY PEYTON SKIPWITH
H I S T O R I C M A S T E R S
REDISCOVERING
RICHARD EURICH
R
ichard Eurich (1903–1992) is one of 20th-century Britain’s most under-recognized artists, but that will definitely change this autumn with the publication of Andrew Lambirth’s The Art of Richard Eurich. This book is very much about Eurich’s art, which was rich, varied, and idiosyncratic, in sharp contrast to his life, which was mundane and uneventful. Richard Ernst Eurich was born into a Quaker family of AngloGerman descent in Bradford, Yorkshire. When he was 11, they moved a few miles north to Ilkley, where the country air was deemed better for his mother’s tuberculosis. Eurich attended Bradford College of Arts and Crafts, then won a prized place at the Slade School of Art at University College, London. In 1934 he married Mavis Pope and they settled at Dibden Purlieu in Hampshire, adjacent to both Southampton Water and the New Forest. They lived there for the rest of his life — almost 58 years. As a painter, Eurich worked a regular five-and-a-half day week and kept office hours, while for relaxation he walked his dog and made music; he was an accomplished violinist and also played the organ and clavichord. He had little interest in travel, leaving Britain only twice — once in August 1939 (of all times) aboard a cargo ship skirting the seacoast between Antwerp and Dunkirk, and then a postwar visit to Switzerland, where one of his daughters was living. This is hardly the life one would expect to inspire the extraordinary variety of work that poured steadily from Eurich’s brush and pencil for three quarters of a century. Eurich’s native city of Bradford was once a center for the wool trade that attracted a vibrant community of merchants from around the world, and indeed one neighborhood there is still known as Little Germany. There were also strong connections with the United States and Australia. The Eurichs were originally part of this mercantile influx, but Richard’s
Self-Portrait with Pipe, 1938, oil on panel, 10 5/8 x 8 1/8 in., Bradford Museums and Galleries, England, UK
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In the Museum, 1937, oil on panel, 20 1/4 x 16 3/4 in., collection of the author
which Priestley donated Eurich’s Self-Portrait with Pipe (1938) in 1943. Many years later Eurich recalled, “It was the look of Bradford that made me want to paint. The mills and the steep streets were so beautiful.” He was a somewhat solitary child and loved to sit at an upper window in the family home looking down on the city’s bustling streets. This aloofness made Eurich aware that, from his eyrie, he could see more of what was going on than could those on the ground — a realization that would bear fruit in the ambitious compositions to come. Throughout his life he often adopted an elevated perspective — performing a kind of mental levitation. This tendency was never more effectively employed than in Eurich’s great World War II painting Dunkirk Beaches, May 1940. A CHILD AT HEART I knew Eurich in the last decade of his life; in the obituary I wrote for The Independent, I described him as “one of those all too rare beings who manage to retain, even into great old age, a child’s sense of wonderment.” There was nothing childish about his art (though he did create an exhibition titled Paintings for Children), yet he never lost that youthful capacity to take at face value those quirks of vision that make others rub their eyes in disbelief. A fine example is Eurich’s little seascape The Gathering of the Waters, in which the bather appears to be jumping over a wave as though it were a brick wall. For many years I have owned an enigmatic painting, In the Museum, in which the viewer is obliged to peer around the beautifully observed rear of a suit of armor into a bare room (domi-
father had become a distinguished bacteriologist and authority on anthrax, a disease that shortened the lives of many wool-workers. Located on the eastern side of the steep, craggy Pennine hills, Bradford was a bustling cosmopolitan place in the early 20th century. In his novel Bright Day, Bradfordian J.B. Priestley described his fictionalised city of Bruddersford as seeming to “have the kind of ugliness that could not only be tolerated but often enjoyed: it was grim but not mean.” Bradford was a city of culture, due partly to its ethnically diverse population, and it boasted two theaters, two music halls, a concert hall, and an art gallery (Cartwright Hall), to
Road Clear, 1978, oil on board, 13 3/4 x 21 5/8 in., private collection, UK
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nated by a model of a Napoleonic-era sailing ship) toward a self-portrait of Eurich wearing a hat. This scene is not as straightforward as it first appears, and I often wonder what was going on in the artist’s mind: he painted it in 1937, the bloodiest year of the Spanish Civil War, so perhaps his pacifist conscience was disturbed? Eurich’s unquestioning acceptance of the conjunction of real and imagined worlds often resulted in such innocent-seeming surrealism, though without the psychological overtones of Salvador Dalí
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or Max Ernst. He veered closer to the American poet Wallace Stevens, who wrote “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” In Britain you are never more than 70 miles from the coast, but Bradford is about as far away as you can get. As a small boy, before he ever laid eyes on the sea, Eurich fell in love with it through a postcard, much as other boys fell for movie stars or sporting heroes. Thus he was drawing imaginary seascapes well before he actually saw the North Sea on a family
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Dunkirk Beaches, May 1940, 1940, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
The Gathering of the Waters, 1970, oil on board, 17 3/4 x 19 3/4 in., private collection, UK
nature may not be painted. With snow it is silence, with the sea it is movement.
holiday to Whitby in 1911. In his recently re-published Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in Twentieth-Century English Painting (1991/2020), the artist and critic Christopher Neve writes: The sea, the sea. Baudelaire thought of it as a landscape in perpetual movement. To paint the sea convincingly is a near impossibility. It has to be experienced. Like snow on the land, its essential F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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Eurich painted both sea and snow with total conviction, and snow has seldom been painted more convincingly than in his Road Clear. This is not the pristine snow of an alpine travel poster, but slushy snow piled and banked beside a narrow country road. And so it was with the sea: we can immediately grasp Eurich’s understanding of, and intimacy with, this subject in all its moods. His sea is not a metaphor for seas in general, but a specific sea. It was the English Channel he painted most often, from the time he first saw it in 1930 (in Dorset) until his death in 1992. That initial encounter soon sparked more, and within three years the Redfern Gallery was presenting his exhibition Paintings of Dorset Seaports. Once he and his wife, Mavis, settled in Dibden Purlieu, Eurich drew his sea imagery from Southampton Water, which separates the English mainland from the Isle of Wight. This maritime thoroughfare features a constant stream of pleasure boats, dredgers, and ocean liners, and its shoreline is animated by a mix of bathers, picnickers, idlers, and dog-walkers. Though Eurich was attracted by all of these aspects, he was equally content to paint the lapping of waves on the shore, animated by nothing more than a seagull or a passing flock of birds. Late in his life, Mavis would drive him to the shore every day and he would sit in the car observing, perhaps making a few cursory pencil notes. Then he would go back to the studio and paint. Eurich had painted the sea many times before his 1930 visit to the English Channel, particularly the North Sea at Whitby, from which Captain Cook had sailed to Australia. Recollections of Whitby informed his 1954 painting Queen of the Sea, just as Bradford, long after he had left it, continued inspiring works such as The Battle of the Boggarts (1948), The Mummers (1952), and Northern Landscape (1957). In his new book, Andrew Lambirth describes the last of these as the “quintessential image of the seduction of memory.” IN HIS OWN WORDS Fortunately, Eurich left us his diaries and an unpublished autobiography written in the mid-1950s, As the Twig Is Bent. He was also an enthusiastic correspondent and we are lucky that his early patron Sidney Schiff and his fellow Royal Academician Bernard Dunstan preserved his letters, now 2 0 2 0
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Flight of Birds over the Sea, 1988, oil on board, 19 x 28 in., private collection, UK
in London’s Tate Archive. In his new book, Andrew Lambirth has taken full advantage of these primary sources, which reveal in Eurich’s own words his responses to people, sights, and events. For example, we learn not only of his early and enduring love for the art of J.M.W. Turner, but also of Paul Cézanne. (As a boy Eurich would cycle over to Farnley Hall, the seat of Turner’s patron Walter Fawkes and his descendants, to view the family’s collection of Turner paintings.) He wrote that “Turner has always been my very own particular god,” while Cézanne “almost makes one weep. What a man he was, the perfection of his painting makes one gasp. I can’t understand the lack of appreciation by painters who ought to know better.” In fact it was Eurich’s admiration for Cézanne that provoked Professor Henry Tonks to note laconically in one of Eurich’s Slade School assessments: “This student is being influenced by painters who have not been dead long enough to be respectable.” From childhood onward, drawing was important to Eurich. He wrote, “The mere act of putting a pencil to paper and looking and trying to record something seen means that one has been in real contact with nature, and viewing an old sketchbook with only the slightest of drawings in it, makes a flashback in the memory which a photograph album is powerless to do.” Eurich’s first exhibition consisted entirely
Northern Landscape, 1957, oil on canvas, 40 1/8 x 50 3/8 in., private collection, UK
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considered it dishonest to conceal these methods; rather, this was a painter’s response to the craftsman’s ideal of “revealed construction.” Eurich’s straightforwardness, combined with his inbred honesty, made subterfuge impossible. As a Quaker and conscientious objector, Eurich was determined not to fight when World War II broke out in September 1939, shortly after his return from the Belgian and French coast. Initially he sought various civilian jobs, but preferred to put his talents and knowledge to more productive use. At Dunkirk over eight days in June 1940, nearly 340,000 British and Allied troops were evacuated in a flotilla of 800 small craft. Eurich promptly wrote to Kenneth Clark, then head of the War Artists Advisory Committee, saying that this was the subject he had been waiting for: “Surely it should be painted and I am wondering if I would be considered for the job! It Bombardment of the Coast near Trapani, seems to me that the traditional sea painting of [Willem] van 1943, oil on canvas, 30 x 50 in., National de Velde and Turner should be carried on to enrich and record Maritime Museum, London our heritage.” Clark agreed and in due course Eurich was given the honorary commission of Captain in the Royal Marines, based at Portsmouth. Despite being painted from secondary sources, the works he produced at this time are among his finest ever; they include Dunkirk Beaches, May 1940; The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940; The Landing at Dieppe 19th August 1942; and Bombardment of the Coast near Trapani, Sicily, by HMS King George V and Howe, 12 July 1943. The latter two reveal Eurich’s great love for Turner, and the Trapani scene is as close as he ever got to a direct homage, specifically the master’s Fighting Temeraire. The Withdrawal from Dunkirk invited much praise in 1941 when it was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition Britain at War. One of Eurich’s more extraordinary and unusual post-war commissions came from Evelyn Waugh in 1951. An early admirer of Victorian art that was then highly unfashionable, the famous author owned a pair of somewhat satirical paintings by Thomas Musgrave Joy (1812–1866). The Joys of Travel 1751 shows stagecoach travelers being held up by highwaymen, while The Joys of Travel 1851 depicts travelers on a crowded train learning that their journey will be delayed. Waugh commissioned Eurich to paint a companion piece — The Pleasures of Travel 1951 — showing a scene of alarm on a crowded airplane as an engine catches fire. The range of expressions on the passengers’ faces is a brilliant study in psychology, and a summaThe Pleasures of Travel 1951, 1951–52, oil on canvas, 20 x 25 in., private collection, US tion of Eurich’s years observing his fellow human beings. Throughout his life, Eurich retained the innocence of that young boy who watched the world, its activities, and its follies, from that of drawings — highly wrought affairs that owe a debt to the engravings upstairs window in Bradford. He remained a benign, detached, and of Lucas Cranach, Wenceslaus Hollar, and other German masters of the slightly bemused observer of the world around him. 16th and 17th centuries. Every square inch was worked over in tones ranging from the most delicate shading in the palest of pale grays to strongly incised lines. Eurich’s figures later became almost sculptural and reveal the impact made on him by an exhibition of works by the Croatian master Information: Andrew Lambirth’s The Art of Richard Eurich (hardback, 192 sculptor Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962), shown in Bradford in 1916. Eurich’s pages, 170 color illustrations) will be published by Lund Humphries (lund drawings are so intensely detailed that he was warned that, if he continhumphries.com) in Britain on September 3 and in the U.S. on December 3. ued in this manner, he would permanently damage his eyesight. The aspect of Meštrović’s work that struck Eurich most strongly was his direct carving, which was then considered crude by many PEYTON SKIPWITH is a fine a rt c onsultant a nd c ritic. He worked a t T he observers accustomed to the highly wrought finish of 19th-cenFine Art Society in London’s New Bond Street for 44 years, retiring in 2005. tury sculpture. Eurich disagreed: “I think construction and imagiSkipwith has authored or co-authored a number of books on British art and native work is more interesting and more enduring. Pretty color design of the early 20th century, including Edward Bawden’s London and Eric values and tricky brushwork are not in my line.” When the subRavilious — Scrapbooks. His 20-year correspondence with Edward Bawden ject demanded, he would boldly use the stub-end of his brush—or (Dear Edward) was published by Hand & Eye Press in 2017. Skipwith is an a palette knife—to achieve the desired effect, and would have asso-ciate director of U.S.-based Arts & Crafts Tours (artsandcraftstours.com). F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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AN AUTUMN LIKE NONE BEFORE ART IN THE WEST
CODY’S BIG MOMENT CODY, WYOMING rendezvousroyale.org codychamber.org centerofthewest.org bywesternhands.org September 14–19
The people of Cody, Wyoming, are not letting COVID-19 derail their September traditions. Though modifications have been made, Rendezvous Royale remains the multifaceted weeklong arts initiative it always was. Organized by the Cody Country Chamber of Commerce, it features a range of lively events that will unfold around town. The festivities kick off on September 14 with artist David Mensing’s weeklong “Painting on the Porch” workshop, and on September 17 Michele Usibelli will delight onlookers with her “Colorful Canvas” program.
JOSHUA TOBEY (b. 1977), Beauty Sleep, 2020, bronze (edition of 45), 25 1/2 x 12 1/2 x 15 in., available through the Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale
BRINGING ARTISTS AND NATURE TOGETHER BIGHORN RENDEZVOUS Brinton Museum Big Horn, Wyoming thebrintonmuseum.org/event/bhr September 12
Located on the Quarter Circle A Ranch in the foothills of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, the Brinton Museum is admired for its collections and exhibitions of 19th, 20th, and 21stcentury American and Indian art. On September 12 it will open two shows that remain on view through November 1. To launch them in style, the museum has scheduled its Bighorn Rendezvous for September 12. In the afternoon, many of the exhibiting artists will participate in a QuickDraw competition, then sketch and paint on the museum’s grounds while chatting with visitors and patrons. That evening, ticketholders will enjoy a festive dinner, auction, and awards ceremony; a major portion of the
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CHULA BEAUREGARD (b. 1974), Head Dress, Etude, 2019, oil on linen panel, 8 x 8 in.
proceeds will benefit the museum’s educational programming. The exhibition Artists in Residence highlights works created by the 10 artists who were invited in 2019 for two-week residencies, during which they explored and depicted S E P T E M B E R /MO ACYT/ O J U B N E R E
On September 18, collectors will take a leisurely Friday Night Art Walk downtown enjoying various events at the town’s galleries. The following morning, artists participating in the QuickDraw will be visible through the windows of Main Street’s galleries and shops; their creations will be auctioned off on rendezvousroyale.org. Already on public view, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s 39th annual Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale highlights the works of 106 artists made in oils, watercolors, pastels, and sculpture. On September 19, auctioneer Troy Black will move through the show with a small live audience watching his every move. He will auction off these works to bidders in the room, on the phone, online, and even more bidders gathered three blocks away at By Western Hands (BWH), Cody’s center for design, furniture, and other functional items. For sale now on the Center’s newly enhanced website are Western-themed artworks being offered in the Scout’s Miniature Sale and the silent auction.
the museum property and nearby sites. The participants were Chula Beauregard, Heather Burton, Lorenzo Chavez, Bruce Graham, Tony Hochstetler, Weizhen Liang, Huihan Liu, Gregory Packard, George Strickland, and Michael Untiedt. Born and raised in Colorado, Chula Beauregard notes, “The Western experience is one of contradictions as we navigate between modern progress and pure wildness. Geographically rooted in the West, I use my art to find a balance between these forces. In subject matter, I prefer to focus on nature’s gifts. I honor the infinite beauty of this land, while striving to lend a relevant voice in these modern times.” The other exhibition opening on September 12 is New England Artists Paint in Big Horn. Thanks in part to the leadership of Connecticut artist Claudia Post, eight talents from that northeastern region visited Big Horn in 2017 to capture the area’s magnificent landscape. Now the public will enjoy the fruits of their labors. This cohort’s members were Zufar Bikbov, Jacqueline Jones, David Lussier, Dianne Panarelli Miller, Claudia Post, Elizabeth Rhoades, Beverly Schirmeier, and Lou Zucchi. 2 0 2 1 70
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A SPANISH MASTER IN SANTA FE EUSTAQUIO SEGRELLES Manitou Galleries Santa Fe manitougalleries.com September 11–October 4
In its picturesque space on Canyon Road, Manitou Galleries is exhibiting recent oil paintings by Eustaquio Segrelles (b. 1936). This Spanish master’s life did not start promisingly: he was born in the southeastern province of Valencia during Spain’s ferocious civil war, and his father passed away when the boy was 6, leaving his mother to care for six children. Fortunately, young Segrelles found solace in drawing, and his gifts landed him a place at the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia in the early 1950s. After graduation he spent 17 years (1955–1972) successfully drawing comics and illustrations for publishers, and in 1957 he began exhibiting his fine art. Like his great Valencian forerunner, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923), Segrelles captures daily life in his native region, which is blessed with a scenic coast and fertile farmlands. He captures perfectly its rich colors, brilliant light, and strong shadows, working mainly in oils but also in watercolors, drawing, printmaking, and even sculpture.
EUSTAQUIO SEGRELLES (b. 1936), Naranjos 2, 2020, oil on canvas, 31 x 31 in.
QUESTING ONLINE QUEST FOR THE WEST ART SHOW AND SALE Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art Indianapolis quest.eiteljorg.org September 11–12
Like so many activities, the 15th annual Quest for the West Art Show and Sale has gravitated online. It will not be displayed and conducted inside the handsome Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, but will nonetheless enliven an entire weekend with nearly 200 new Western-inspired paintings and sculptures created by 50 artists from around the U.S. Everyone is welcome to admire them online, and it costs only $25 to register to bid in the main sale on September 12, which will be fixed-price and luck-of-the-draw. A day earlier, website visitors can click “buy now” during the sale featuring smaller, more affordable works by the same artists. Quest for the West’s website has been enhanced with many digital extras (such as interviews with the artists), the sale catalogue, and a concierge service that can F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
JOSEPH MCGURL (b. 1958), Procession, 2020, oil on linen panel, 12 x 24 in.
answer questions and fulfill collectors’ needs in real time. Two parts of the 2020 Quest for the West program have been postponed to next year. Academy Award-winning actor Wes Studi (Cherokee), who has appeared in the films Dances with Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans, will now be the guest speaker in 2021. Also delayed is the on-site exhibition of Quest artworks that have won the annual Harrison Eiteljorg Purchase Award.
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A portion of all proceeds will benefit the museum’s operations and educational programming. Founded by the Indianapolis businessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg with other civic leaders, the museum has — since its opening in 1989 — sought to inspire appreciation of the art, history, and cultures of the American West and the indigenous peoples of North America. The Eiteljorg is the only museum of its kind in the Midwest, and one of only two east of the Mississippi that explore both Native America and the American West.
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JACKSON’S SHOW GOES ON JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING jacksonholechamber.com westernvisions.org jacksonholeartauction.com September 9–20
THOMAS
MORAN
(1837–1926),
Cascade
Falls,
Yosemite, 1905, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 20 in., estimate $750,000–$1,250,000 at the Jackson Hole Art Auction
Presented by the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce, the Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival is transcending COVID-19 by launching its 36th edition with a few necessary modifications. On offer over 11 days will be in-person and virtual events, many involving the town’s superb galleries. Several events will incorporate online participation, including the QuickDraw and Auction set for September 19. QuickDraw participants will create their masterpieces in 90 minutes while spectators watch on livestream, and the results will promptly be auctioned off through BidSquare. About halfway through the auction will come the original version of Thomas Blackshear’s painting Hunter’s Watch, which has been selected as the festival’s featured artwork. This image graces the program’s official poster, which can be purchased through the festival at any time. Meanwhile, the National Museum of Wildlife Art has reimagined the 33rd annual edition of its Western Visions Show & Sale. Its celebrations launch on September 9 with the jewelry and artisan sale, and three days later
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the exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and sketches will open at the museum (running through October 18). On view will be more than 200 works by living artists, all auctioned off virtually. On September 17 comes an online discussion among the Jackson 5 artists Amy Lay, Amy Ringholz, Kathryn Mapes Turner, September Vhay, and Kathy Wipfler, and the week closes on September 20 with the museum’s festive brunch. Occurring that same weekend is the 14th annual Jackson Hole Art Auction (September 19). On offer will be approximately 250 lots to be bid on through absentee bids, by telephone, and online through livestreaming. The lots include an unprecedented number of works by members of the Cowboy Artists of America (among them Howard Terpning, John Coleman, and Martin Grelle), as well as historical works by such masters as Carl Rungius, Bob Kuhn, Oscar Berninghaus, Gerard Curtis Delano, and Joseph Henry Sharp. S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
THOMAS BLACKSHEAR (b. 1955), Hunter’s Watch, 2020, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 38 x 30 in., featured artwork for the Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival
Jackson Hole is the ideal place to begin a driving tour of Grand Teton National Park nearby. Complementing its mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers, and huge skies are diverse and abundant forests, wildflowers, and wildlife. The park also has a rich cultural history with old homesteads and cattle ranches to explore and photograph. Visitors can walk a trail that Native Americans and fur trappers used in the 1820s, as well as a modern one built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
B Y K E L LY C O M P T O N
C O L L E C T O R S A V V Y
GET YOUR ART APPRAISED
A
t some point in most collectors’ lives, Each organization offers a certification course there comes a time for a valuation, that covers appraisal principles, procedures, perhaps of a few specific artworks or ethics, and law. Passing the final exam allows perhaps an entire collection. A valugraduates to display the organization’s initials ation is a written opinion of the artafter their names, and like many professionwork’s financial value, upon which its users can als they keep abreast of recent developments confidently base their own financial decisions. through for-credit continuing education Collectors should hire a qualified appraiser who courses. AAA members regularly consult will generate a report underpinned by up-to-date, its magisterial 2003 publication All About factual market data. In addition to following preAppraising: The Definitive Appraisal Handscribed industry methodology, the appraisal must book. And because that volume offers more be fair, objective, and unburdened by any conflict detail than most collectors need, AAA also of interest on the appraiser’s part. In particular, published the 32-page Experts’ Guide to Colhis or her remuneration cannot be tied to the lecting in 2011. collection’s value; thus hourly billing is the most Ever since the savings-and-loan scancommon form of compensation. dal of the 1980s (which involved fraudulent Appraisal reports are used regularly in Appraiser Betsy Thomas examines a historic painting. appraisals, among other misdeeds), the Interinsurance negotiations, sales, charitable donanal Revenue Service has worked closely with tions, liquidations, divorce settlements, probates, the big three appraising organizations to proand the taxation and equitable distribution of fessionalize this field. Today the IRS provides estates. As such, the report is of keen interest not only to owners and oversight through its Art Advisory Panel of experts representing various potential buyers, but also to the insurers, bankers, accountants, attorneys, specializations; they volunteer to help the IRS evaluate the acceptability judges, executors, tax agencies, dealers, brokers, museums, and other of tangible personal property appraisals. Panel members are on the lookinstitutions with whom they often engage. out for appraisals that grossly over- or understate value. Such infractions Appraisers tend to focus on one of five areas: the first four are gems and can lead to an appraiser being effectively disqualified and potentially jewelry; real estate; businesses (as in “I want to sell my business, but what’s barred from ever writing another report. it worth?”), and machinery and equipment. Readers of Fine Art ConnoisFor all these reasons, collectors should feel confident that a certiseur are more likely to focus on the fifth area, “personal property,” which fied appraiser has cleared the requisite hurdles and deserves their trust. encompasses fine and decorative arts (including antiques), furnishings and Fortunately, the websites of ASA, ISA, and AAA have “find an appraiser” other household contents, fine wine, classic cars, and sports memorabilia. features on their websites, and it is also wise to ask your favorite dealer Appraisers of fine art and antiques are independent professionals or auctioneer for leads, too. with expertise in one or more specialties; just for example, an appraiser Particularly knowledgeable about 19th-century and 20th-century might be an expert in paintings of two unrelated historical periods, or fine art, the New York City art adviser Betsy Thomas has published perhaps in both sculpture and 20th-century design. Many appraisers several articles in Fine Art Connoisseur. She is also a qualified appraiser are former museum curators, auction house specialists, dealers, or indewho proudly adds “AAA” after her name. Since earning a M.A. degree pendent scholars with decades of experience in their field. at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and working as a specialist at All of them look ultimately to the Appraisal Foundation, which Christie’s, Thomas says she has been pleased to see the appraisal field sets the congressionally authorized standards by which appraisgrow more professional: “The depth of expertise in the appraisal field is als must be written (officially the Uniform Standards of Professional more vibrant than ever due to continuing education opportunities and Appraisal Practice, or “USPAP”), and which also sets the qualifications the rigorous standards applied to appraisals. The art market is a complex appraisers must have in order to write a compliant report. Appraisecosystem and only a qualified appraiser can ensure that a collection is ers in the fine and decorative arts must have successfully completed properly valued and updated on a regular basis.” relevant coursework in their specialties, obtained at least two years of experience in the business of buying, selling, or valuing a specific type of property; and earned an appraisal designation from one of the field’s three professional organizations. Information: appraisers.org, isa-appraisers.org, This trio comprises the American Society of Appraisers (ASA), the appraisersassociation.org, btfaa.com International Society of Appraisers (ISA), and the Appraisers Association of America (AAA). The last of these is most relevant to Fine Art Connoisseur because of its concentration of fine and decorative arts experts. 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
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GREAT ART NATIONWIDE
E V E N T S P R E V I E W
FLYING HIGH
FROM ABOVE: JILL BASHAM AND KIM VANDERHOEK Principle Gallery Alexandria, Virginia principlegallery.com September 18–October 12
(ABOVE) KIM VANDERHOEK (b. 1971), Velvet Sky, 2020, oil on solid wood panel with non-removable frame, 17 1/2 in. diameter
(LEFT) JILL BASHAM
(b. 1965), Floating Over, 2019, oil on linen, 36 x 48 in.
Principle Gallery will soon present the exhibition From Above, which features new oil paintings by Jill Basham and Kim VanDerHoek that capture the world from high viewpoints. Each artist is sending 10 large works and 10 smaller ones. The project got started last year when Basham and VanDerHoek were visiting the
SCULPTING MOMENTS IN TIME MICK DOELLINGER: ANIMAL IMPRESSIONS Mockingbird Gallery Bend, Oregon mockingbird-gallery.com October 2–30
Mockingbird Gallery is ready to exhibit recent sculptures by Mick Doellinger, who grew up in Australia surrounded by unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife. He was first exposed to art by the figurative sculptor
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gallery on the same day. Realizing they both value unusual perspectives and that their styles would mesh visually, they promptly booked this show with Principle, and now it’s coming to pass. VanDerHoek started to love elevated perspectives at 35,000 feet: “When flying home after a painting event in Wisconsin, I William Ricketts, then caught the horse bug at age 15 when he started working at a training facility for thoroughbreds. While visiting California as a steer wrestler on the rodeo circuit, Doellinger grew fascinated with the science of taxidermy and began to master it. Soon his deep understanding of animal anatomy allowed him to recreate animal forms in compellingly lifelike ways, so he applied this skill in his taxidermy practice while also guiding trophy hunts around the South Pacific region. Now an elected member of both the National Sculpture Society and Society of Animal Artists, Doellinger explains, “When someone looks at my sculptures, I hope they feel the essence of the animal. I want people to connect with the piece in some way — to S E P T E M B E R /MO ACYT/ O J U B N E R E
was struck by the unique viewpoint that being in an airplane provides. I was higher than passing clouds and quickly snapped a photo, intending to use it as inspiration for a painting. That quickly turned into a whole series of aerial views.” Basham says she always looks “for the window seat on a plane. Many people fly [without] realizing the beauty passing around and below them. I want to bring attention to this beauty that is often missed from an above perspective.” Principle director Clint Mansell adds, “While you’re walking outside, look up at the buildings, look down at the pavement … and when you get a chance, see the world from above. Basham and VanDerHoek’s paintings will give us a wonderful bird’s eye view of many cities and landscapes; they’ll depict scenes we aren’t used to seeing in our everyday lives.” An extra bonus is the artists’ collaboration on one painting through the spring and summer of 2020. Basham started working on it in her Maryland studio, then shipped it to VanDerHoek in California. They have been posting short videos of their working process on social media, and during the exhibition’s opening reception on September 18 it will finally be unveiled and signed jointly.
notice subtle nuances of shape, motion, or character. It’s less about creating a perfect replica of the animal, and more about sculpting a narrative or moment in time.”
MICK DOELLINGER (b. 1956), Attitude Is Everything (White Rhino), 2020, bronze (edition of 9), 27 x 50 x 17 in.
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OIL PAINTERS HEAD TO TEXAS
DAUD AKHRIEV OPAM (b. 1959), Light of Villa Vitalba, 2019, oil on linen,
OIL PAINTERS OF AMERICA’S 29TH ANNUAL NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION OF TRADITIONAL OILS
19 1/2 x 24 in.
RS Hanna Gallery Fredericksburg, Texas oilpaintersofamerica.com and rshannagallery.com through September 19
RS Hanna Gallery has already opened the 29th annual National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils organized by the nonprofit organization Oil Painters of America (OPA). This selling show features over 230 paintings selected from more than 2,000 entries submitted by OPA members. Artists and collectors will gather virtually on the weekend of September 11–12 for a reception and what
may well be the first ever worldwide virtual wet paint competition. OPA is set to distribute awards totaling more than $100,000 and including a Gold Medal worth $25,000, all judged by master
painter Rose Frantzen, who will be interviewed during OPA’s virtual convention September 17–19. This online program will also include webinars by Kurt Anderson (OPA’s immediate past president), David Dibble, Rusty Jones, Kelli Folsom, and Susan Hotard, as well as presentations by John DiGiacomo and Dave Geada. Registration for the convention and wet paint competition is available to everyone, not just OPA members.
BIRDS IN THE SPOTLIGHT BIRDS IN ART Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum Wausau, Wisconsin lywam.org September 12–November 29
WALTER T. MATIA (b. 1953), No Country for Old Frogs, 2018, bronze (edition of 10), 41 x 18 x 14 in., collection of the artist; photo: QuickSilver, Takoma Park, Maryland
TIMOTHY DAVID MAYHEW (b. 1952), On Ice, 2019, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in., collection of Christopher G. Lea
The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum will soon open its 45th annual Birds in Art exhibition. A total of 510 artists from around the world submitted 830 works for the threeperson jury’s consideration. In the end, only 114 artists were selected. They include Timothy David Mayhew, who has been named the 2020 Master Artist and will be the focus of F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
a solo retrospective within the larger exhibition; 22 others who have been honored as Master Artists during previous exhibitions; and 91 additional artists selected for their paintings, sculptures, and graphics created within the last three years. All will be illustrated in the 134-page catalogue that accompanies the show. The only downbeat in this feelgood project is that all festivities planned for the September 12–13 opening weekend have been cancelled due to COVID-19. Mayhew was first selected to exhibit in Birds in Art in 2010 and has been juried in nine times since. He is well known internationally
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for researching and reviving various Old Master techniques, including the natural, quarried chalks that many Renaissance artists used to draw. Every year Mayhew embarks upon intensive study of a new bird or mammal species, a passion he refined while studying with the master animal painter Bob Kuhn (1920–2007). His sensitive treatment of landscape captured in plein air stems in part from subsequent studies with Clyde Aspevig and Matt Smith. Today Mayhew runs the Atelier Cedar Ridge in Farmington, New Mexico.
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For only the third time in PSA’s history, two artists will receive its designation of Hall of Fame Honoree in the same year. Frederick D. Somers is a two-time winner of the Prix de Pastel, and was one of two “Eminent Pastelists” named at the 2013 gathering of the International Association of Pastel Societies. Maceo W. Mitchell is director of PSA’s School for Pastels and a former member of its Board of Governors. The two men have been friends since meeting as students at the University of Iowa.
PASTELS PREVAIL PASTEL SOCIETY OF AMERICA’S 48TH ANNUAL EXHIBITION pastelsocietyofamerica.org September 8–October 4
For the first time in its history, the Pastel Society of America (PSA) will host its annual exhibition online only rather than at New York City’s National Arts Club. Jurors Claire Schroeven Verbiest, Anna Wainright, and Duane Wakeham reviewed 1,715 images submitted by 665 artists from around the world. All 207 of the selected works will be illustrated in the accompanying digital catalogue, and $44,000 in awards will be distributed after the judging by Marjorie Shelly, a renowned pastel expert and conservator at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
FREDERICK D. SOMERS (b. 1942), Jacob's Ladder, pastel on paper, 22 x 16 in., private collection
IMPRESSIONISTS COME TO UTAH AMERICAN IMPRESSIONIST SOCIETY AT ILLUME GALLERY OF FINE ART St. George, Utah americanimpressionistsociety.org and illumegalleryoffineart.com October 22–November 21
DAWN E. WHITELAW (b. 1945), Saint-Rémy Square, 2020, oil on linen panel, 20 x 24 in.
WHY FIGURES STILL MATTER PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW III Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art Wausau, Wisconsin wmoca.org October 8–December 12
The Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art is ready to present the latest edition of its annual Painting the Figure Now exhibition. On view will be images of people in every possible mode — in action or repose, at play or work — all reminding us that the human form is a subject with inexhaustible potential for artists. Curators David Hummer and Didi Menendez have developed the project with guest curator F. Scott Hess, a distinguished figure painter in his own right.
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The American Impressionist Society (AIS) is set to open its 21st Annual National Juried Exhibition at Illume Gallery of Fine Art. On view will be just over 180 paintings created by the organization’s members, along with Hess notes, “There was a time when finding well painted figurative works was difficult. There just wasn’t that much of it around. But that has changed. It seems there is an overabundance of well painted works at this time, as one sees them too often on Instagram and other social media platforms. In curating this show I looked for works that were not only technically excellent, but also captured my attention in a different way, and made me think beyond the represented figure. This might be political/social commentary, or it might be visually poetic, or intrigue with narrative or humor, or relate to painting’s grand history, or deliver a strong sense of what it is to be human. I wanted paintings that delivered a view of existence in today’s world. We are living in very difficult times, and I expect artists to be saying more about our experience during this period than just reproducing a pretty face or a nice body.”
approximately 20 paintings by AIS Masters, founders, officers, and board members. The show’s opening weekend will kick off with a two-day workshop by AIS Master William Schneider (October 20–21). On the 22nd, he will judge the exhibition and present awards during a lively reception. Schneider returns on the 23rd to demonstrate his painting techniques, and there will be additional educational programs. The gathering in Utah concludes on October 24 with an all-members paint-out, followed by a “wet wall competition.” All on-site activities are subject to change due to COVID-19, so please check the AIS website closer to the time for updates.
ANNA WYPYCH (b. 1986), Steel Eyes, 2015, oil on icon panel, 20 x 16 in.
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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
BY JEANNE SCHINTO
D E S T I N A T I O N A R T
PROVINCETOWN
RISES TO THE CHALLENGE
I
t was Henry David Thoreau who famously wrote that, on maps, Cape Cod resembles an arm bent at the elbow, flexing its muscle. At the peninsula’s tip, Provincetown was the Cape’s “sandy fist.” More than 150 years later, the modern denizens of Provincetown’s art community have shown all the strength and resolve that Thoreau’s potent metaphor represents: they have adapted to the limitations and uncertainties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the centuries, the people of Provincetown have proved a resilient bunch. Inhabited for eons by the Wampanoag and Nauset tribes, and later populated by fishermen and sailors especially from the Azores, “P-Town” (its affectionate nickname) is now a premier destination and permanent address for many members of the LGBTQ community. It also rightfully lays claim to being among the most important centers of 20th-century American art. From Native Americans to seafarers to artists — not to mention political activists — the citizens of P-Town know how to weather hard times, and the current residents are working together to figure out how best to rise to the latest challenge.
School of Art. By World War I, several schools were attracting hundreds of students each summer. Hawthorne’s impressionist colleague E. Ambrose Webster (1869–1935) also ran a school. So did Hans Hofmann, who, both here and at his school in Manhattan, encouraged young artists like Lee Krasner and Red Grooms to break free from formalism and convention. As early as the 1920s, Provincetown artists had begun to embrace modernism. A group of them had studied in Paris, been exposed to the Fauves, Cubists, and others with revolutionary
notions about art, and transported those ideas back home. In the 1940s and ’50s, among the abstract expressionists (beside Hofmann) who converged here were Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler. They joined the long list of artist couples who have worked and lived in P-Town, nurturing each other (or not): Hawthorne and Marion Campbell Hawthorne, Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Milton Avery and Sally Michel, Lucy and William L’Engle, Jo and Edward Hopper, Jerry Farnsworth and Helen Sawyer, Henry and Ada Raynor Hensche.
P-TOWN ART HISTORY 101 The list of artists who have lived in Provincetown — or merely passed through, taking up residence for a summer or two — is truly exalted. This picturesque locale with its scarlet sunsets and rugged, rolling dunes began attracting painters as early as the 1890s. Provincetown’s legacy-keepers peg its official start as America’s oldest continuously active artist colony to 1899. That’s the year Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930) opened his Cape Cod
LASZLO DE NAGY (1906–1944), Monday, n.d., color white-line woodblock print on paper, 10 x 11 1/4 in., collection of Napi and Helen Van Dereck, on view at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum
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Provincetown has, likewise, been a place where artists have experimented with techniques. Most notably, the whiteline woodcut method for making color prints was invented here. According to lore, it was B.J.O. Nordfeldt (1878–1955) who, having grown impatient with the labor of making multiple blocks, devised a way to make such prints with a single block. He separated the colors with grooves that he didn’t ink during the printing step, causing the white of the paper to become the outlines around shapes. The results were clean and crisp, with a distinctly modern look, emphasizing design and composition over content. Nordfeldt’s student Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956) became the technique’s leading practitioner and developed with others what became known as the Provincetown Print. Its style was particularly well suited to images of this locale, with its sunshine and shadows, steeply pitched rooflines, and white picket fences that — then and
(LEFT) NANCY WHORF (1930–2009), Summer Night, East End, n.d., oil on panel, 25 x 29 in., Berta Walker Gallery
(BELOW) CHARLES WEBSTER
HAWTHORNE (1872–1930), Crew of the Philomena Manta, 1915, oil on canvas, 70 1/4 x 88 1/2 in., Provincetown Town Art Collection, photo: James Zimmerman
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(RIGHT) ROSS MOFFETT (1888–1971), Shank Painter Pond (Cutting Ice), c. 1925, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 39 1/2 in., Provincetown Zimmerman
Town
Art
Collection,
photo:
James
(BELOW) ALVIN ROSS (1920–1975),
Haircut, 1958, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 in., collection of Lucas Garofalo and Jeff Swanson, on view at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum
now — demarcate the town’s charming cottages and lush gardens. (A fine example of a Provincetown Print by Laszlo de Nagy is illustrated here.) Not all of Provincetown’s artists chose to innovate. Ignoring the avant-garde, John Whorf (1903–1959) found inspiration in the seacoast and expressed it in marine motifs reminiscent of Winslow Homer. Like her father, Nancy Whorf (1930–2009) favored realism, painting P-Town scenes in every season, particularly winter, creating what she considered a kind of visual memoir. Even today, says Christine McCarthy, executive director of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), “You’ll find everything here, from traditional landscapes all the way to video art.” And she doesn’t mean only at 460 Commercial Street, where PAAM established itself in 1918, three years after the
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organization’s founding by a group of artists, including Hawthorne, Webster, and Gerrit Beneker. Along with local businesspeople, they saw a need for both a professional asso-
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ciation and a permanent collection. In fact, Provincetown’s commercial district is only three miles long and a quarter mile wide, but it is saturated with art venues. There are 49 licensed galleries and, altogether, more than 60 places to buy art. Other municipalities possess some fine artworks, but who can name another that does so on the scale of Provincetown, which owns more than 300? Some 30 of its portraits, seascapes, and historical narratives hang in the hallways and offices of the Provincetown Town Hall, an 1886 Victorian grand lady that underwent a $6 million restoration in 2008–10. Another 30 works are displayed at the Provincetown Public Library, a former church spacious enough to accommodate a half-scale model of the schooner Rose Dorothea built by Francis “Flyer” Santos (1914–2015). Still more impressive town-owned pieces are on view at the Veterans Memorial Elementary School, and also at the Council on Aging. Hawthorne’s 1915 wall-size oil Crew of the Philomena Manta was the earliest piece to enter the town’s collection, the year after it was painted. In 1905, the fishing dory of Antoine Souza and Manuel Souza Bartholomew, cousins from the Azores, had become separated from its mother ship, the painting’s namesake. Only Antoine survived the ordeal. Ross Moffett (1888–1971), who posed for Hawthorne as a Philomena Manta crew member, is represented in the town’s collection with paintings of his own, including Shank Painter Pond (Cutting Ice), a circa 1925 scene of ice cutters working in what is now a wildlife sanctuary. Stephen Borkowski, a longtime member of the Provincetown Art Commission, says the town adds new artworks to its
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JULIE BECK (b. 1981), Lydia the Lawyer, 2016, oil on canvas, 36 x 18 in., Bowersock Gallery
holdings “very judiciously.” One recent acquisition, now hanging in the library, is a wall-size seascape, Gods of the Sea by Nancy Ellen Craig (1927–2015), who was known for grand, classically inspired scenes and celebrity portraits. Another new arrival is Still Life with Conch #2, painted in oil by Moffett and donated by Berta Walker, whose eponymous gallery is at 208 Bradford Street. Walker’s grandparents the musician-composer Harvey Gaul and writer Harriet Avery Gaul, in whose honor she made the donation, began coming to Provincetown from Pittsburgh in 1915. A third recent addition is Ilona Royce Smithkin’s red-chalk likeness of Grace Gouveia Collinson (1909–1998), a teacher, poet, and all-around political and cultural force who arrived in Provincetown from Portugal at 7 and spent a storied life here. “She was a real Provincetown character, known for helping Portuguese and other immigrants learn English, assimilate, and become citizens,” Borkowski explains. As for Smithkin, a P-Town character in her own right, she turned 100 on March 27, 2020. Considering the sheer number of artists who live or visit here, it’s unsurprising that one often sees art being created in Provincetown’s coves, streets, and Province Lands, which are part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Besides plein air painters working on their own, artists often paint in groups, usually hosted by schools. For example, PAAM, whose teaching program was launched in the 1920s in the manner of the Art Students League of New York, offers an array ranging from two-hour drop-in life-drawing sessions to week-long workshops. Or at least it did so before the pandemic struck. ART LOVE AND SOCIAL DISTANCING It’s tough to socially distance in Provincetown proper. While the resident population tops out at 3,000, the office of tourism has estimated that, in ordinary times, 50,000 to 70,000 people arrive by car, bus, ferry, or otherwise each summer day. On special occasions such as Parade Day during August’s raucous Carnival, the number of day trippers can reach 100,000. This year the town expected to welcome crowds for its commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing. Many people erroneously think that William Bradford and the others who crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower first set foot in what is now Plymouth, on Boston’s South Shore. In fact, on November 11, 1620, they made landfall and signed the Mayflower Compact in the place now called Provincetown Harbor. This explains the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum and its towering (253 feet) granite campanile at 1 High Pole Hill Road. Town-wide exhibitions and events were planned for the remembrance, among them the opportunity to step aboard the Mayflower II. This vessel was to be anchored in the harbor for some days in mid-September. Alas, Provincetown 400 has been postponed until 2021. Many of P-Town’s theme weeks were cancelled, too. Nonetheless, folks here
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EDITH LAKE WILKINSON (1868–1957), Girl on Beach, c. 1916, oil on canvas, 19 1/2 x 13 1/2 in., The Bakker Project
Native Americans and Pilgrims that features life-sized figures, the Mayflower, and renditions of sea and sky that will turn one gallery into the shores of Provincetown as they looked four centuries ago. “I’m adding ‘hopefully’ to every statement I make,” McCarthy warns. “If there’s a resurgence [of COVID-19] in the fall, we have about 10 recovery plans, 10 different scenarios.” As for the municipal collection, before the pandemic it was accessible to anyone whenever the town’s governmental buildings were open. Alas, Borkowski notes, “[The collection] is a sleeping beauty right now. I suspect it will reawaken by summer’s end, but the situation seems to change daily. Everyone has had to adjust, but we’re strong people.” Fortunately, the town collection’s website (provincetown historyproject.com) was already in place prepandemic, so one can see there not only the art, but also many historical ephemera.
are finding ways to bring art to the people while keeping them safe and healthy. “We’re offering a lot of online content,” says Chris McCarthy, who is happy that students living across the country are now taking PAAM’s classes. Before the pandemic struck, she had organized an exhibition highlighting the collection of the late local restauranteur and landlord Napi Van Dereck (1932–2020). It features a pantheon of Provincetown artists, including Beneker, Nordfeldt, Lazzell, Moffett, Nancy Maybin Ferguson, Pauline Palmer, and George Yater. Her project had been scheduled to hang at PAAM from March 27 through SepF I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
tember 13. When we spoke in early summer, it was being presented online. Since then, PAAM has reopened, with timed, ticketed entries for limited groups to see an edited slate of exhibitions, including that one. Scheduled from September 18 through November 30 is a retrospective devoted to Alvin Ross (1920–1975) in celebration of his centenary. It will feature his masterful still lifes and enigmatic portraits, 40 from PAAM and 20 loaned by private collectors. From October 2 through November 29, PAAM will present The Arrival, 1620 by Mimi Gross (b. 1940) — a conceptualization of the first meeting of
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FRIDAY NIGHT ART STROLL, TRANSFORMED In the past, considering its scope, Provincetown’s summertime Friday Night Art Stroll required a serious plan of attack. Openings were staggered, starting at 5 p.m. in the West End and 6 p.m. in the East End. A convenient endpoint was PAAM, which stayed open until 10 p.m. on those evenings. Most people walked or biked from gallery to gallery. Pedicabs were another option. (Driving is never a smart idea in P-Town.) And often what one saw along the way, whether drag queens or costumed pets, was just as entertaining as the galleries’ displays. When the pandemic hit, this weekly tradition, which typically brought 150 to 300 people through any single gallery, was cancelled — at least in its previous form. The “stroll” is now online at ptowngallerystroll.com, a collaborative site in which some 30 dealers participate. Its organizers are Jill Stauffer, Jill Rothenberg-Simmons, and Pete Hocking — executive director, board member, and board president, respectively — of The Provincetown Commons, a 10,000-square-foot community center, exhibition venue, and shared studio space. Steve Bowersock of Bowersock Gallery is gratified that the pandemic has finally united so many independent gallerists. They had tried forming a guild more than once, and always failed. “This coming together is very hopeful,” he notes. Stauffer adds that it probably worked this time because the pandemic made collaboration seem urgent and also because her organization, being non-profit, was a “neutral party.” Bowersock, for his part, credits the pandemic with getting him to finally adopt Hoverlay, an app that helps would-be art buyers visualize pieces in the spaces where they’re destined to go. He had
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PETE HOCKING (b. 1966), At Love’s Frayed Edge, Requiem, 2019, oil on panel, 36 x 36 in., Four Eleven Gallery
to write-ins during the actual show. When we spoke, McCarthy was uncertain if the exhibition would be possible this year. Even if only virtual, July 6 to September 13 is its designated window. Whatever happens, McCarthy notes, “It’s a great way for a beginning collector to pick up an original work of art for as little as $125.”
already researched what Hoverlay’s developers call its “augmented reality” platform, since, he explains, “As you know, people are forever asking ‘What’s it going to look like on my wall?’” Now he has the tool available to help clients answer that question. AUCTIONS: GOING, GOING STRONG After the Commonwealth of Massachusetts allowed retail operations to reopen, galleries began accommodating up to five people at a time, depending on square footage. Like many gallerists, James Bakker of The Bakker Project has made use of his windows for changing displays. “That way people are able to look at art even if they feel uncomfortable coming inside,” says the collector, dealer (since age 15), appraiser, and auctioneer, who is planning an exhibition, The Women, for September 18 through October 18. Its lineup includes Edith Lake Wilkinson (1868–1957), a Hawthorne student who, new evidence indicates, was making white-line color woodblock prints even before Nordfeldt. A 2015 documentary, Packed in a Trunk, tells the story of Wilkinson, who ended her days in a mental institution but has been rediscovered thanks to her grandniece Jane Anderson.
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Bakker holds auctions every spring and fall, with online sales in between. Customarily his live sales occur at the Harbor Hotel. “We’re so dependent on decisions being made by government, but even if we have another [COVID-19] wave in the fall, one way or another we’ll have our fall sale on October 24. Because we do online auctions, we’re already set up.” A year-round resident since 2001, Bakker moved to P-Town after closing his gallery in Boston. Since 2008, he has lived in a house built for a 19th-century sea captain that was acquired in 1900 by E. Ambrose Webster, who ran his school there. The house appears in Webster’s own paintings, as well as in paintings by others. In 1988, when Bakker began spending summers in Provincetown, he guestconducted PAAM’s first Annual Consignment Auction, a benefit at summer’s end. He’s done the same every year since. This year, that auction will be held online, with bidding open September 11–25. PAAM’s annual Members’ 12x12 Exhibition and Silent Auction, which presents nearly 400 works measuring 12 inches square, has previously had online bidding in addition S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
BEYOND THE TOWN LIMITS Founded in 1968, the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) is accustomed to offering residencies and a full summer season of workshops and classes, as well as nightly readings and artist talks that are free and open to the public. Its roster is usually chockablock with nationally recognized names. Now, however, the entire 2020 program has been shifted to 2021, with virtual events and programs filling the interim. Pete Hocking (b. 1966), who is represented by the Four Eleven Gallery, was scheduled to lead a landscape painting workshop at FAWC in June. Instead, he taught an online class with Mark Adams (b. 1953), a fellow landscapist and professional cartographer whose work is shown by the Schoolhouse Gallery. Hocking has also been teaching virtually for PAAM, engaging with students as far away as Florida and Texas. “One benefit of taking an online class is that you can work in your own space,” he notes. “Another is you don’t have to uproot yourself from the life you’re living.” Of course, Hocking admits, “It’s not as immersive an experience as the one you have here, and you miss the chance to take a meditative walk in the woods or on the beach.” In the mid-19th century, Thoreau walked the Cape’s length and breadth, going long distances alone and with companions. This year, Hocking tasked himself with walking 1,000 miles around the Cape as a fundraiser for The Provincetown Commons. He does it in eight- to 12-mile sprints, so to speak. Hocking’s self-imposed deadline for completion is September 22, the first day of autumn, but his walking will undoubtedly continue thereafter. He declared in a recent blog post: “I’ve tried to use nature as my anchor, and I’ve largely been successful. Walks … have done much to remind me that the universe is bigger than this [COVID-19] crisis and certainly bigger than me.” Information: To plan your visit, go to ptowntour-ism.com and provincetownartguide.com. JEANNE SCHINTO has been a reporter for Maine Antique Digest for more than 17 years, writing about art, auctions, museum exhibitions, and trends in the trade. She lives in Andover, Massachusetts. 2 0 2 0
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BY PETER TRIPPI
H I D D E N C O L L E C T I O N
ON FIFTH AVENUE, A CONNOISSEUR’S TAKE ON AMERICAN ART & HISTORY
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ome of America’s leading art collectors remain extremely discreet about their holdings, even as they generously lend specific works for temporary exhibitions or donate them to museums’ permanent collections. This discretion certainly pertains to Judith Hernstadt, the New York-based collector who has spent decades researching and acquiring significant American fine and decorative artworks of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, as well as related works from Europe. This season Hernstadt has kindly granted Fine Art Connoisseur a glimpse of her collection because she will soon be moving house. This, therefore, is an ideal moment to highlight how impressively she has gathered and arranged her treasures before they are relocated to her new home. Having earned an M.U.P. degree in urban and regional planning at New York University and pursued additional coursework at Harvard Business School, Hernstadt was previously president and owner of a broadcast company. Over the years she has become a philanthropist involved in a wide range of organizations related to her own profession, to U.S. foreign policy, and to American visual arts and history. Just for example, Hernstadt has served on the boards of the Decorative Arts Trust, Decorative Arts Society, Georgia Museum of Art, and American Friends of Yale University Art Gallery (steering committee). She has also been an active
(TOP) The dining room looking southwest, with C.B. Ives’s Egeria in the corner. On the left wall hangs J.B. Stearns’s 1850 painting of a woman riding a horse.
(RIGHT) The double master bedroom looking northwest; at center is
the day bed with adjustable back rest made in Philadelphia and dated 1730– 40. At right is a William & Mary period walnut high chest of drawers made in New York c. 1720. At left, the four drawings around the mirror were all made by William H. Bartlett (1809–1854).
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member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s William Cullen Bryant Fellows, the U.S. Department of State Fine Arts Committee, the collection committee of Olana (Frederic E. Church’s studio house in Hudson, New York), the American Friends of Attingham, and the Rockefeller University Council. The recipients of her many gifts of art include the Met, Yale, Brooklyn Museum, and the State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms. Over the years, Hernstadt has acquired works from leading dealers and auctioneers throughout the U.S. and Europe. Driving her pursuit has been a keen interest in the ways that material culture — not only art but also documents, artifacts, and ephemera — offers insights into the history of the United States and its people. Given her expertise in planning, it makes sense that she is particularly interested in representations of American places, be it William H. Bartlett’s depiction of the interior of Faneuil Hall in Boston or J. Allen St. John’s oil painting of Old Faithful in what is now Yellowstone National Park. Rather than merely gathering rare objects, Hernstadt first gathers ideas and knowledge, checking in with scholars, curators, experts, and other collectors for the backstories and in the process becoming their valued colleague and sounding board. She notes, “I have long been inspired by the warm encouragement I have received from these kindred spirits, and by our lively exchange of information. Moreover, I truly enjoy passing that enthusiasm along to others whenever I can.” Like most of them, she looks out for original condition — not always easy to find when dealing with objects up to 300 years old. CONTEXTS The interior views illustrated here were taken earlier this year as Hernstadt began to plan her move. The setting is her magnificent “co-op” at 927 Fifth Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — one of 12 full-floor apartments in a 12-story, limestone-clad building designed in 1917 in the Renaissance Revival style by Warren & Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal. Hernstadt occupies the entire ninth floor, which spans 55 feet directly overlooking Central Park. The 27 oversized windows set into the apartment’s four exposures offer sweeping westward, northward, and southward views of the park, the glittering skyline of Central Park South, and the historic townhouses that run along East 74th Street toward Madison Avenue. This geographical context is relevant because one might well imagine that a city apartment encompassing approximately 5,500 square feet and 14 large rooms (including six bedrooms and five full baths) might feel gloomy. In fact, as these photographs reveal, daylight plays a leading role in the visual impact not only of Hernstadt’s home, but also of her collection. Seen here are glimpses of Warren & Wetmore’s soaring ceilings, plaster moldings, herringbone floors, and working fireplaces, all enhanced by the owner’s use of white and yellow wall colors. Visitors enter the apartment from its private elevator via a large gallery lined with artworks before passing into the 18 by 33-foot living room overlooking Central Park via two exposures. On either side of it is the dining room (21 by 23 feet, with three exposures) and the library with its original wood paneling. Hernstadt leads guests who are particularly interested in art onward into the private wing of the apartment, which is linked by a 5’6”-wide gallery. All 62 feet of it are lined with more of her acquisitions, especially works on paper such as maps and drawings that should not be in the full daylight that pours into the outermost rooms. This long gallery is tied together visually by a 23-footlong wool carpet made sometime before 1870 in the Kurdish town of Senneh, in what is now Iran. This runner is so notable that it was selected by the Haji Baba Club — America’s leading group of rug experts — as one of the finest examples in the New York area. The furniture and other decorative artworks inside the double master bedroom (measuring 24 x 16 feet) are particularly important. SOME HIGHLIGHTS It would be impossible in a single article to provide and analyze the impressive list of works in Hernstadt’s collection, so surely it is more instructive to high-
(TOP) JAMES PEALE (1749–1831), Portrait of Mrs. Young, 1812, oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 27 in. (MIDDLE) The entrance gallery looking west toward the living room and Central Park beyond. The plaster bust of George Washington in the corner at right is by a maker as yet unidentified.
(BELOW) The living room looking northwest; in the corner at right is a rural
scene with animals painted by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819–1905).
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(TOP) FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH (1826–1900), The Meteor of 1860, 1860, oil on canvas, 10 1/4 x 17 1/2 in.
(BELOW) WALTER LIBBEY (1827–1852), The New Fife,
c. 1851, oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 25 in.
One half of the gallery that connects to the private wing is enhanced with a 23-foot-long Persian wool carpet made sometime before 1870.
light a handful of specific works that readers of Fine Art Connoisseur might find particularly intriguing. Among the most outstanding of the paintings is The Meteor of 1860, painted by Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) on and just after July 20, 1860. It was on this date that the skies of North America were illuminated by a spectacular string of fireball meteors. Church watched in awe from Olana, while down the Hudson River in New York City Walt Whitman was spurred to reflect upon this unforgettable phenomenon in words rather than brushstrokes. Hernstadt’s painting is widely seen as an icon of American art and played a key role in the magisterial 2012 touring exhibition The Civil War and American Art, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s senior curator Eleanor Jones Harvey. William L. Coleman, Ph.D., who is director of collections and exhibitions at the Olana Partnership, says this painting, “which was once on view at Olana alongside views F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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of the Northern Lights and Arctic peaks, is a classic statement of a distinct artistic vision that joined reportage, scientific study, intrepid travel, and allegory in a mixture wholly his own. This compelling canvas seems to be illuminated from within, capturing a rare astronomic phenomenon that captured the imagination of the continent.” Starting out with such a masterpiece may be misleading, however, because Hernstadt does not usually seek out works just because they were made by famous artists. A good example of her curiosity is The New Fife, painted around 1851 by the now relatively forgotten American Walter Libbey (1827–1852). He was a rising star in American art when he died suddenly the following year at the tender age of 25. From his teens Libbey had been gradually refining the portrait-genre format made popular by the older master William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), and this particular work won much attention. Walt Whitman wrote that there is “a character of Americanism about it… [I]n this boy of Walter Libbey’s, there is nothing to prevent his becoming a President, or even editor of a leading newspaper.” The artist’s evocation not only of innocence but also of possibilities is striking and we can see why Hernstadt chose to display this masterwork over her living room’s fireplace. Anyone interested in American history must eventually focus on Philadelphia, so it’s not surprising that Hernstadt owns a painting from a member of that one-time capital’s leading artistic dynasty, the Peales. She is pleased to own not only the Portrait of Mrs. Young painted by James Peale (1749– 1831) and still in its original frame, but also the receipt for $20 he gave her father (“Mr. Macallister”) on January 14, 1812. Dating from just a year earlier is the atmospheric View of Sweetbriar painted by the now-less-famous, yet talented, artist Thomas Birch (1779–1851). Born in England, he had come to bustling Philadelphia in 1794 and made a name for himself painting, among other subjects, the estates of merchant gentlemen on the city’s outskirts. This house still stands in what is now Fairmont Park and was highlighted as an iconic example of the British tradition of “country house” portraits in the 1986 exhibition Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830, curated by Edward J. Nygren for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Hernstadt’s interests are not limited to paintings. Helping her to welcome guests in the entrance gallery is a period plaster bust of George Washington created by a still-unidentified maker. (Mysteries like this attract 2 0 2 0
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(LEFT-RIGHT) THOMAS BIRCH (1779–1851), View of Sweetbriar, 1811, oil on canvas, 26 x 35 1/2 in.
SIMÉON PIERRE DEVARANNE (1789–1859), Thomas Jefferson, c. 1820–30, iron, 17 in. high
CHAUNCEY BRADLEY IVES (1810–1894), Egeria, c. 1876, marble; at right is a gumwood and red oak table made in New York 1710–20.
instinctive researchers like Hernstadt, so the search continues.) Glowing in a corner of the dining room is a statue of a completely different character: Egeria was carved in marble around 1876 by the neoclassicist Chauncey Bradley Ives (1810–1894), a Connecticut-born expatriate who settled in Rome. Here he imagines the legendary water nymph who married Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius. Grief-stricken after his death, Egeria purportedly dissolved into a sacred pool, and Ives reveals the crucial moment of metamorphosis when her translucent toes transform into rivulets of water. As noted above, Hernstadt also collects European artworks, usually ones that shed light on the United States. A canonical example is a terra cotta relief of the Marquis de Lafayette created by the great French medalist Pierre Jean David d’Angers (1788–1856), but perhaps more unexpected is the sculpture of Thomas Jefferson cast in iron for a leading Berlin foundry by Siméon Pierre Devaranne (1789–1859), who was better known as a jeweler working in this material. Hernstadt has become deeply interested in the vogue for iron jewelry and sculpture in Europe during and after the Napoleonic Wars (when so many gold artworks were melted down), and so recently she obtained — after 15 years’ looking— a superb German iron candlestick. One of her key correspondents in this pursuit has been Dr. Nicholas Penny, former director of London’s National Gallery and an expert on sculpture and decorative arts. Many of Hernstadt’s rooms are lined with drawings, prints, maps, and other works on paper that reflect the breadth of her interests. There is particular strength in the art of William H. Bartlett (1809–1854), a Londoner who won fame for his illustrations of places in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Among the subjects of his sepia drawings here are the Oxbow in the Connecticut River Valley (once hailed as a natural wonder); the interior of George Washington’s military headquarters at the Hasbrouck House in Newburgh, New York; and the High Bridge aqueduct that now holds the honor of being New York City’s oldest bridge. Perhaps most intriguing is Bartlett’s scene of visitors admiring displays inside Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which Hernstadt later examined carefully with the late scholar of American art William H. Gerdts in order to establish exactly what was on view. Given the spectacular vistas of Central Park Hernstadt enjoys from many windows, it makes sense that she acquired Twenty-One Views of Central Park, created by Thomas Addison Richards (1820–1900) in 1862, the year after he published a similar group of charming scenes in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Though not widely remembered now, Richards was renowned in his day and served in the Union Army alongside the park’s landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, during the Civil War. It is typical of Hernstadt’s collegiality that several years ago she invited patrons of the Central Park Conservancy to come admire all of her artworks depicting
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Central Park in conjunction with the launch of Metropolitan Museum curator Morrison Heckscher’s book about the park’s artistic legacy. Last but not least among Hernstadt’s passions are furniture and other decorative arts and furnishings. Just for example, she is proud to own a gumwood day bed made in New York or New Jersey (1730–40) not only because it is rare, but also because it was previously owned by the great New York collector Mrs. Robert W. de Forest, who loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new American Wing in 1906 for an exhibition now considered the key turning point in our collective appreciation of decorative arts made in this country. Hernstadt is in the process of helping to sponsor an entire study day about day beds, and she hopes to learn more about her own during that event, whenever it happens. Hernstadt has long been a patron of the Netherland-America Foundation, which explores the full range of Dutch cultural and economic engagements with the U.S. past and present, offering more than a dozen Fulbright fellowships and other educational programs here. Among her Dutch-related treasures is a wooden kas (cabinet) deaccessioned by the Brooklyn Historical Society, which had obtained it from the Dutchdescended family that used it in their farmhouse for generations. Also here is a superb William & Mary-style walnut high chest of drawers from New York (c. 1720) and a selection of blue-and-white Chinese export porcelain made for the booming Dutch market in the mid-18th century. A natural extension of Hernstadt’s interest in the Dutch is her service on the board of Historic Huguenot Street (HHS), a landmark district of 30 buildings set on 10 acres in New Paltz, New York. Most of them are related to the French Protestants who built them, but the complex’s location in the Hudson River Valley means that HHS also explores archeology and material culture related to Dutch and Native American settlements in the area. One could go on for pages about other treasures in the Hernstadt Collection, and indeed a catalogue of them should be published someday. For now, however, it should give art lovers pleasure to know that Judith Hernstadt has collected, and continues to acquire, artworks and other objects that shed light on the long arc of American culture — something we all should know more about, especially in these complicated times. Information: For details on the Hernstadt apartment, visit 927fifthavenue.com or contact Louise C. Beit at Sotheby's International Realty (louise.beit@sothebyshomes. com) or John Burger at Brown Harris Stevens ( jburger@bhsusa.com). PETER TRIPPI is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur.
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BY PETER TRIPPI
H I D D E N C O L L E C T I O N
THE IBEX COLLECTION
ART “MATRONAGE”
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he term “realist art” encompasses a broad range of styles and technical approaches, and today the world’s largest private holding of “figurative, ultracontemporary, superrealist” art is the IBEX Collection. Its paintings by more than 100 artists offer keenly observed visual details that surpass photography, capturing the “microexpressions” of the people depicted in order to shed light on human nature and what it means to be human. Many of these works feature surrealist, magical, mythological, or playful touches that let viewers know the artist lives in our time. These are, in other words, not paintings pretending to be centuries old. The IBEX Collection was founded seven years ago by its Munich-based chairman, Albrecht von Stetten, who had previously built and sold one of Europe’s largest agricultural companies. Art is in his blood, as his aristocratic family is related by descent to the famed Medici dynasty of collectors. Von Stetten selected the ibex as the new collection’s name and symbol, partly because that sturdy Alpine goat appears in his family crest, and also because that animal has the impressive ability to climb the steepest inclines in Europe’s most rugged mountains. His cocollectors are David Willson (originally from Australia) and chief curator KiKi Kim, who hails from South Korea. They, too, grew up in art-collecting families. It is Willson, a global business consultant, who developed the IBEX Collection’s assessment tool of approximately 50 criteria for acquisitions, which range from technical proficiency to anticipated returns (because the collection is always open to reselling specific works). This initiative’s defining achievement to date is the IBEX Masterpiece Project, which — like the best ideas anywhere — was invented by the F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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ALEXANDER TIMOFEEV (b. 1971), Last Love, 2019, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 78.7 in.
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ARANTZAZU MARTINEZ (b. 1977), Freedom Reborn, 2015–18, oil on canvas, 78.7 x 118 in.
co-collectors out of necessity. In its first phase, the co-collectors reviewed 4,000 artists and visited 400 of them in their studios. Ultimately 24 painters were selected for the IBEX Masterpiece Project commissions: each work was to measure approximately 80 by 120 inches and would require two to three years of painstaking full-time work. IBEX recently unveiled 20 of these works completed by artists living in Argentina, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Spain, and the United States. Von Stetten notes, “The prohibitively high upfront cost of finely detailed paintings like these means they will neither be commissioned by galleries or collectors nor spontaneously created by artists. This is where IBEX has stepped in to help these masterpieces finally see the light of day.” He continues, “With art investment on the rise in North America and Asia, there was clearly a demand for contemporary big-ticket works, but apparently the supply was not coming through, due to a lack of art dealers with a bold enough vision and funds to boot.” Kim adds, “Actually, we do not collect art, we collect artists, whom we offer
long-term financial support with very few strings attached.” IBEX’s generous cash advances provide the selected artists with a wealth of time and an open mind with which to devote themselves completely to their Masterpiece Projects. The artists whose works were recently unveiled are Javier Arizabalo Garcia, Antonio Castello Avilleira, Emanuele Dascanio, David Eichenberg, Marco Grassi, Jeong Hae Kwang, Park Hyung Jin, Hubert de Lartigue, Martin Llamedo, Arantzazu Martinez, Sergio Martínez Cifuentes, Osamu Obi, Gabriel Picart, Aurelio Rodriguez Lopez, Nobuyuki Shimamura,
CHRISTIANE VLEUGELS (b. 1963), Faith, Hope, Love, 2018–20, oil on canvas, 98.4 x 206.6 in.
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Many readers of Fine Art Connoisseur may have noticed that Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube,
EMANUELE DASCANIO (b. 1983), The Nature
and other platforms are increasingly aggressive in removing art they define (all too vaguely) as
of The Universe (De Natura Universi), 2016–19,
“objectionable.” Our collective reliance on the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic has only
graphite and charcoal on paper, 98.4 x 98.4 in.
exacerbated the problem, which is why a new initiative named Don’t Delete Art! was launched this past May. Given the omnipresence of nude figures in its holdings, it makes sense that the IBEX Collection has joined this partnership with the photographer and installation artist Spencer Tunick (best known for his large-scale nude shoots), the National Coalition against Censorship, Article19, PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection, International Arts Rights Advisors, and Freemuse. The group argues that Internet platforms should adopt a clear set of principles that would allow legitimate art to circulate freely online. In support of this objective, the website dontdelete.art features a virtual gallery of photography, painting, video, and text recently banned or otherwise restricted, along with informative webinars, exhibitions, and other digital events.
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) MARCO GRASSI (b. 1987), The Paradox of Evolution, 2015–19, oil on canvas, 94.4 x 126 in. 2015–19, oil on panel, 63 x 94 in.
GABRIEL PICART (b. 1962), The Urn (L’Urna), PARK HYUNG JIN (b. 1970), The Three Graces,
2016–20, oil on canvas, 70.8 x 126.7 in.
MARTIN LLAMEDO (b. 1980), The Banquet,
2017–19, oil on canvas, 79 x 79 in.
Alexander Timofeev, Dino Valls, Christiane Vleugels, Philipp Weber, and Wang Xiao Bo. In addition to the luxury of focusing on a single project, these individuals have enjoyed the rare opportunity to travel, meet fellow artists, and visit international exhibitions and new cities. Completely underwritten by IBEX, these experiences have provided the artists with creative inspiration and chances to experiment with new techniques or tools. “MATRONAGE” All of these activities reflect a very old approach to supporting artists that had unfortunately gone out of fashion over the past half-century. One might describe it as slow patronage, but the IBEX co-collectors prefer to call it “matronage” because they see themselves as “matrons of the arts” who convey the standard of care we all expect from mothers: they support their artists completely in order to stimulate their best possible work, looking after every aspect of their existence — from funding to networking. Importantly, the selected artists were not given any instructions regarding subject matter. “Once we have chosen our artists, and they have chosen us,” von Stetten explains, “we give them free rein. For the first six months of the project we didn’t even ask, let alone see, what they were painting or otherwise doing to prepare for their painting. But eventually we invited them to step out of their comfort zone, be it physically or conceptually, for instance by traveling with them to
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exhibitions and cultural experiences on the other side of the globe.” Over this multi-year process, von Stetten says the co-collectors have seen the painters “move toward greater experimentation and innovation in their artistic approaches, with a deepening meaning and growing eloquence manifesting in their works. They’ve pushed the boundaries of superrealism today, and we are proud of that.” In production now is a documentary film that will introduce the IBEX Masterpiece Project, and the team has just released two prints — Ouroboros and The Father — after recent graphite drawings by the Italian master Emanuele Dascanio. (The prints were produced by Pure Fine Arts, a leading publisher in Munich.) Looking to the future, Willson says, “The coronavirus crisis has encouraged us to rethink how we may best present the works of our artists globally, in a post-pandemic world. As a consequence, we are designing a unique 3-D gallery to showcase the IBEX Masterpiece Project. The gallery, where each painting exists in its own unique space that supports the artistic idea, will be available soon.” Fine Art Connoisseur congratulates von Stetten, Kim, and Willson on their achievement and hopes that the success of the IBEX initiative will inspire other collectors (working in teams or independently) to pursue a similar model in other areas of realism. Information: ibex-collection.com, ibex-masters.com. PETER TRIPPI is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur.
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make it an annual event. The group now encompasses Collins, McGaughy, Lee Ricks, and E. Gordon West, who will attend the reception on October 17 and sign copies of the book they have written (with editing by their fellow watercolorist Pat Safir). On October 4, Clay McGaughy will demonstrate his techniques at the gallery.
A RT I ST S & G A L L E R I E S
online group exhibition from Chicago’s 33 Contemporary Gallery. Its artworks explore objects, places, or memories that — in these troubling times — offer the artist (and hopefully viewers) a measure of tranquility, solace, and safe harbor from the storm.
Fredericksburg, Texas insightgallery.com September 4–25
InSight Gallery is about to open its Fall Group Show featuring more than 30 of its talented artists. One highlight will be a quartet of recent paintings by Damian Lechoszest. Damian Lechoszest (b. 1976), Adam, 2020, oil on canvas, 26 x 18 in.
(TOP) Lori Putnam (b. 1962), Lowcountry Boil, 2020, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in. • (RIGHT) James Richards (b. 1972), Walk with Me, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.
Jivan Lee (b. 1984), Lost and Then Found, 2020, oil on linen, 60 x 54 in.
Santa Fe
Charleston
lewallengalleries.com through September 19 LewAllen Galleries is presenting recent oil paintings by the Taos artist Jivan Lee. Titled Dynamics of Change, this show reveals his powerful emotional response to the physicality of the natural environment in which he immerses himself. Lee applies paint thickly using spatulas, brushes, paper towels, and even his bare hands, creating images that hover between abstraction and representation. The exhibition includes the artist’s largest piece to date and can be enjoyed remotely via a 3-D virtual walkthrough.
meyervogl.com September 4–25 “We both wanted the same thing: dead fish and beer.” That’s how Lori Putnam describes the day she and fellow painter James Richards developed an almost sibling-like bond. More than 10 years later, they will finally have a show together when Sibling Rivalry opens at Meyer Vogl Gallery. Putnam says “this new body of work showcases our mutual love for the Lowcountry, our family, and our good friends.” On September 4, the gallery will host an all-day pop-in (masks required). At 1:30 p.m. that day, the artists will discuss their show on Instagram Live.
Jeffrey T. Larson (b. 1962), Still Life of Possibilities, 2020, oil on linen, 16 x 24 in.
Orleans, Massachusetts Collins Galleries September 26–October 16
On Cape Cod, Collins Galleries will exhibit recent still life paintings by the British artist Paul Raymond Seaton and the American Jeffrey T. Larson. Both masters transcend the merely “pretty” to find something deeper in their setups.
Finis Collins (b. 1929), Terlingua Church, Big Bend, 2003, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in. Ardith Starostka (b. 1962), Repose, 2009, oil on linen mounted on panel, 11 x 14 in., available from 33 Contemporary Gallery (Chicago)
San Antonio
prudenciagallery.com October 4–November 14 Art Gallery Prudencia will soon present the exhibition The Watercolor Gang at 50 Years. Five decades ago, Finis Collins, Ivan McDougal, and Clay McGaughy took a week-long painting trip to Texas’s magnificent Big Bend National Park. They enjoyed it so much they decided to F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Online only
artsy.net/33-contemporary through December 31 Curated by Dr. Samuel Peralta, Shelter is the latest
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Paul Raymond Seaton (b. 1953), Garden Roses, 2019, oil on linen, 16 x 14 in.
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Perkinson, and the authors themselves. For details, visit riverflowsbook.com.
B O OK S
Christine Lashley (b. 1967), Husk, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.
Charleston
principlegallery.com September 4–30 Principle Gallery will soon present Nature/Humanity, a show of recent oil paintings by the impressionist Christine Lashley and the realist Kyle Stuckey that highlights their shared interest in how people and nature coexist. At home in Virginia, Lashley has spent the lockdown painting her garden and also scenes of Charleston and Paris based on memory rather than direct observation. She is especially gifted at capturing how white and pastel-colored buildings change colors based on time of day, light intensity, and atmosphere. Stuckey lives in Charleston and will exhibit a range of marsh scenes, still lifes, Charleston and Paris cityscapes, and even a full figure. During lockdown he has produced several tonal paintings.
Kyle Stuckey (b. 1987), Peaches and Pink, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.
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The catalogue accompanying the touring exhibition Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee will soon be published by Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland Museum of American Art in partnership with D. Giles Ltd (London). This is the first major project devoted to Doris Lee (1904–1983), whose folk-art-tinged scenes of everyday life were widely admired from the mid-1930s through the 1950s, along with her graphic designs and illustrations. Based in the artists’ colony of Woodstock, New York, she exploded onto the American art scene in 1935 but has been more or less forgotten since her death. The Lee retrospective will appear at the Westmoreland (Greensburg, Pennsylvania) from September 5 through November 29 and then visit Florida’s Vero Beach Museum of Art, Memphis’s Dixon Gallery and Gardens, and Iowa’s Figge Art Museum.
Two centuries ago, artists began painting the American West in watercolor. From firsthand portraits of Native Americans to dramatic landscapes, this visual story is told by the watercolorists Don Weller and Marlin Rotach in their new 200-page book The River Flows: Watercolors of the American West. The historical watercolorists profiled include George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Thomas Moran, Charles M. Russell, Frederic Remington, Thomas Hart Benton, and Maynard Dixon. The living ones include William Matthews, Morten Solberg, Dean Mitchell, Tom S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
In his 228-page book Knowing and Seeing: Reflections on Fifty Years of Drawing Cities, Douglas Cooper reflects on his half-century-long career as a muralist specializing in cityscapes. In a book that is part memoir and part analysis of his own art, Cooper offers personal anecdotes on his site sketches and finished works, then explores their intellectual roots. Though his core artistic ideas began in Pittsburgh (where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University), Cooper has exhibited and made murals worldwide. All of this work has been driven by a desire to combine his conception of place with his perception of it — thus the title Knowing and Seeing. The book has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (upittpress.org).
M USEU MS
Peter Anton (b. 1963), Donut Pillar, 2020, mixed media, 20 x 15 x 13 in.
New London, Connecticut lymanallyn.org through October 18
On view at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum are 35 mouthwatering hyper-realist treats by Connecticut-based artist Peter Anton. For Sweet Dreams: Confectionery Sculpture, he has created an immersive environment of oversized, 2 0 2 0
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festively decorated donuts, jelly rolls, ice cream cones, cakes, and other delights that are actually made of plaster, resin, wood, metal, acrylic, and oil paint. Anton notes, “We all have food in common. We need food to sustain us, as well as to experience very special memories.”
created by this Massachusetts artist celebrate life — vita — as much as they evoke the 17th-century Dutch still life painting genre known as vanitas. Originally, vanitas still lifes were intended to remind viewers of life’s brevity and fragility. Rather than offering only stillness, Speranza examines hidden spaces — the sculptural qualities of flowers — and infuses this traditional genre with contemporary vitality.
Artists. On view are more than 50 paintings, drawings, and sculptures of creatures from around the globe, including birds, cats, mammals, and endangered species. Executive director Melissa H. Mulrooney notes how perfectly this project “represents the intersection of our efforts as both a museum and a nature center.”
OUT & A BOUT
Kevin Chambers (b. 1982), The Dreamer, 2020, bronze (edition of 10), 20 x 14 x 10 in.
John Ward’s acrylic painting Rescue Near Galveston
Marietta, Georgia
mariettacobbartmuseum.org September 19–December 13 A member of the National Sculpture Society, Atlanta’s Kevin Chambers will soon exhibit approximately 50 works in the solo exhibition Alegoria. He earned a B.F.A. in media arts and animation from the Art Institute of Atlanta, then studied the figure with such masters as Glenn Vilppu, Brian Booth Craig, David Simon, and Andrew Cawrse. Today Chambers says, “I am constantly inspired by everything around me and try to bring that to my work.”
Torso of Aphrodite/Venus, Roman, 1st century AD, marble, 46 in. high
This summer John Ward’s acrylic painting Rescue Near Galveston won the 2020 George Gray Award for Artistic Excellence, the highest honor presented each year by the U.S. Coast Guard Art Program (COGAP). At New York City’s Salmagundi Club, jury members Capt. Jason Tama, club president Elizabeth Spencer, and Fine Art Connoisseur editor-in-chief Peter Trippi examined all 31 works by the 22 artists who had donated their artworks to COGAP’s permanent collection. Ward’s scene depicts an Air Station Houston helicopter rescuing an oil tanker crewmember during a medical emergency. COGAP’s collection now holds more than 2,000 artworks in various media, and this is its 39th year using art to educate wide-ranging audiences about the Coast Guard’s people and their work.
Tampa
tampamuseum.org through January 9, 2022 The Tampa Museum of Art houses one of the largest Greek and Roman antiquities collections in the southeastern U.S., so it makes sense for it to celebrate the centenary of American women’s right to vote — and of its own founding — with the exhibition HerStory: Stories of Ancient Heroines and Everyday Women. On view are works from the collection that highlight goddesses and mythological characters including Aphrodite, Athena, and the Amazons, as well as women whose names have been forgotten.
Stamford, Connecticut stamfordmuseum.org through September 7
Kathleen Speranza (b. 1962), Heavy Rose, 2018, oil on panel, 14 x 11 in., collection of Erika Dolmans
Ogunquit, Maine
ogunquitmuseum.org through October 31 The Ogunquit Museum of American Art is presenting the exhibition Kathleen Speranza: Vanitas Vita. The florals F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Chula Beauregard’s Into the Light
The Stamford Museum & Nature Center is the latest venue to present Art and the Animal, a touring juried exhibition organized by the Society of Animal
On May 29, American Women Artists (AWA) hosted its awards ceremony via Facebook Live in partnership with the Booth Western Art Museum (Cartersville, Georgia), which was then presenting Making Their Mark, an exhibition featuring 113 paintings and sculptures by the organization’s members. More than $36,000 in cash and merchandise prizes were awarded remotely to 20 artists by the three jurors: Catherine Huff (High Museum of Art, Atlanta), Elizabeth Wilson (Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta), and Chrishaunda Lee Perez (writer and film producer). The $10,000 Grand Prize went to Carrie Waller. Among the other prizewinners were two illustrated here: Lisa
Jody Rigsby (b. 1966), Hopnotized [Blacktailed Jackrabbit], 2019, oil on board, 12 x 9 in.
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wildlife, figures, and historical scenes both epic and intimate. The customary in-person sale will be replaced with an exciting virtual experience on the evening of September 12. This will be a proxy-bid-only sale, for which bids are being accepted from now until just before the event starts. Everyone can enjoy the online catalogue’s expanded features and take private digital tours by appointment. The artworks will all remain on view at the museum until closing time on September 13.
Lisa Gleim’s The Secret Keepers
Gleim’s pastel The Secret Keepers (Booth Museum Purchase Award) and Chula Beauregard’s oil Into the Light (Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine Award of Excellence). Gleim obtained permission to receive her award in person because she lives within easy driving distance of the museum. For details, visit americanwomenartists.org
Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837–1908), A Winding Stream: View of Mount Chocorua, n.d., oil on canvas, 15 1/4 x 12 1/4 in., estimate $8,000–$s12,000, Brunk Auctions
Classical-style American furniture and many 19th-century American paintings, including scenes of New Hampshire (where Banks restored another historic house) by such masters as Durand, Bricher, Gifford, Champney, Cropsey, and Shapleigh.
Asheville, North Carolina brunkauctions.com September 12
Brunk Auctions will soon disperse the renowned collection of the late connoisseur, scholar, and playwright William N. Banks, Jr. (1924–2019). This sale of more than 300 lots will focus on the contents of Bankshaven, the 1820s Federal-style house in Newnan, Georgia, that Banks rescued and reconstructed on his family’s property. Among the standouts are superb examples of Federal and
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Great Falls, Montana cmrussell.org September 12
The C.M. Russell Museum has delayed its popular annual benefit auction from March to September. On view at the museum now through September 10 are the works of art to be sold. The fun begins at 10 a.m. on September 12, when auctioneer Troy Black begins the First Strike Auction that features works by an array of contemporary artists. Then at 1 p.m. comes The Russell Auction, which highlights still more contemporary art plus significant historical works. It’s easy to register in advance and bid remotely.
AU C T IO N S & FA I R S
Severin Roesen (1816–c. 1872), Still Life with Fruit (one of a pair), n.d., oil on canvas, 26 x 21 in. (each), estimate $40,000–$60,000, Brunk Auctions
Charles M. Russell (1864–1926), Following the Buffalo Run, c. 1894, oil on canvas, 23 1/8 x 35 in., estimate $1.5 million–$2 million
Mian Situ (b. 1953), Prepare to Celebrate, 2020, oil on canvas, 32 x 26 in.
Oklahoma City
nationalcowboymuseum.org/prix-de-west September 12 The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum has announced a new look for its 48th annual Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition & Sale. Like so many activities, this much-anticipated event was delayed, but now its more than 300 paintings and sculptures (made by over 95 artists) are on view at the museum. Notable is the sheer diversity of subjects, ranging from the customary rodeos and reservations to landscapes, S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009), Spruce Timber, 1946, watercolor with graphite on paper, 21 5/8 x 30 in., estimate $100,000–$150,000
Boston
skinnerinc.com September 25 Skinner will conduct its next auction of American and European fine paintings and sculpture entirely online. The event will be livestreamed with bidding by Internet, telephone, and absentee bid. Please check the firm’s website on the off chance that public health conditions might also permit a live audience to assemble in the saleroom.
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Timothy David Mayhew Inducted as the 2020 Master Artist The internationally-acclaimed 45th Annual Birds in Art
Master Artist Retrospective Exhibition September 12 - November 29, 2020
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In Her Pain, She Fled 14” x 11” Oil, Crayon and Wax
BOBBI MILLER
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“Magpie Melody” 15”h x 40”w Acrylic on Board
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Larry Cannon ASMA LPAPA CPAP CWA
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Fine Art Watercolors www.cannonwc.com
Valley Sunset
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Treasures from the Estate Sept. 4TH -Oct. 17,TH 2020 “ U N T I T L E D ” | Oil on Canvas – 51” x 44”
Cheryl Newby g a l l e r y
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KATHIE ODOM
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Anthony P. Frudakis, n.a. American Classical Realism
Adromeda 28� Bronze
The Whole Picture, 48x24, oil on canvas
BONNIE LAMBERT
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Vicki Pedersen vickipedersen.com vicki.pedersen@gmail.com
Learning the Ropes, Oil, 30" x 24”
North Star Art Gallery presents
BRIAN KEELER August-September: When Life Is Still October-November: Magical Mythologies
Luminous Lake- Cayuga July Evening oil on linen on panel, 30” x 30”
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Rick J. Delanty CAC, AIS, LPAPA
Painting The Spirit of Nature Representation:
Mission Fine Art Gallery St. George, Utah S u n s e t O ve r Ho m e , 18 x 2 4 , oi l
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Pandora 30 x 40 Oil on Linen
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CHANTEL LYNN BARBER Capturing Life in Acrylic
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“Into the Wind” 12x16, acrylic on panel
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Sara Jane Reynolds FINE ART
Painting the Lowcountry Landscapes of South Carolina
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“Morning on the Prairie“ 30x30 oil on canvas
WILLIAM A. SCHNEIDER
Revealing the Soul AISM, OPAM, PSA-MP
“Reckless Abandon” 24 x 18 Pastel on Archival Panel Available at Illume Gallery of Fine Art St. George, UT • (435) 313-5008 illumegalleryoffineart.com
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Nostalgia BETH BATHE
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PALDEN HAMILTON Cascade 48x44” Oil
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Beyond the Light, 20x24 Oil
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The scent of the Lowcountry… A captivating odor of salty air, hot sun on warm cedars and pines, and the rich tang of pluff mud… A land full of water… With Sea Islands that march from Charleston to Savannah facing the winds of the Atlantic. Get a taste of the Lowcountry: marygilkerson.com
Dawn Light, Edisto, oil on panel
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ROB COMPTON FINE ART
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PAINTING NEW MEXICO & THE AMERICAN WEST Register at
larimore.faso.com for exclusive offers and first views of new work. Visit our NEW LOCATION in TAOS!
P L E I N A I R & S T U D I O PA I N T I N G S
135 North Plaza, Taos, NM 87571 larimore.faso.com 575.770.4462 “Aspens on the Acequia” 16”x12” oil on linen panel
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312.388.2568
WWW.MATTHEWPAOLETTI.COM
Oil on canvas 18X24 “Mary”
Charles Hildebrandt
Jaws of Fall, 36” x 48”, Acrylic on canvas
Nightswimming II, 18” x 24”, Acrylic on canvas
hildebrandtart.com charles.hildebrandt@gmail.com 336.287.3035 F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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CATHERINE KOON OPA, CAC
Taos Governor, 20 X 16 oil on canvas Available through the artist
www.catherinekoon.com
Elaine Hahn Please visit my website
elainehahnfineart.com to see all my works: Original Oils, Original Watercolors and Limited Edition Prints.
Inquires Welcome elaine@elainehahnart.com Signature Memberships Oil Painters of America American Women Artists American Watercolor Society National Watercolor Society Art Renewal Center Living Artist
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Debbie Mueller Art
Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival in Isolation 2020
www.debbiemuellerart.com
Suspended Service 11 x 14” oil on panel Best in Show
Nubble Light 12 x 16” oil on panel People’s Choice Award and Honorable Mention
Looking Beyond 36 x 48”, oil on canvas
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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Pamela Askew phmaskew phmaskew@gmail.com
“Yellow Tree”, 24 x 18, Oil on canvas
A Veteran, Bronze Sculpture On View in the permanent collections of: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Angel Fire, NM 87710
www.vietnamveteransmemorial.org
National Museum of Marine Corps.
Triangle, VA 22172
www.usmcmuseum.com
Suzanne Johnson 184
For Commission Inquires Contact: Suzanne Johnson Sculpture Design sjsculpturedesign@yahoo.com SJSculptureDesign.com Studio 810-695-1800
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HEATHER ARENAS
‘Grace at the Met’, 36x48, oil on cradled birch
WAOW MASTER AWA SIGNATURE
WWW.HEATHERARENAS.COM
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Are you a collector? Are you an artist? Join us! We are a unique non-profit (known as Windows to the Divine) that partners with museums and galleries to promote the living artist. Collectors for Connoisseurship (C4C) is our invitation-only nationwide network of artists and collectors dedicated to art appreciation via exhibitions, paint outs, symposiums and salons. If you are a collector, consider becoming one of our Founding Connoisseurs who travel together to different cities (Denver, NYC, Paris, Atlanta/Savannah). If you are an artist or a collector, you won’t want to miss our biennial national exhibitions. From November 5-7, 2020, we will host Contemporary Visions of Beauty at Space Gallery Annex in Denver featuring the works of renowned artists, including LuCong, Scott Fraser, Albert Handell, Ron Hicks, Quang Ho, Dan, Danny & John McCaw, C.W. Mundy, Jill Soukup, Daniel Sprick, Adrienne Stein, and Vincent Xeus.
To learn more about us: www.windowstothedivine.org or contact Shannon Robinson: shannon@artistcalling.com Daniel Bilmes, Woven Flower, 2018 Windows Exhibition (Private Collection)
L I L I YA M U G L I A
Streets of Piedmont, 8"x10", Oil on Panel
M U G L I A - A R T. C O M 186
Hym Whiche is Knowen for a Lyer, 18”x36”, Oil on Canvas
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Sunny Afternoon in Piedmont, 9”x12”, Oil on Panel
I N F O @ M U G L I A - A R T. C O M S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
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D O N RAN KIN
www.donrankinfineart.com
Wo rks a ls o o n v ie w at BARB A RA MO O RE F INE A RT, C ha dds Fo rd, PA Near the House, 30” x 22” Transparent watercolor on paper, 2019, Available via artist. $7,000
Presents
The Watercolor Gang at 50 October 4- November 14, 2020 The gallery will also host a virtual tour of the exhibit Dancing by E. Gordon West
Canyon Deep by Clay McGaughy
Featuring Finis Collins, Clay McGaughy, Lee Ricks, and E. Gordon West Past Members include Al Brouillette, Jack MacDonald, Ivan McDougal, Roy Murray, KuoYen Ng, Allen Richards, Hal Sims Clay McGaughy will be demonstrating his watercolor technique Sunday, October 4, from 2-4pm Reception and Book Signing with the Artists will be Saturday, October 17, 12-4pm Pieces on display at Art Gallery Prudencia in San Antonio, TX Visit prudenciagallery.com for details 210.422.8681 Terlingua Church by Finis Collins
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Mission Espada by Lee Ricks
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Go Ahead:
Laugh!
Gary Alsum Bronze Sculpture
We could all use some humor about now!
Chasing Butterflies 8”H x 17”W x 11”D
View Gary’s work, serious and not so serious, or inquire about commissioning your own masterpiece at:
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garyalsum.com
GALLERY PARTNERS: Nationalsculptorsguild.com Knoxgalleries.com
e-mail: gary@garyalsum.com
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35th Annual
Bosque Art Classic
See Art Differently.
First Light on the Sentinel by Isaiah Ratterman
Online Art Exhibition & Sale
September 12-26
Pure Heart by Tanja Gant
2020 Judge
Bruce Greene, CA
202 Pieces 123 Artists
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Koala Walk by Linda Becker
September 12 Patron Pre-Sale 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Virtual Awards Ceremony Facebook 7 p.m.
Ballet Dancer by Pokey Park
September 14 Online Sale Opens 10 a.m. September 26 Sale Ends 2 p.m. OC
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Last Dance by Kathy Tate
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Sponsored by the BAC Art Council | Clifton, TX
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— ADVERTORIAL —
WORLD’S FIRST REALISM ART CONFERENCE GOES ONLINE Attracts Leading Master-Level Artists
H
ow do you bring together artists from all over the world and give them exposure to learn from the finest artists alive today? In a response to COVID-19 and the worldwide quarantine, art publisher Eric Rhoads believed that artists were feeling the need to be connected, to be inspired, and to learn more during their downtime. So he launched the world’s first virtual art conference, PleinAir Live, for the plein air painting audience. The event, intended to bring the world together, was not a substitute for the company’s famous Plein Air Convention & Expo — but after COVID cancelled that event, the timing could not have been more perfect. PleinAir Live was held this past June and had an audience much larger than the convention itself. People who attend PACE often spend $3,000 or more on tickets, airfare, cars, hotel, and meals; PleinAir Live, at about 1/10th of the cost, was able to attract a broader range of attendees, and it turned out to be a big success. Knowing that COVID might cancel the company’s well-attended Figurative Art Convention & Expo, Rhoads announced a new virtual conference, Realism Live. The difference is that Realism Live is not just figurative and portrait painting, but includes landscape, still life, flower painting, and other disciplines. To be held October 21-24, with a Beginner’s Day on October 20, the event is expected to exceed the massive attendance of PleinAir Live and break the world’s record for the largest attendance at a virtual art conference. It will also break the record for the largest number of people painting online together, virtually, from the same model. “People really connect,” says Rhoads. “We developed a way for our attendees to interact and get acquainted
with other artists, and people really made friends and felt connected. We also held a nightly paint-out gathering and happy hour, where many hundreds of us were on together while I interviewed random people from around the world. It was a blast. So we’ll be doing that with Realism Live as well.” This event is unique because people from all over the world will be attending live, while others watch it later in their own time zones. And there will be instructors from all over the world, along with the top instructors in America, teaching drawing and painting on just about every possible subject. Within days of announcing the new event, the size exceeded that of the Figurative Art Convention & Expo, and as of press time there were almost 700 people attending, including people from over 30 countries. “This truly is the first world gathering of realism artists,” says Rhoads. Realism is defined as subjects that can be identified; this event will feature a range of styles from tight, academic realism to loose, impressionistic styles. Realism Live will present a world-class faculty, including world-renowned painters Daniel Sprick, Rose Frantzen, Daniel Gerhartz, Juliette Aristides, Graydon Parrish, and Joshua LaRock. More are announced each week. For those who have never attended a virtual conference, it's a matter of having Internet access, showing up, clicking on the link provided after registering, and watching on your computer or tablet or phone. Those who want to participate in interactive events will need a camera on their phone or computer. To sign up, visit realismlive.com, and be sure to explore the optional Beginner’s Day as well.
PARTIAL LIST OF FACULTY AT REALISM LIVE
190 Daniel Sprick
Graydon Parrish
Joshua LaRockS E P
Juliette Aristides
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Rose Frantzen F I N E A R T C
Daniel Gerhartz
O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Joshua LaRock
Graydon Parrish
Sign up at:
RealismLive.com or call:
Juliette Aristides
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
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561.655.8778
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$38,000 ART COMPETITION
WIN $15,000 CASH AND THE COVER OF PLEIN AIR MAGAZINE 8th Annual Salon Grand Prize Winner – Tom Hughes
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SALON CATEGORIES
Acrylic • Animals & Birds • Best Artist Over 65 • Artist Under 30 • Building • Drawing • Figure & Portrait • Best Floral • Landscape • Nocturne, Sunrise, Sunset • Oil • Outdoor Still Life • Pastel • Plein Air Work ONLY • Student • Vehicle • Water • Watercolor • Western 192
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NOW OPEN FOR ENTRIES To enter, visit: PleinAirSalon.com S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
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BECOME A BETTER PAINTER TODAY!
Packed with the 10 most valuable tips to expand your mastery of figurative art, from Eric Rhoads, Publisher of Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine and PleinAir Magazine. To download go to
realismlive.com/ebook
d i r e c t o ry o f a d v e rt i s i n g Adams, Mark Edward..................... 84 Alexander, Charles......................... 43 Allison, Deborah............................. 40 American Impressionist Society.......48 American Tonalist Society............. 30 Anderson, Kurt............................... 39 Anthony Frudakis Studio............... 169 APOKALUPSIS LLC......................... 196 Arenas, Heather............................. 187 Art Gallery Prudenica..................... 184 Artwork Archive............................. 46 Askew, Pamela............................... 176 Balser, Poppy.................................. 37 Barber, Chantel Lynn..................... 171 Barlow, Mike................................... 88 Basham, Jill.................................... 23 Bathe, Beth Brownlee..................... 170 Bektayeva, Aigerim........................ 19 Bennett Prize, The.......................... 24 Bingham, Bruce.............................. 176 Bird, Matthew................................. 175 Bonacci, Yvonne............................ 39 Booth Western Art Museum........... 72 Boren, Nancy.................................. 53 Boren, Nelson................................. 82 Bosque Arts Center........................ 172 Boston Design Week...................... 62 Boyd, Dennis.................................. 173 Boyd, Jr., David............................... 51 Boyer, Lyn ...................................... 164 Boylan, Brenda............................... 165 Brookgreen Gardens...................... 65 Brown, Brienne............................... 50 Brown, Krystal................................ 42 Budan, Karen A.............................. 44 Buswell, Blair.................................. 69 Byrne, Michele............................... 53 Carolyn Lord Studio....................... 70 Casebeer, Kim................................ 86 Caster, Mitch.................................. 84 Castillo, Victoria............................. 39 Cease, Lana.................................... 177 Celebration of Fine Art................... 21 Chambers, Kevin............................ 56, 58 Chambers, Lauren.......................... 58 Cheryl Newby Gallery.................... 167 Closson, Nate................................. 90 Coleman, Barbara.......................... 41 Collins, Troy................................... 11 Colorado Dominican Vocation Foundation..................................... 184 Compton, Rob................................ 179 Corbett, Rox................................... 195 Danziger, Fred................................ 186 Debrosky, Christine........................ 52 Delanty, Rick.................................. 175 DickinsonArt, Inc............................ 39 Dunphy, Kathleen........................... 74 Durant, Erik.................................... 61 Ellem, Kathy................................... 81 Figliola, Vincent............................. 168 Finderup, Lars................................ 57 Fisher, Cynthie............................... 76 Foell, Sue........................................ 38 F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Fusco Four Marketing.................... 62 Gallegos, Eloisa.............................. 57 Garrish, Mary.................................. 51 Gary Alsum Bronze Sculpture........ 189 Gilkerson, Mary.............................. 166 Goble, Ann..................................... 41 Gonske, Walt.................................. 5 Graham, Lindsey Bittner................ 43 Greenwood, Jim............................. 58 Groesser, Debra Joy....................... 49 Hahn, Elaine................................... 182 Hamilton, Palden............................ 186 Harms, David.................................. 43 Hassard, Ray................................... 178 Hazel, Aaron................................... 22 Held, John Davis............................. 163 Hildebrandt, Charles...................... 189 Hopkins Henry, Leah...................... 60 Howard, Ellen................................. 177 Huang, Qiang................................. 37 Illume Gallery of Fine Art............... 17 Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival....... 47 James J. Rieser Fine Art................. 73 Jill E. Banks Art, LTD....................... 6 Johnson, Joel R.............................. 87 Johnson, Stephanie....................... 167 Johnson, Suzanne.......................... 187 Jung, Michelle................................ 7 Keefe, Shelby L.............................. 37 Kirkland, Jamie............................... 181 Kling, Chris..................................... 44 Koon, Catherine............................. 182 Kovvuri, Lisa................................... 36 Krupinski, Chris.............................. 67 Laguna Plein Air Painters Association...55 Lambert, Bonnie............................ 169 Larimore, Ron................................. 180 Larry Cannon Watercolors............. 178 Larsen, Ann.................................... 45 Lashley, Christine........................... 32 Liliya Muglia Vovk........................... 185 Lindsey, Carolyn............................. 49 Lotton Gallery................................ 4 Lovett, Amanda.............................. 44 Lundeen, Kaaren............................ 36 Manitou Galleries........................... 28 Mary Whyte LLC............................. 26 Mathison, Jeffery............................ 70 McChristian, Jennifer..................... 29 McCollough, Celeste..................... 50 Meehan, Patrick............................. 53 Melanie Ferguson Ceramics.......... 57 Miller, Bobbi................................... 164 Miller, Vanessa............................... 52 Moné, Nicole.................................. 63 Mueller, Debbie.............................. 183 Mutti, Linda.................................... 50 National Museum of Wildlife Art......75 National Sculpture Society............ 64 National Watercolor Society.......... 70 North Star Art Gallery.................... 173 O’Gormley, Peregrine..................... 35 Odom, Kathie................................. 168 Oil Painters of America.................. 36 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R
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Ordman, Aline E............................. 45 Overton, Brad................................. 78 Paoletti, Matthew........................... 181 Papa, Ralph.................................... 179 Paula Holtzclaw Fine Art................ 10 Pedersen, Vicki............................... 171 Peet, Darcie G................................ 38 Pisik, Doug..................................... 61 Principle Gallery............................. 23, 32 Putnam, Lori................................... 2 Rankin, Don.................................... 185 Raynolds, Linda S........................... 87 Reavis, Jeanne................................ 41 Red Piano Art Gallery, The............. 13 Reuben, Orit................................... 50 Reuter-Twining, Diana.................... 54 Reynolds, Sara Jane....................... 174 RJD Gallery..................................... 8-9 Rogers, William L........................... 40 Rogo Marketing & Communications...24 Sanders, Nancy.............................. 58 Saubert, Tom.................................. 85 Schneider, William A...................... 174 Schultz, Suzy.................................. 59 Schwartz, Jean............................... 165 Scott, Sandy................................... 86 SEWE/Southeastern Wildlife Exposition...................................... 33 Sherry Salari Sander...................... 170 Siminger, Suzanne......................... 34 Smith, Adam.................................. 66 Smith, Shelley................................ 45 Sneary, Richard.............................. 180 Sokov, Pavel................................... 40 Sotheby’s International Realty - NYC...27 Srinivas, Radhika............................ 52 Stallings, David.............................. 188 Steamboat Art Museum................. 79 Steiner Prints.................................. 77 Strickland, Ulla............................... 60 Strock-Wasson, Carol..................... 18 Stuller, Susan................................. 71 Susiehyer Studio............................ 89 Timothy David Mayhew / Atelier Cedar Ridge................................... 163 Tucker, Ezra Noel............................ 166 Ukrainetz, Echo.............................. 88 Ukrainetz, Ron................................ 88 Usibelli, Michele............................. 89 VanDerHoek, Kim........................... 23 Walker, Steven S............................. 38 Washington Society of Landscape Painters, Inc................................... 14-15 Wausau Museum Of Contemporary Art................................................... 68 Weiss, Robin................................... 49 Weller, Don..................................... 31 Wells, J. Russell.............................. 172 Wetzel, Brooke............................... 90 Williamson, Robin G....................... 43 Willing-Booher, Denise................... 183 Youngquist, Romona...................... 42 Zhao, Jing....................................... 41
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C L A S S I C
ROBERT MEREDITH (b. 1 9 4 0), Th e Mirror in the S t u d i o, 2 0 1 9, o i l on panel, 26 x 18 in., collection of the artist
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Report Reveals.... Mistakes Collectors Make That Put Their Art Collection and Its Value at Serious Risk
To download go to
collectormistakes.com
covid cafe
w: roxcorbettart.com e: rox@roxcorbettart.com
THE APOKALUPSIS PROJECT Apokalupsis: “to take the cover off ” in Greek
Master painter Joseph Sulkowski has created over 50 art pieces culminating with his Magnum Opus, a 8’ x 12’ oil canvas mural, to be unveiled in 2021.
In this grand allegory, the foxhounds are a metaphor for humanity and the landscape symbolic of the field of time and space we occupy and negotiate. Currently, each of the hounds’ animations and interactions are presented as individual exhibition oils, studies, and drawings available for sale from $5,000 to $65,000. Contact Sulkowski Studios directly for inquiries.
www.josephsulkowski.com • jhsulk@bellsouth.net
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