Geoffrey Laurence

The Artwork of Geoffrey Laurence

Born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1949, Geoffrey Laurence is an American painter, illustrator, educator and designer of both graphic and interior work. Although considered an artist of the realism school, he is more concerned with the emotional responses that can be achieved through various painting techniques. Laurence finds figurative painting to be artificial by its very nature and, thus, an abstraction of the observed life-experience. For him, the goal of all painting is to engage the viewer in an emotional narrative.

Geoffrey Laurence’s parents were naturalized Americans, refugees from Europe and Holocaust survivors. At four years of age, Laurence moved with his family to England where he received his education. In 1965, he entered London’s Byam Shaw School of Art where he studied under geometric painter Bridget Riley. After receiving his London Certificate in Art and Design in 1968, Laurence studied graphic design for a year under poster artist Tom Eckersley at the London College of Printing. In 1969, he studied under Frederick Gore, the Head of the Painting Department, at Saint Martins School of Art where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1972.

Laurence moved to New York City in 1992 and attended the New York Academy of Art where he studied with painter and draftsman Eric Fischl and realist painter Vincent Desiderio. Laurence received his Master of Fine Arts Cum Laude in 1995. He worked freelance for the next tweety years in different art-related fields. Laurence was an illustrator for several magazines, including “Woman’s World” and “Look Now”, as well as a graphic designer for such companies as Pineapple and British Petroleum.

In the fashion industry, Geoffrey Laurence created a range of t-shirts for Walt Disney, the British online clothing retailer Burton and the UK-based global retailer French Connection. He also created work for fashion designer Katherine Hamnett and such companies as PampleMouse and Muscle Sport. During the 1990s, Laurence did interior design work for restaurants including London’s Zen restaurant chain. His design work has appeared in Vogue Magazine, the Royal Institute of British Architects magazine and the London Evening Standard. In addition to applying his skills to freelance work, Laurence continued his focus on figurative drawing and painting, work which regularly appeared in exhibitions.

Exposed to art since early childhood, Laurence has always been fascinated with the history of its development from early cave paintings to European masterworks. He sees art, which is older than verbal language, to be a major part of being human, that distinction which establishes human identity and elevates man from mere mechanical life. Laurence’s work has evolved over the course of his career and developed into two general themes. The first is maintaining a balanced link between pre-1900 classical painting and work of a more contemporary nature. The second is the continuation of a meaningful visual response to the Holocaust, a personal dedication resulting from his being the offspring of concentration camp survivors.

Geoffrey Laurence has been painting and exhibiting his work both in the United States and Europe for over forty-five years. In addition to group and solo gallery exhibitions, his work has been exhibited at the Brighton Museum in the United Kingdom; Taos, New Mexico’s Van Vechten-Lineberry Museum; Sacramento’s Center for Contemporary Art; the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin; and Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center, among others. Laurence was recently a finalist at the 2023 ARC Art Renewal Centre Salon in New York City.

Among Laurence’s many honors have been the 1995 Walter Erlebacher Award, the 2004 Robert Rauschenberg Award, the 2006 George Sugarman Foundation Grant, the 2017 Palm Art Award, the 2018 PoetsArtists/Bauhaus Award, and the 2023 Robert Rauschenberg Grant. Laurence has taught at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, the Santa Fe School of Art at SFCC, Seattle’s Gage Academy of Fine Art, and Santa Fe’s Bettina Steinke Studio. He is currently represented in the United States by Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery in Romeo, Michigan.

Geoffrey Laurence’s website, which includes technical resources for artists, classes, and contact information, can be located at: http://www.geoffreylaurence.com

Second Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “Animal Nature”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “The Brother”, 2006, Oil on Canvas, 96.5 x 71.1 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “Hold Fast”, 2004, Oil on Canvas, 198.1 x 182.9 cm, Private Collection

Ross Jones

The Artwork of Ross Jones

Born in 1966 in the small community of Otaki, Ross Jones is a painter from New Zealand whose works are intermixed with elements of surrealism. All of his carefully designed paintings contain hints that lead the viewers to various narratives. Jones combines objects, vintage toys, and personal photographs with his childhood memories to depict worlds of whimsy, remembrance and personal freedom.

Ross Jones spent his early years in Otaki, a town of five-thousand people that remained basically unchanged through the years. He graduated from the School of Design Innovation at the Victoria University of Wellington, previously Wellington’s School of Design. Ross spent the next fifteen years creating commissioned work for private individuals and companies, including New York’s Penguin Books, Bank of America, The Wall Street Journal and Time Incorporated. He currently paints personal work full time from his studio overlooking the Hauraki Gulf north of Aukland.

Over the years, Jones has been inspired by the work of both fine artists and commercial illustrators. Among these artists are Winslow Homer, Howard Pyle, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, the Wyeth family, and Maxfield Parish. Jones was particularly attracted to the composition and unique blending of color in Parish’s work. He was also drawn to the clean lines featured in Art Deco furniture and the seemingly effortless design compositions of vintage French posters.

An important factor in his choice of painting subjects is Ross Jones’s fascination with everyday objects, those most often taken for granted, as well as those extraordinary occurrences that happens in one’s life. He includes just enough detail in his work to initiate a story; the goal being that the viewer complete the narrative through their own experiences. Working with a carefully researched color palette, Jones uses every opportunity to play with the light in his paintings. He shapes the mood of each painting by his attentive use of multiple light sources, linear and aerial perspectives, and stretched shadows. Jones often distorts both shapes and architecture to increase the drama and compositional dimensions.

Ross Jones’s work is held in private collections in England, Ireland, North America, Australia and New Zealand. His work has been regularly featured and sold at many New Zealand gallery exhibitions including the Boyd-Dunlop Gallery in Napier; the Parnell Gallery in Parnell, Aukland; the Central Art Gallery in Queenstown; the RedSea Gallery in Brisbane City; and the Flagstaff Gallery in Devonport, Aukland.

Notes: Ross Jones’s website, which includes exhibitions, contact information, and both original work and limited edition prints for purchase, is located at: https://jonesthepainter.com

The Central Art Gallery has an online article in which Ross Jones discussed his style and techniques, as well as those artists who have inspired and influenced him. This article can be found at: https://centralart.co.nz/collections/ross-jones-1

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Ross Jones and 2018 Maiden Voyage”, Color Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ross Jones, “Anonymous Delivery”, 2012, Oil on Linen, 95 x 115 cm, Private Collection

Wade Reynolds

The Artwork of Wade Reynolds

Born in Jasper, New York in June of 1929, Wade Reynolds was an American self-taught realist painter. He studied electronics during his service in the United States Navy and for a short period of time in Rochester, New York. Realizing he was in the wrong career, Reynolds relocated to New York City where he joined a local theater group and studied drama at the studio of director Herbert Bergoff.

Residing in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, Reynolds designed fabrics, glassware, china, and wallpaper before focusing on painting. In 1958, he began his professional art career with a commission for illustrations for Richard Mason’s novel “The World of Suzie Wong”. In May of the following year, Reynolds relocated to California where he successfully established himself as a technically skilled painter of portraits and figures.

Reynolds painted throughout the California area, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oceanside and Newport Beach. Among his many commissions are portraits of stage and film actress Agnes Moorehead and Broadway costume designer Noel Taylor. Reynolds also painted the official state portrait of California Governor George Deukmjian who served from 1983 to 1991.

Wade Reynolds was an instructor at the Laguna College of Art and Design, formerly the Art Institute of Southern California, and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. After a long fight with cancer, Wade Reynolds passed away in October of 2011.

Wade Reynolds’s work has been exhibited in galleries in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Newport Beach, New York City, and Santa Fe. His work has been shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor. In addition to many private collections, Reynolds’s work is housed in the permanent collection of the University of Southern California’s Fisher Gallery.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wade Reynolds”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of Wade Reynolds

Bottom Insert Image: Wade Reynolds, “Boy on Chair”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 60.1 cm, Private Collection

Patrick Anthony Hennessy

The Paintings of Patrick Anthony Hennessy

Born in August of 1915 in Cork, Patrick Anthony Hennessy was an Irish realist painter known for his landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and trompe l’oeil paintings. Often considered an outsider of latter day Irish painting, he developed a distinctive personal style of carefully observed realism executed with highly finished surfaces that he faithfully followed throughout his career.

After his father’s battle death in 1917 during World War I, Hennessy’s mother remarried to John Duncan from Scotland in 1921; the family relocated to Arbroath, a royal burgh on the coast of Scotland where Duncan’s relatives resided. During his primary education at the Arbroath High School, Hennessy showed an aptitude for art and graduated in 1933 with the honor, Dux for Art, and an accompanying medal. In the autumn of that year, he entered the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee where he studied drawing and painting under portrait painter Edward Baird and noted landscape painter James McIntosh Patrick.

Patrick Hennessy, in addition to his art studies, wrote a ballet entitled “Paradise Lost” which was performed at the college in 1935. In each year of his course, he gained a First Class Pass, as well as winning first prize in 1934 and 1936 for the work he produced during summer breaks. Hennessy graduated with a First Class Distinction in 1937 and, with a scholarship, earned his Post-Graduate Diploma in 1938. During his studies, Hennessy met his life-long partner, British-Irish landscape and portrait painter Harry Robertson Craig who was also attending courses at Dundee. Aside from the period between 1939 and 1946 when they were separated by the war, they spent the rest of their lives together.

A month after finishing his post-graduate work, Hennessy entered his paintings in a group exhibition at the Art Galleries in Arbroath. Awarded an Annual Traveling Scholarship for further studies in Italy and France, he traveled to Europe in June of 1938. In Paris, Hennessy reunited with two friends, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. whom he had met the previous year. Known as the two Roberts, these painters and theater set-designers had established both a lifelong romantic relationship and a professional collaboration in their art. Hennessy and the couple traveled together through the south of France until their arrival in Marseilles at the end of 1938.

Upon his return to Scotland, Patrick Hennessy was selected for the residential summer course at the historical arts center, Hospitalfield House, under painter James Cowie, an artist of detailed draftsmanship based on studies of the Old Masters. Two of Hennessy’s paintings from this period were accepted for the Annual Exhibition held by the Royal Scottish Academy. With war looming in the autumn of 1939 and feeling disenchanted by his time at Hospitalfield House, he made the decision to return to his native Ireland. On his arrival in Dublin, Hennessy was offered an exhibition in December of 1939 at abstract artist Mainie Jellett’s Country Shop gallery on St. Stephens Green in the city center.

After his well received exhibition, Hennessy was invited to join the Society of Dublin Painters with whom he would exhibit annually during the 1940s and early 1950s. Beginning in the early 1940s, a visual homosexual subtext began to be incorporated into some of Hennessy’s paintings. In addition to the work he produced for exhibition in this period, he also received many portrait commissions from clients. Hennessy began a long relationship with the Royal Hibernia Academy in 1941 with the acceptance of three of his paintings for their annual exhibition; he exhibited with the academy virtually every year from 1941 until his death.

In 1946, Patrick Hennessy reunited with Harry Robertson Craig who had recently been discharged from the intelligence branch of the British Army where he served during the Second World War. Prior to his service, Craig had extensively traveled throughout Europe where he painted landscapes and portraits. Hennessy and Craig soon moved to Crosshaven in Cork and later to the seaport town of Cobh on the southern coast of County Cork. In 1948, Hennessy had an exhibition at Dublin’s Victor Waddington Gallery, which had emerged as Ireland’s most important modern art venue. After a year as an associate, he became a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1949.

Hennessy’s work became noticed in North America when his published work “De Profundis” was included in the Contemporary Irish Painting Exhibition that toured various cities on the continent. The 1950s brought Hennessy a retrospective of his work from 1941 to 1951 at the Dublin Painters Society and several painting excursions to Italy and Sicily. One of his works at this time, “Bronze Horses of St. Marks”, was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1954. In 1956, Hennessy had two major solo exhibitions of his work: London’s Thomas Agnew Gallery which showed thirty-eight paintings and Dublin’s Ritchie Hendriks Gallery which would be the main outlet for his work over twenty-two years.

In the winter of 1959, Patrick Hennessy became seriously ill with pneumonia. As a consequence, he and Harry Craig decided to spend the winter season in Morocco. After 1959, they never spent a full year in Ireland and increasingly spent time abroad. In the 1960s, Hennessy continued to be true to his personal style; however, as he did not follow the current trends in art, he began to receive less favorable reviews from the art critics. Finally in 1965, Chicago’s Guildhall Gallery, which had accepted his work for years, offered Hennessy a major exhibition in 1966. The success of which enabled him to become an artist with work on permanent display at the gallery and a scheduled annual exhibition.

In 1968, Hennessy made a permanent move to Tangier, Morocco where he painted prolifically for nine years to keep up with the demand from both the Hendriks and Guildhall Galleries as well as the Royal Hibernian Academy. A highly successful retrospective of Hennessy’s work was held in 1975 at the Guildhall Gallery. Three years later, he had his last show in Dublin at the Hendriks Gallery. After his move with Harry Craig to the Algarve in Portugal, Hennessy had little contact with Ireland and began to have health problems that soon grew more serious. In November of 1980, Craig brought him to a London hospital for treatment. Diagnosed with cancer, Patrick Hennessy died on the thirtieth of December in 1980.

Following cremation, Patrick Anthony Hennessy’s ashes were buried in London’s Golders Green Crematorium. He had left his entire estate to Harry Robertson Craig, with the proviso that on Craig’s death the Royal Hibernian Academy should be the beneficiary. Upon Craig’s death in 1984, this legacy was used to set up the biennial Hennessy Craig Scholarship for aspiring artists. Hennessy’s work, in addition to many private collections, can be found in major public collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Ireland, the University Colleges of both Cork and Dublin, and the Crawford Art Gallery, among others.

Note: The Irish Museum of Modern Art has an excellent article on Patrick Hennessy’s connections which such figures as Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bowen, Roger Casement and other artists. This Modern Irish Masters article can be found at: http://www.modernirishmasters.com/context/patrick-hennessy-context/#stags

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Patrick Hennessy and Harry Robertson Craig”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Boy and Seagull”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 52 x 38 cm, Irish Museum of Modern Art

Third Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Cliffs of Etretat (Self Portrait)”, 1962, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen at Bowenscourt”, 1957, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 71 cm, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland

Bottom Insert Image: Patrick Hennessy, “Men Bathing, Etretat”, circa 1954, Oil on Canvas, Date and Location Unknown

Laura Krifka

The Artwork of Laura Krifka

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1985, Laura Krifka is an American artist whose carefully constructed and intimate figurative work dissects the workings of power, observation and identity in contemporary visual culture. After initial studies at Newbold College in England and Avondale College in Australia, Krifka earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, in 2008. She continued her studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received her Master of Arts in 2010.

Laura Krifka incorporates the techniques of contemporary film and photography framing into her work, as well as visual references to historical art images. She often collapses several views of the same subject, space or pose into a painting which, appearing deceptively simple, actually contains challenging puzzles, distortions, and physical impossibilities. The pleasure of observation is a recurring theme in Krifka’s work. Vulnerable figures inhabit domestic spaces in various states of preparation, undress, and play. They either gaze out of their canvases or are observed gazing at a central form of desire.

The complex compositions of Krifka’s paintings require a great deal of planning; their style reflects some of the classical principles of the early nineteenth-century Neoclassicists. Krifka, however, does not limit herself to prescribed conventions or conformity. Ignoring customary gender boundaries, she bends and adapts the roles of both male and female in her work. Krifka instills in her figures a deliberate degree of gender ambiguity that manipulates the narrative and raises the psychological component.

In 2015, Laura Krifka showed her work at a solo exhibition entitled “Reap the Wind” held at the CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles. Her multi-faceted work, which included recent paintings, sculpture, film and video, examined human behavior and psychology, death, violence and sexuality. In addition to her own allegorical world, Krifka weaved mythological and historical references into her theatrical and sometimes lurid dramatic scenes. These scenes, expressed through a classical lexicon, made voyeurs of the viewers, witnesses to sometimes secret romances, murders or other transgressions.

Krifka’s work has appeared in many southern California exhibition spaces, among which are the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, the Torrance Museum of Art, the Louver at Los Angeles, and Beacon Arts in Inglewood. Her work has also been shown at the Zroboli Gallery of Chicago, the BravinLee Programs in New York and Las Vegas’s VastSpaceProjects, among others.

Krifka’s work is housed in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection of Palm Beach, and the Pizzuti Collection in Columbus, Ohio.

For the 2018-2019 academic year, Laura Krifka was a member of the studio art concentration faculty of the Art and Design Department at California Polytechnic State University. She is represented by the contemporary art gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Krifka’s website, containing images and contact information, can be found at: https://www.laurakrifka.com

Second Insert Image: Laura Krifka, “Pink Peep”, 2019, Oil on Panel, 116.8 x 76.2 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Laura Krifka, “Sour Grape”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 101.6 x 60.1 cm

Michael Costello

The Artwork of Michael Costello

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Michael Costello is an American realist painter. After graduating from Burlington High School, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University under figurative painter Barnett Rubinstein known primarily for his still life work. Costello’s work explores humankind’s anxiety in the twentieth-century through images that capture the human body’s vulnerability and celebrate its perceived flaws.

During his study years in Boston, Costello focused his work on twentieth-century objects and their place as icons in history. He moved in 1978 to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he has shown his work for over three decades. While living there, Costello’s work was noticed and encouraged by the late figure painter Alice Neel, whose expressive work challenged the traditional, objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors.

In 1984, Michael Costello relocated his studio back to Boston and began working with the Barbara Singer Fine Art gallery through which his work was introduced to corporate art collections in the metropolitan area. In the mid-1980s, Costello began his annual European travels to work ‘plein air’ and in association with various artist residencies. In 2008, he became the first recipient of The Pollack-Krasner Masters to Byrdcliffe; the primary criterion for acceptance at Byrdcliffe is artistic excellence or demonstrated commitment to one’s field of endeavor.

Much of Costello’s inspiration springs from writings, in particular Umberto Eco’s essays “The History of Beauty” and “On Ugliness”, and from such classical figures of tragedy as Pagliacci, the clown figure of Italian opera, and Gilles, the male heraldic-dressed figures of Belgium carnivals. Costello works from life; he choses his models based on their ability to inspire empathy for the human condition. He paints them with emotional honesty, without flattery, and with recognition of any imperfections. Costello believes through the presentation of their nude bodies the psychology of the sitter overrides the formality of portraiture, thus revealing the sitter’s unconscious.

Michael Costello’s 2018 series “La Comedia é Finita” (The Comedy is Finished)” is a series of drawings in charcoal, pastel and Russian clay that depicts models as a twentieth-century Pierrot, the clown of pantomime and early comedy theater. Costello’s drawings, depicting clowns in various states of repose and undress, explore mankind’s relationship with the icons of jesters and fools. Reminding us that we are more than we appear on the outside, the figures of varying race, gender and orientation are a reflection of our own lives with its tragedies and hopes.

Costello has presented his work in both group and solo exhibitions since 1980. Among the over fifty group exhibitions in which he has exhibited are the 1980 and 1982 “Small Works Show” held by the Provincetown Art Association, the 1991 “Nuclear Solstice” and 1994 “Fantastically Real” at the Mills Gallery in conjunction with the Boston Center for the Arts, the 2008 “Byrdcliffe Pollock-Kransner Fellows” at the Kleinert/James Art Center, the 2013 “Off the Wall” at the Danforth Art Museum, and the 2018 “Three” at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts.

Michael Costello has had over thirty solo exhibitions in galleries throughout the east coast of the United States, These exhibitions include, among others, multiple shows at The New East End Gallery in Provincetown; the Barbara Singer Fine Art gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Schoolhouse Center in Provincetown; the A Street Gallery in Boston; Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton, New York; the 101 Exhibit in Miami; and The Lucky Street Gallery in Key West, Florida. Since 2015, Michael Costello has shown yearly at Provincetown’s contemporary William Scott Gallery with whom he is represented.

In addition to private collections, Costello’s work can be found in many corporate and public collections including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, the Federal Reserve, Chicago’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Boston Public Library, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the headquarters of Wellington Management and Fidelity Investment, among others.

“For over thirty years I have worked with models to comment on our cultural heritage, both philosophical and theological, to acquaint all that is good with beauty. We focus on making clear definitions of what is ugly and what is beautiful, which often shuns both sides to the extreme, turning the beautiful, ugly and making ugly, beautiful. My work with the model as muse gives us a window into the individual soul. I intend to inspire the viewer to observe the subject with a level of pathos; to confront the truth within themselves, what they believe to be beautiful.” – Michael Costello, Boston Voyager Interview, March 2018

Michael Costello’s website with images, exhibitions and contact information is located at: https://www.michaelcostelloartist.com

Note: A 2019 interview with Michael Costello which discusses his “Dancers” drawings, a part of the 2013 series “Boxers and Ballerinas”, can be found at the online art platform “Pineapple” located at: https://pnpplzine.com/index.php/2019/01/08/michael-costello/

Top Insert Image: Meagan Hepp, “Michael Costello”, 2018, Color Print, Boston Voyager March 2018

Second Insert Image: Michael Costello, “Pierrot Enraged”, “La Comedia é Finita” Series, 2018, Pastel, Charcoal and Russian Clay on Paper, 76.2 x 56.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Michael Costello, “Self Portrait Based on Rembrandt”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 66 x 55.9 cm, William Scott Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Michael Costello, “Marat Redux”, 2011, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 122 cm, Private Collection

Randall Lake

Artwork by Randall Lake

Born in California in 1947, Randall Lake is an American artist who, influenced by an exhibition of work by Van Gogh, paints oil landscapes, still-lifes and portraits in an impressionistic realist style. He is currently based in Utah with a studio in Salt Lake City and a studio in his Spring City cottage home.

Lake traveled to France and studied French in 1968 at the Sorbonne of the University of Paris. When the events of the May 1968 protests closed the university, he continued his studies at the Academie Julian under painter Claude Schurr. In addition to his painting studies, Lake completed his English Degree, Cum Laude, in 1970 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1972, he studied with Belgium designer and color-abstract painter Gustave Singier at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts.

Randall Lake was an instructor in English at the Sorbonne from 1970 to 1973. He studied printmaking in 1973 under English printmaker and painter Stanley William Hayter at the Atelier 17, an experimental workshop that was influential in the teaching and promotion of printmaking in the twentieth-century. After four years of teaching, Lake settled in Utah where he studied under English-born portrait artist Alvin Gittins at the University of Utah. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977 and became in 1978 a visiting member of the Department of Art Studio faculty at the university.

Lake continuously searches for new subjects and techniques for his work. Over time, his journey in art has reflected his journey in life, from the traditional landscapes executed as a Mormon to the more daring works as an openly gay man. Lake is drawn to the atmosphere that was present in the nineteenth-century, the lifestyle, the arts and the architecture. He paints from life and location to capture the essence of the subject and the moment. Seeking a change in his work, Randall Lake has begun experimenting with the elements of Abstraction and Fauvism, a movement which emphasized painterly qualities of brushwork and strong color.

Randall Lake is the recipient of many awards for his work, including the 2003 Grand Prix du Peintre Maudit from Salt Lake City’s Guthrie Institute, the 2015 and 2016 Award of Merit for the Spring City Plein Air Competition, ant the 2001 and 2006 Governor of Utah Award for Fine Art, among others. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Jinling Library in Nanjing, China; Utah State Collection of Art; Wyoming State Collection; Utah Museum of Fine Art; and the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York.

Note: A video portrait of Randall Lake by Michael Schoenfeld for RadioWest Films can be found at: https://films.radiowest.org/film/randall-lake

An article on Randall Lake’s work, with quotes by the artist, can be found at the Springville Museum of Art website located at: https://www.smaexhibition-self.org/randall-lake.html

Randall Lake’s website, containing his work, gallery events and contact information, can be found at: https://www.randalllake.com/page/11302/collection

Second Insert Image: Randall Lake, “Afternoon Nap”, 1991, Pastel on Paper, 35.6 x 45.7 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Randall Lake, “Self Portrait with Model”, 1992, Oil on Canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm

Igor Sychev

The Paintings of Igor Sychev

Born in February of 1987 in the northern city of Nadym, Igor Sychev is a Russian artist known for his Magic-Realistic figurative paintings. At the age of five years having shown an inclination towards the arts, his parents enrolled him in the city’s art school where he studied until the age of sixteen. Sychev left Nadym upon graduation and relocated to Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, where he entered the Faculty of Industrial Design at the State Academy of Architecture, Design and Fine Arts.

After graduating from the Academy in 2010, Sychev moved to Moscow, which as Russia’s capital offered wider prospects for a career and self-expression. He soon obtained employment as an industrial designer and created designs for furniture and interior spaces. In 2011 while working in the design field , Sychev began a personal study of oil painting techniques. Over the next ten years, Igor Sychev gradually redirected his energies into pursuing a career as a painter.

In addition to the primary medium of oil paints, Igor Sychev also produces works in the mediums of watercolor, pencil, sepia and charcoal. His work is inspired by the works of the recognized Master artists , such as Michelangelo’s “David”, who viewed the nude male body as a source of beauty, Other influences on Sychev’s work include the paintings of Lucian Freud and Egon Schiele, the large-scale expressive paintings of Paolo Troilo, painter Gregory Little’s boldly colored figures in everyday scenes, and Portuguese painter Carlos Barahona Possollo’s male nude paintings.

As the present politics and attitudes in Russia are predominantly homophobic, Igor Sychev has not been able to exhibit in galleries or museums. He holds his private exhibitions in establishments offered by friends. Sychev’s work is held in many private collections throughout the world, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, and South Africa, among others.

Images of Igor Sychev’s paintings, watercolors and drawings, as well as contact information, can be found at the artist’s website located at: https://www.igorsychev.com

Bottom Insert Image: Igor Sychev, “Concrete Colours” Sketch, Date Unknnown, White/Black Pencil and Pen on Paper, Artist Collection (Available)

Simona Dolci

The Paintings of Simona Dolci

Born in 1950 in Pesaro, a city located on the Adriatic Sea, Simona Dolci is an Italian realist painter and architect. In 1975, she earned her doctorate in Architecture from the University of Florence under Leonardo Ricci, a leading figure in the Italian architectural scene of the Second War World and a proponent of social and landscape-bound architecture. Dolci was assistant Professor in the university’s Department of Architecture from 1976 to 1980. After her tenure at the university, she studied painting and drawing at Florence’s Accademia di Belle Arti.

In 1983, Simona Dolci continued her training at the Florence atelier conducted by painter and educator Nerina Simi, the daughter of Italian painter and sculptor Filadelfo Simi, himself the student of the famous French painter Jean Leon Gérome. From 1988 to 1991, Dolci completed her studies in painting and artistic techniques at Florence’s renowned Cecil Graves School of Art, a private atelier focused on classical techniques of drawing and oil painting.

Since 1991, Dolci has taught drawing and painting skills at her own studio, an old monastery in the heart of Florence, as well as at the city’s Academy of Art. Starting in 1995, she also taught the Academy’s summer painting and drawing courses, and became its Program Director in 2005. Dolci has been Director of the Academy’s Intensive Drawing Program since 1998.

Simona Dolci has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the years, including the 2007 exhibition “The Art of Seduction” at Dublin’s Gormleys Gallery, where she showed her paintings together the figurative work of Irish sculptor Paddy Campbell. In 2018, she presented new works at “The Sweet Noise of Life”, a major exhibition in Pietrasanta, Italy. That same year Dolci was awarded the prestigious “Caterina de Medici Prize” by the International Medicean Academy of Florence, reserved to great contemporary women who have distinguished themselves in their professional careers. Her paintings are in many private collections in Italy, France, Mexico, and the United States.

“You will draw figures so that this will be sufficient to demonstrate what the figure has inside its soul; otherwise your art will not be commendable” -Leonardo Da Vinci

Bottom Insert Image: Simona Dolci, “Vulcano”, 2015, Oil on Canvas on Panel, 65 a 85 cm, Private Collection

Note: For those interested in a scholarly article on Simona Dolci’s realistic work, I recommend art curator Anita Valentini’s article “Simona Dolci: Portraits of Contemporary Archetypes, The Sweet Sound and Memory of Life” which can be found at the link below:

Click to access Scritto-critico-EN.pdf

Sergio Cerchi

Paintings by Sergio Cerchi

Born in Florence in 1957, Sergio Cerchi is an Italian painter and musician. Beginning in his teenage years, he started to study in his two passions, the visual arts and music, by attending workshops held by Florence’s artists and playing in musical groups. Cerchi received his Bachelor of Arts from Florence’s Istituto D’Arte of Porta Romana and attended courses at the prestigious Luigi Cherubini Conservatory of Music.

Sergio Cerchi worked through a process of experimentation with various art techniques to develop his own personal style. His influences range from primitive art to the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Cerchi’s figurative and still life works are set in flattened and realist tableaux, similar to theater sets, within which are contained references to popular culture, art history and personal experience.

In Cerchi’s paintings, the pictorial surface as a whole is fractured into multiple quadrants whose portion of the image is rendered with different coloring and lighting. Through this technique, figures and objects are segmented and reconstructed in collages composed from their angled fragments. The resulting canvas, with its shifting, peeling surface and fading horizon planes, presents a unique version of cubist art.

Sergio Cerchi’s paintings are mostly executed in different shades of a dominant hue. Depending on the angle of each fragmented quadrant, the tone of that part of the image may appear softer or bolder. The palette of Cerchi’s oil paints range from warm undertones of red carmine, mixed with shades of green, ocher and blues, to tones of brown and gray. A prominent feature of his work is the use of bold, dramatic shading in the compositions.

Since 2011, Sergio Cerchi has been represented by Galleria Gagliardi located in San Gimignano, Siena, Italy. He presented his work at a 2013 curated exhibition, entitled “Art in Therapy”, held at the Chiesa di Sant’Agala, a national archeological site in Spoleto, Italy.

Note: Images of Sergio Cerchi’s work and information on exhibitions can be found through Galleria Gagliardi’s website located at: https://www.galleriagagliardi.com/en/artist-works/cerchi-sergio

Bottom Insert Image: Sergio Cerchi, “Supereroe”, 2017, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 100 cm, Private Collection

Alex Folla

The Paintings of Alex Folla

Born in 1980 in Oggiono, a northern town in the Province of Lecco, Alex Folla is a contemporary Italian artist. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Painting at Milan’s Accademia di Brera and a Masters Degree in Visual Arts from the Accademia di Bella Arti in the city of Carrara. He currently lives and works in Milan, Filorera located in the Italian Alps, and Moscow.

Trained in the history and techniques of the Renaissance and Baroque artists from Michelangelo to Caravaggio, Alex Folla uses his classical training to tackle contemporary life though metaphoric images. He creates profoundly technical and pictorial realistic images which incorporate such human issues as the frailty of the body, illness, holiness and strength. In many of his works, Folla takes traditional sacred imagery and, using its classical composition and his stylistic choice, reconstructs it to form symbolic images of a more contemporary nature.

In his 2016 show “BulleTime”, Alex Folla based his work on the idea of martyrdom and reinterpreted the classical images of the Christian martyrs in a more contemporary way. The figures of the martyrs, often substituted with either a self-portrait or one of friends, were painted in seventeenth-century techniques with gold leaf backgrounds used in early traditional Byzantine paintings. Folla’s paintings in this series are contemporary in appearance by his use of the “bullet time” cinematic technique, a slow-motion film shot enabling you to see every moment of the scene, typically when the protagonist dodges the incoming bullet. With the use of this technique from movie culture, Folla focuses the attention of the viewer towards each of the paintings’ figures, who are seen moving from their position as if to avoid an object’s trajectory and their inevitable martyrdom.

Alex Folla’s paintings have appeared in multiple group exhibitions throughout the world including the 2010 Castello Dei Pico Exhibition, where he won the Volturno Morani Prize; the 2014 International Alla Prima Exhibition in New Delhi; the 2016 LA Art Show in Los Angeles; the 2014 and 2016 SWAB International Exhibitions in Barcelona; and the 2017 Ostrale 17 Biennale in Dresden, Germany, among others.

Alex Folla’s fist solo exhibition, entitled “Black and White”, was in 2013 at Milan’s Union Gallery. Since then, he has had multiple solo shows including two at Moscow’s Triumph Gallery: “Miracles” in 2014 and “#unknownmonk” in 2015; the 2014 “Football Players” at the Savina Gallery in St. Petersburg; the 2016 “bulleTime” at Los Angeles’s Building Bridge Gallery; and the 2016 “#unknownmonk 2.0” at Los Angeles’s Italian Institute of Culture in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Additional images, exhibition dates and contact information can be found at the artist’s site located at: http://www.alexfolla.org/saints3.html

Top Insert Image: Alex Folla, “Patrocio”, 2020, Oil and Gold Leaf on Canvas, 145 x 145 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Alex folla, “Aiace”, 2020, Oil and Gold Leaf on Canvas, 145 x 145 cm

Clara Peeters

Clara Peeters, “Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries”, circa 1625, Oil on Wood, 46.7 x 33.3 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Clara Peeters, “Table with Cloth, Salt Cellar, Gilt Standing Cup, Pie, Jug, Porcelain Plate with Olives and Cooked Food”, 1611, Oil on Panel, 55 x 73 cm, Museo National del Prado, Madrid

Clara Peeters was a still-life pioneer, one of the only female Flemish artists who exclusively painted still-life works. She was a contemporary of Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jan Brueghel the Elder, and as such, was active during one of the great periods of European art. Peeters is credited with the popularization of colorful, banquet or breakfast pieces, depicting sumptuous displays of tableware, goblets, food, drink and flowers, into the Dutch painting tradition. She is known for her meticulous brushwork, ability to capture precise textures, and her low angle of perspective.

While customs and law did not favor women’s inclusion in professional activities, a small number of women were able to overcome the existing restrictions and become painters. Factors such as the problem of studying anatomical drawings from live, normally male, models who posed nude in an activity was forbidden to women and thus limited their work to portraits or still-life paintings.

There is very little documentation on the life of Clara Peeters aside from her paintings. Scholars believe she was born between 1588 and 1590. Although a record indicates a Clara Peeters was baptized in Antwerp in 1594, both Clara and Peeters were common names. A baptism in 1594 would imply that her sophisticated 1607 paintings, the earliest dated known works, were done when she was thirteen, which seems unlikely. By 1612, Peeters was producing large numbers of painstakingly rendered still life paintings. There is no known work of hers beyond 1621; the date of her death is also unknown.

While Peeters is not registered in the painters’ guild in Antwerp, she is described in a document as a painter from there. Of her known works, six bear marks on their painting panels indicating their preparation in the city of Antwerp. On the blades of three silver knives depicted in Peeters’ paintings are hallmarks, indicating their origin as the city of Antwerp; these knives also bear Peeters’ name which might be an indication of her own marriage, as silver cutlery was used as wedding gifts.

Clara Peeters’ first known work, signed and dated 1607, reflects the compositional and technical skill of a trained artist. She signed thirty-one works and dated many of them; another seventy-six works are speculated to be in her body of work, although documentation is lacking to assign them affirmatively. Although no record of patrons is available, it appears that Peeters was a successful artist. The fact that her work was widely distributed and is present in collections in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Madrid, suggests she exported her paintings through dealers and likely was able to achieve some profit. Four of Peeters’ early works came to the Prado Museum from the Spanish Royal Collection.

Clara Peeters devoted her activities to still-life painting, deploying a style that emphasized the real appearance of things, in a period where realism was seen as an alternative to the idealism of the Renaissance tradition.Her paintings depicted fish and fowl ready to be cooked, cooked food displayed on the table, serving vessels, cutlery, other objects, most of them costly luxury items. These were all painted with great detail in the description of both texture and form: the brightly lit objects were presented in elegant contrast with the dark backgrounds.

Peeters’ paintings show the tastes and customs of the prosperous classes in the middle of the Renaissance period. The tables in her still-life works include imported goods and food, such as wine, fruit, sweetmeats, and particularly fish, of which Peeters was the first artist to portray as the main subject of a still-life. Her work also included falcons next to dead fowl, the subject of an aristocrat’s hunt, and sea shells, prized for their exotic origins and beauty.

Clara Peeters was one of the first known artists to incorporate self-portraiture into still-life paintings. Barely noticeable, they appear at least in eight of her works, often reflected on a silver-gilt goblet or on the lids of pewter jugs. On the surface of the right goblet in her “Still Life with Flowers, Gilt Goblets, Coins and Shells” are located six self-portraits of Peeters, where she is seen holding her brushes and palette in a stance upholding her status as a woman painter. Depicted in detail on such a minute scale, these self-portraits attest to Clara Peeters’s level of artistic skill.

Insert Images:

Clara Peeters, “Still Life with Flowers, Gilt Goblets, Coins and Shells”, Detai View of Self-Portraits, 1612, Oil on Panel, 59.5 x 49 cm, Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle

Clara Peeters, “Still Life with Fish, Candle, Artichokes, Crabs and Shrimp”, 1611, Oil on Panel, 50 x 72 cm, Museo National del Prado, Madrid

Clara Peeters, “Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels”, 1615, (With Signed Silver Knife), Oil on Panel, 34.5 x 49.5, Museum Mauritshuis, The Hage

James Huctwith

Figurative Paintings by James Huctwith

Born in rural southern Ontario, Canada in 1967, James Huctwith is a painter in the realist tradition. From 1986 to 1989, he studied fine art at the University of Guelph’s College of Art in Ontario, primarily in architecture and art history and theory. Huctwith started painting and exhibiting in the early 1990s in Vancouver. Relocating to Toronto in 1995, he was represented by the O’Connor Gallery where he regularly exhibited his emotionally and physically explicit work for a decade.

After a period of personal disruption and change, Huctwith joined Vancouver’s Gallery Jones in the spring of 2005. He stayed with the gallery for two years, during which time he exhibited a series of non-figurative works. Beginning in 2006, Huctwith was also represented for two years by Montreal’s Galerie Harwood, where the work he exhibited consisted primarily of interpretations of the still life genre. In 2007, he ended his relationship with the O’Connor Gallery.

Feeling a need to recapture his connection with his work, James Huctwith returned to the province of Ontario, placed his previous work with Toronto’s Antonio Arch Fine Arts, and signed up with Ottawa’s Galeria La Petite Mort. His first solo show of figurative work at the Petite Mort gallery in the fall of 2009 was a success. Huctwith’s work, now published and regularly reviewed, is collected internationally with many works in private collections..

Huctwith’s current realist work, both figurative and portraiture, is done with an emphasis on historical techniques. His canvases of male figures are moody, masculine, and mysterious. While a sense of calmness is presented in Huctwith’s scenes, there is often a lurking undercurrent of uncertainty and conflict.

The artist’s website can be found at: http://daintybastard.blogspot.com

William Orpen

William Orpen, “Self Portrait on Cliff Top in Howth”, cica 1910, Black Charcoal and Gouache, 50.5 x 36.5 cm, Private Collection

Born in County Dublin in November of 1878, William Newenham Montague Orpen was an Irish draftsman and portrait painter of London’s wealthy Edwardian society. A talented figure of British-Irish Post-Impressionism, he was the youngest son of wealthy, amateur painters and a gifted student who learned rapidly from a succession of celebrated tutors.

William Orpen was enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1891, where he studied from 1892 to 1896. He continued his studies at London’s Slade School of Art between 1897 and 1899, under figurative painter Henry Tonks, landscape painter Philip Wilson Steer, and genre and portrait painter Frederick Brown. Having mastered oil painting and different painting techniques, Orpen’s work, during his six years of study, received many prizes including the British Isles gold medal for life drawing.

Upon graduation from the Slade School, Orpen, along with his fellow graduate, Welsh painter Augustus John, opened in the autumn of 1903, the Chelsea Art School, a private teaching studio, near King’s Road in Chelsea. Although it was meant as a joint venture, most of the teaching and running of the school was undertaken by John, with Orpen’s chief contribution being a series of lectures on anatomy. Both male and female students were admitted to the school but, despite John’s own bohemian lifestyle, the sexes were segregated for the Life classes. The project was not a success, and, after the waning of both’s interest, the school closed in 1907.

From 1902 to 1915, William Orpen, in addition to his classes at the Chelsea School, taught at the Dublin Metropolitan School of At, where his pupils included portrait painter Margaret Clarke, romantic-realist painter John Keating, and cartoonist Grace Gifford. In the summer of 1904, he and his friend and mentor, the gallery director and art dealer Hugh Lane, traveled to Paris and Madrid. Orpen guided Lane on the purchase of Impressionist works, and Lane, several years later, commissioned Orpen for a portrait series of notable Irish figures to be displayed at Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. In 1908, Orpen began exhibiting his work regularly at London’s Royal Academy; the work in this period was done in a distinctive open-air style that featured figures composed of touches of color.

Starting in 1912, Orpen began his successful career as a portrait painter with a series of portraits of his favorite model, Vera Brewster Hone, the wife of writer Joseph Hone. This series, of such quantity that Orpen numbered them instead of naming them, included the 1912 “The Angler” and the 1918 “The Roscommon Dragoon”, which portrayed Vera Brewster wearing a Dragoon uniform. With the support of painter John Singer Sargent, Orpen built a reputation, in both Dublin and London, as a fashionable portrait painter who presented his subjects in a traditional, polished style. He also painted several group portraits, a popular genre at the time, which include the 1912 “The Cafe Royal in London”, depicting Orpen and Augustus John, and the 1909 “Homage to Manet”, with the subjects, including Hugh Lane and Henry Tonks, assembled before Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzales.

In December of 1915, as World War One commenced, William Orpen was commissioned into the Army Service Corps. In January of 1917, through connections with the senior ranks of the British Army, he was given the title of an official artist, which included a promotion to major and unrestricted access to the Front areas in France. Throughout the war years, Orpen painted battle locations, trench scenes, and many portraits of both enlisted men and officers. For his work in this period, he stopped using half-tones and half-shades and adopted a new palettes of colors, with weak purples, bright greens, and large white spaces of sunlight. Many of these war artist works are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.

Both before and after the war, Orpen produced a number of realistic self-portraits. in which he used his skills as a draftsman to resolve the challenges of surface, lighting, and reflection that he set for himself. His 1910 “Myself and Cupid” was actually a painting within a painting; in this portrait, Orpen painted a table top beyond which was hung a portrait of himself sitting next to a statue of Cupid. Orpen’s 1910 self portrait, known as “Leading the Life in the West”, shows him reflected full-length in a mirror in his studio, wearing a bowler hat and holding gloves and a riding crop. An IOU note is tucked in the frame of the mirror, a testament to the pleasures and distractions of his early career. In Orpen’s 1917 self-portrait “Ready to Start”, painted shortly after his arrival in France, Orpen is inspecting himself in the mirror wearing his military uniform. The French postcards and papers on the desk in the foreground set the scene of wartime France, while the bottles of wine and spirits reference Orpen’s dependence on alcohol during the war.

William Orpen’s life after the war was never the same: he became an alcoholic, grew distant from his wife and family, and mostly painted only to support the lavish lifestyle he took up in Paris with his mistress. Despite his personal problems he was still successful and continued to exhibit widely. Orpen was made a member of the prestigious Royal Academy in 1921 and, in 1923, he received a commission to paint a portrait of Edward, Prince of Wales, for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. In 1927 he was commissioned for a portrait of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, which was posthumously entered into the National Portrait Gallery. Orpen’s work was also part of the painting event at the 1926 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam.

Orpen became seriously ill in May of 1931, and , after a period of alcohol-induced illness and memory loss, died in London, at the age of fifty-two, in September of 1931. His contribution to the teaching of Irish art has always been recognized as he helped to nurture and influence Ireland’s most important painters of the twentieth-century.William Orpen is buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in southwestern London; a commemorative stone is located in the Island of Ireland Peace Park at Messines, Belgium.

Insert Images Top to Bottom:

William Orpen, Self Portrait, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 122.9 x 89.9 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum

Sir William Orpen, “Self Portrait”, circa 1901, Colored Chalk on Dark Gray Paper, 15.5 x 10.9 cm, Private Collection

William Orpen, “Self Portrait (Ready to Start)”, 1917, Oil on Panel, 60.8 x 49.4 cm, Imperial War Museum, London

Frank Duveneck

Paintings by Frank Duveneck

Born in October of 1848 in Covington, Kentucky, Frank Duveneck was an American etcher and painter. He began painting in his early teens and was employed as an assistant to Wilhelm Lamprecht, a graduate of Munich’s Royal Academy who began a mission to decorate churches in the Cincinnati region. In 1869, Duveneck traveled to Munich where he intended to continue his study of church decoration.

After developing an interest in easel painting, Duveneck enrolled in 1870 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied under painters and illustrators Wilheim Diez and Alexander Strähuber.. Gaining distinction for his work, Duveneck won a prize in 1872 that entitled him to a studio of his own. Some of his best known works were painted during his time in Germany, including his 1872 “Whistling Boy”. one of Duveneck’s first renditions of working-class ruffians, now housed in the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Frank Duveneck’s work of this period are painted in a vigorous style that reveals the influence of Wilhelm Leibi, who was the leader of a group of young German realists guided by French realist Gustave Courbet’s innovative and social-themed work. Duveneck’s early style, with its generally dark colors and expressive brushwork, was a melding of contemporary German practice with his interest in the techniques of the Old Masters, particularly the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters.

Duveneck returned to Cincinnati in 1873, and, in the following year, exhibited portraits he had painted in Germany. His reputation as an artist in the United States began with a successful 1875 Boston exhibition of his work where his bold and spontaneous style caused a sensation. Despite encouragement to stay in Boston and paint commissioned portraits, Duveneck returned to Germany where he set up a studio in Munich and began to develop a reputation among its American students.

After a trip to Venice in 1877, Frank Duveneck opened his own painting school in Munich, which soon drew the attention of studying artists. His students, who would become known as the Duveneck Boys, included such future artists as portrait painter and illustrator John White Alexander, and impressionist landscape painters Theodore Wendel and John H. Twachtman. In 1879 Duveneck and his students traveled to Italy, where they would remain for the next two years spending winters in Florence and summers in Venice.

Duveneck was elected to the Society of American Artists in 1880. Around this time, he became interested in etching and produced several works in this medium which were similar in style to those of James Whistler, whom Duveneck had met in Venice. This collection of works were exhibited in a London exhibition in 1881. After 1880 Duveneck altered his painting style to one of lighter colors and less somber lighting effects, which might have been a response to his stay in Italy.

In March of 1886, Frank Duveneck married Elizabeth Boott, one of his students. They lived at Villa Casteliani in Florence for two years and had one son, Frank Boott Duveneck. After his wife’s 1988 death of pneumonia in Paris, Duveneck made the decision to return in the following year to the United States. He taught painting classes at Cincinnati, New York and Chicago, and frequently traveled to Europe throughout the 1890s. Duveneck became a teacher at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1890 and became a regular faculty member in 1900. He was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1905, and became a full Academician in 1906.

Duveneck exhibited his works in a private room at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition held in San Francisco; his works were received with great acclaim, and he was awarded a Special Gold Medal of Honor. Before his death in Cincinnati on January 2, 1919, Frank Duveneck donated a large and important group of his works to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which remains the center for Duveneck studies. His works can be seen at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Top Insert Image: J. Land, Portrait of Frank Duveneck, 1877, Detail, Photographic Sepia Print on Cabinet Card, Smithsonian Institution

Middle Insert Image: Frank Duveneck, “Study for ‘The Harem Guard”, 1879, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 66 cm, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco

Bottom Insert Image: Frank Duveneck, “Self-Portrait”, 1877, Oil on Canvas, Cincinnati Art Museum

Peter Churcher

Paintings by Peter Churcher

Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1964, Peter Churcher is a portrait and figurative painter in the realist tradition. He holds a Bachelor of Music with Honors from Melbourne University which he acquired in 1986. Traveling through Europe after gaining his Licentiate for Piano Performance from Trinity College in London, Churcher visited many galleries and decided to return to his original passion, painting. He studied at Melbourne’s Victorian College, now Deacon University, where in 1992 he earned his BFA in Painting.

Churcher first showed his work in the group exhibition “Artworks II: Thirty Emerging Melbourne Artists” held at the South Melbourne Town Hall. After entering his work in two group exhibitions at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, he gave his first solo show at the gallery in 1994. Since that time Churcher has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and has been represented in many group exhibitions across the country.

Peter Churcher’s work deals primarily with the human subject in portraiture and group figurative narratives. His subjects are ordinary people sighted on the streets, who are presented on the canvas with their own personalities and natural enthusiasms. A number of commissioned portraits for both private and public personalities are also contained in Churcher’s body of work.

As a commissioned officer during the Persian Gulf War, Churcher was, in 2002, appointed to be Australia’s official war artist. Traveling to the Persian Gulf and Diego Garcia, he recorded the people and operations of the Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force. Churcher’s work captured many aspects of army life not covered by the press photographers. His images of Australia’s flying officers and pilots, the sailors, and the engine-room stokers aboard the HNAS Kanimbla are now included in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.

Peter Churcher’s work is represented in many major public, corporate and private collections throughout Australia and overseas including the National Gallery of Australia and The National Portrait Gallery, both in Canberra; The Australian War Memorial; and Parliament House in Victoria, among others.

Peter Churcher is represented in Australia by Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane and Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. He is currently living and working in Barcelona, Spain. Churcher’s most recent solo show is at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art in Melbourne through April 16th of 2021.

Top Insert Image: Peter Churcher, “Hostel”m 2017, Oil on Canvas, 116 x 98 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Peter Churcher, “The Young Painter”, 2014, Oil on Canvas, 78 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Walter Stuempfig

Paintings by Walter Stuempfig

Walter Stuempfig was one of Philadelphia’s most highly regarded painters of the mid-twentieth century. He is known primarily for his landscapes of the Philadelphia area and the shores of New Jersey. Stuempfig’s work is often pervaded with a sense of poetic melancholy that has led to his frequent classification as a romantic realist.

Born in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in January of 1914, Walter Stuempfig’s initial education was at the Germantown Academy from which he graduated in 1930. He spent a year studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania before enrolling, in October of 1931, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Stuempfig studied under modernist illustrator and painter Henry McCarter, the impressionist landscape painter Daniel Garber and realist landscape painter Francis Speight.

In 1934, Stuempfig won the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship for study abroad. He traveled frequently to Europe, and he was deeply influenced by the European masters, particularly Nicolas Poussin, Caravaggio, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. From his initial exhibition in 1932 until 1966, Stuempfig regularly exhibited in the annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy. He had his first successful exhibition, as an American realist painter, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1942 “Artists for Victory” show.

Discovered by art gallery director R. Kirk Askew, Stuempfig had his first one man show in 1943 at the Durlacher Brothers Gallery in New York. His show was sold out on opening night, with both the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art adding his work to their collections. Stuempfig continued to be represented by the Durlacher Brothers Gallery through 1961. In 1947, the Corcoran Gallery purchased his painting “Two Houses” which had won second prize in the biennial competition that year for contemporary American paintings.

Walter Stuempfig had married his wife Lila Hill, a sculptor who also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy, in 1935. Upon his wife’s death in 1946, he concentrated more intensely on his artwork. working from his studio in the Chestnut Hill area of northwest Philadelphia. Stuempfig would spend his summers painting at New Jersey’s shore area and the Manayunk area of Philadelphia. In 1948, he became an instructor in drawing and composition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where he taught until his death, after a long illness, in November of 1970.

As a painter, Walter Stuempfig worked independently, and remained outside the mainstream of the contemporary artistic movements. He was a prolific artist, producing over fifteen hundred works of figure compositions, landscapes and architectural subjects, portraits, and still lifes, all done in the style of romantic realism. Stuempfig had a subtle and polished painting technique; his figurative work had a great subjectivity, which was often infused with nostalgia and personal sentiment.

Walter Stuempfig’s paintings can be found in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Top Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Queen of the Seas Casino”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 48.1 x 55.9 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Walter Stuempfig, “Sturgeon”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 35.6 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Matthijs Röling

Paintings by Matthijs Röling

Born in Oostkapelle, The Netherlands, in 1943, Matthijs Nicolaas Röling is a figurative painter, lithographer and academy lecturer who has carried on the tradition of realistic painting, enriching its language with artistic techniques derived from surrealism.

Röling received his training at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague from 1960 to 1963; he continued his studies at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam in 1963 to 1964 . He had his first exhibition in 1965 at the Drents Museum in the city of Assen . In 1972, Röling became a lecturer at the Academie Minerva in Groningen where he taught such future artists as realist painters Jan van der Kooi, Douwe Elias, and Peter Pander. Röling has also lectured at the Classical Academy for Fine Art, also in Groningen.

Matthijs Röling first achieved recognition for his work in 1976 with his series of still-lifes, entitled “Cabinets”. In 1983 he began working on large-scale decorative projects, such as monumental canvases and wall and ceiling paintings. In recent years these projects have come to occupy an increasingly important place within Röling’s highly diverse body of work.

Röling’s first large-scale, oil on panel mural, entitled “De Sterrenhemel (The Starry Sky)”, was finished in 1983. The mural is located at the Café De Eenhoorn in the city of Eelde, and consists of four horizontal panels, each panel depicting a section of the night sky with its zodiac symbols and measuring 196 x 173 x 16 centimeters. In a 1987 collaboration with Northern-realist painter Wout Muller, Matthijs Röling produced the mural “Boom van Kennis (Tree of Knowledge)”, which is installed in the auditorium of the Academy Building at the University of Groningen.

Since 1962, Matthijs Röling has been regularly exhibiting his work in museums and galleries throughout the Netherlands, including Amsterdam’s galleries M.L. de Boer and Galerie Mokum, and Groningen’s Galerie Wiek XX. Röling received the Dr. AH Heineken Prize for Art in 1994 for his short operatic work. The Drents Museum in Assen houses a number of Röling’s paintings and sketchbooks in its collection.

T M Davy

The Artwork of T M Davy

Born in New York, New York in 1980, T M Davy is a painter whose body work is characterized by realistic oil portraits. Davy studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 2001, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he currently teaches. In 2012 , he was an artist in residence at BOFFO in Fire Island, New York.

T M Davy’s work relies on scenes that are directly connected to his life and surroundings. Persistent themes in his work are the issues of intimacy, love, and friendship. Past subjects in his work have included candle-lit scenes of domestic life with family, his husband Liam, and his circle of friends. Davy has also painted a series of images centered on horses, inspired by the time he spent on a relative’s farm, and a series of images of candles lit in darkness.

The consistency of Davy’s technical execution and the sophistication of its realism are apparent in his oil on canvas work, whether in a small or a large-scale format. A connecting link in all of his paintings is his use of the chiaroscuro effect, a technique used also by painters Caravaggio and Anthony van Dyck, which emphasizes the interaction of light and shadow.He has also worked in the mediums of pastel and gouache, with which he produced several series of open air spontaneous drawings in a smaller scale format.

In his work produced on Fire Island, New York, Davy portrays many of his beachside figures entering or in the water, exemplifying the union of bodies with nature, a prominent theme of the artist. His portraits celebrate his inseparable communion with his husband, Liam Davy, as well as the intimacy and bond among close friends. His “Fire Island” series are a meditation on the power and freedom born from togetherness—between figure and landscape, mind and body, human and human.

Davy’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the “No Soul for Sale” exhibition at theTate Modern in London; the “B-Out” exhibition at the Andrew Edlin gallery in New York; the 2009 “Nudes” exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in São Paolo; and the 2019 “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany in 2018: the Exile gallery in Berlin, Germany, 2012; and gallery 11R in New York in 2014 and 2017.

“We exist in an age of complete transition. The time is now to communicate the beauty of queer love around the world. A paradigm shift in people’s conception of love is happening. If I can, I want to play a small part in that–in revealing how true and how eternal it is. Transcendence is a movement to the broadest spectrum. “ —T M Davy, 2019

Information of T M Davy’s work and exhibitions can be found at the artist’s site: http://www.tmdavy.com

Michael Triegel

The Artwork of Michael Triegel

Born in December of 1968 in Erfurt, Michael Triegel is a German painter, illustrator and graphic artist based in Leipzig. From 1990 to 1997, Michael Triegel studied at the renowned Hochschule fьr Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, where he was taught by Arno Rink, a painter in the German figurative tradition.

The Academy in Leipzig is closely associated with the New Leipzig School, a movement in German art that arose following the fall of the Berlin Wall, of which the painter Neo Rauch, a proponent of social realism, is the most important representative.The members of this association largely use the same figurative form language, though they vary widely in terms of their technique.

In terms of their subject matter and execution, Michael Triegel’s paintings are instilled with the atmosphere of the early European Renaissance. He works in the style of the old masters, applying layer upon layer with a very refined technique that compliments his ability for realistic detail. Triegel’s paintings are a celebration of pure figurative painting, with classic religious and profane motifs, which look like altarpieces but, at the same time, appear alienating and surreal.

In 2010, Michael Triegel, commissioned by the Bishop of Regensburg, painted the official portrait of Pope Benedict XVI, which resulted in international recognition of his work.