Jan Mankes

The Artwork of Jan Mankes

Born in August of 1889 in the city of Meppel, Jan Mankes was a Dutch painter whose restrained, detailed work included self-portraits, landscapes and detailed studies of animals and birds. Although he developed a reputation as an ascetic, Mankes was well acquainted with both events and artists in the Netherlands.

The son of tax inspector Beint Jans Mankes and Genty Hartsuyker, Jan Mankes began his initial education in 1902 at Meppel; however, after his father received a new assignment, the family moved in 1903 to Delft, a city in South Holland. Beginning in 1904, Mankes studied at the Delft workshop of painter and stained glass artist Jan Lourens Schouten. In his free time, he also trained in stained glass techniques at the workshop of Hermanus Veldhuis and often assisted Veldhuis in his work. There is evidence Mankes participated in the restoration of stained glass panels at Sint Janskerk, a Gothic-styled church in the city of Gouda.

Mankes often traveled to The Hague where he attended evening classes at its Academy of Fine Arts and studied the painting collections in the Mauritshuis Museum. He was particularly influenced by the work of sixteenth-century German artist and printmaker Hans Holbein the Younger as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painters Carel Fabritius and Johannes Vermeer. In 1908 at the age eighteen, Mankes showed his first paintings to his friend, Delft engraver Antoine van Derktsen Angers, who advised him to leave the glass works and devote himself to a career as a painter.

After the retirement of his father in 1909, Jans Mankes moved with his parents to the village of Bovenknipe in the northern province of Friesland. Inspired by its landscapes, he decided on the main themes for his work: portraiture and depictions of the natural world’s fauna and flora. From 1909 onwards, Mankes was supported financially by his patron from The Hague, tobacco merchant and major art collector A. A. M. Pauwels. His letters to Pauwels expressing gratitude for both money and materials were published in 2012 by the Netherlands Institute for Art History; Pauwels’s letters did not survive.

In 1911, Mankes created a portrait of Anne Zernike, a progressive Mennonite woman and Netherlands’ first female minister with a doctoral degree. This portrait is now housed in the collection of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden. In the same year, Mankes painted one of his most famous self-portraits, “Self-Portrait with an Owl”. His exposure in 1912 to the work of Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his woodblock prints, created a lasting impression on his work, especially in regard to simplicity of composition.

On the thirtieth of September in 1915, Mankes married Anne Sernike and the couple lived for several years in The Hague. After a diagnosis of tuberculosis, he and his wife relocated in 1916 to the city of Eerbeck in the central-eastern province of Gelderland. Two years later, the couple had their only child, a son named Beint after Mankes’s father. However by this time, Mankes’s health was steadily failing due to his tuberculosis. He died on the twenty-third of April in 1920 at the age of thirty.

In addition to private collections, Jan Mankes’s work is housed in the Netherland’s Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, the Museum Belvedere Heerenveen, the Rijksmuseum, and the MORE Museum in Gorssel as well as other international museums.

Top Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Self Portrait”, circa 1915, Pencil and Charcoal on Paper, 21 x 17.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Zelfportret met Uil (Self Portrait with an Owl)“, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 20.5 x 17 cm, Museum Arnhem, The Netherlands

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Annie Zernike”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 34 x 32.5 cm, Museum for Modern Realism (MORE), Gorssel, The Netherlands

Greg Drasler

The Paintings of Greg Drasler

Born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1952, Greg Drasler is an American painter known for his metaphorical images that explore the formation of identity and memory. His representational work incorporates elements of abstraction, surrealism, and the postmodernist elements of graphic design.

Drasler’s paintings of elaborately constructed interior spaces, symbolic and commonplace objects, and patterned panoramas hold enigmatic puzzles and psychological mysteries that intrigue the viewer’s sense of perception. A major component of his work is the exploration of liminal spaces and thresholds between public and private, real and imaginary, and object and environment. Liminality, in anthropology, is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage. Participants in effect stand at the threshold of their previous self-identification and their new existence established by the rite.

Greg Drasler uses the strategies of bricolage, the creation of a work from a diverse range of objects, to place the viewer in a state of liminality. His images of suitcases, men with hats, automobile interiors, film sets, and the American highway contain symbols, metaphors, visual puzzles and puns. Humor, nostalgia and a sense of the uncanny are contained in these examinations of the Self and its relationship to local culture and both personal space and location.

In the 1960s, Drasler became interested in art as a career through his exposure to the contemporary art of his time. A major influence on his life’s work came from James Rosenquist’s awe-inspiring 1964-65 “F-111”, a painting of fifty-nine interlocking panels that enclosed the viewer. Drasler was also influenced by sculptor Horace Clifford Westermann, a master of traditional carpentry and marquetry techniques, as well as the representational artists of the Chicago Imagists such as Jim Nutt, whose work was inspired by pop culture, and Robert Brown for whom collected art and objects functioned as important source materials.

In 1976, Drasler entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study art. He committed to the medium of painting in 1978 and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1980. After receiving his degree, Drasler enrolled in the university’s Year in Japan Program, a period which focused his work on the relationship between identity and place presented through the use of domestic functional imagery. After completing his Master of Fine Arts in 1983, Drasler relocated to New York City and began to exhibit his work professionally. The first exhibition of his paintings was in the first “On View” held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1983.

Greg Drasler’s earliest work focused on builder and handyman imagery that served as an allegory for self-construction. His first series, executed between 1987 and 1990, was the “Baggage Paintings”, which depicted plush luggage in random but carefully composed states, either stacked as in “Samson and Delilah” or grouped as in “Baggage Claim”. The meticulously detailed groups of baggage, whose lighting and color were playfully painted, presented allegories of identity, luxury, and privacy. Drasler’s 1990 painting from the series, “His”, depicts two upright traveling trunks in a room. One contains a set of six drawers while the other is opened to reveal an empty space for hanging clothes. The bright golden light that emanates from the interior of the trunk, almost magically, is in stark contrast to the dull interior of the room.

With the support of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991 and a subsequent National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1993, Drasler began “Cave Paintings” which depicted intricately constructed, ornate interior living spaces that served as metaphors for one’s creation of the Self, as well as, the relationship to one’s personal, domestic space. These tableaus with their architecture, wallpaper and fabric were distinguished by human absence and trope-l’oeil obfuscation. The illusionistic perspective and the meld of motifs were designed to create a voyeuristic view of unsettling presence and closely guarded secrets, a similar sensation akin to painter Giorgio de Chirico’s famous piazza paintings. “Cave Paintings’ were first presented at New York’s Queens Museum of Art in 1994, followed by exhibitions in Seattle, Boston and New York.

Greg Drasler’s “Tattoo Parlor” series explored wallpaper patterns and the psychological imprint they have on a room’s occupants. One group from the series was “Jesus Wallpaper”, that consisted of papered walls of loosely rendered iconic images of Jesus and assorted hanging objects; the “Jumping Jesus” installation, for instance, contained hanging auto jumper-cables. Starting in the early 2000s, Drasler’s investigations of liminal spaces included automobile interiors, Hollywood illusionism, and the great American road trip. After seeing cutaway automobile props used in film sets, which exist as both interior and exterior spaces, he employed that image in several paintings including the 2006 “Green Screen” and the 2010 “Internal Combustion”.

With a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Drasler drove across country, during which he gathered ideas for what became his “Road Trip”series, expansive vistas of the Midwest that often depicted the vernacular architecture of the American roadhouse. These paintings included large areas of criss-cross patterning, often looking like quilts in the sky, that suggested the vast reach of the landscape and its division into property. A major work of this series was the 2016 six-panel “Stratocaster Suite” which presented a stop-motion sequence in the style of Eadweard Muybridge when displayed across the wall.

Greg Drasler’s essay “Painting into a Corner: Representation as Shelter” was published in editor Joseph Scalia’s 2002 “The Vitality of Objects: Exploring the Work of Christopher Bollas”, published by Continuum Press, London, and Wesleyan Press. He collaborated with poet Timothy Liu for the 2009 “Plolytheogamy” published in 2009 by Philadelphia’s Saturnalia Press; it was comprised of interleaved images of Drasler’s paintings and Liu’s poetry. Drasler has taught and lectured at schools, including Princeton University, Pratt Institute for the past twelve years, Williams College, Hofstra University, and Montclair State University. Starting in 2007, he has been represented by New York’s Betty Cuningham Gallery on the Lower East Side.

Notes: A biographical narrative by Greg Drasler on his life, as well aa contact information and video projects, can be found at the artist’s site located at: https://www.drasler.com

More information on Greg Drasler’s work can be found at the Betty Cuningham Gallery website located at: http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/artists/greg-drasler

Second Insert Image: Greg Drasler, “Green Room”, Cave Painting Series, 1997, Oil on Canvas, 177.8 x 127 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Greg Drasler, “Houdini”, 1987, Oil on Canvas, 177.8 x 152.4 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Greg Drasler, “Wiggle Room Post It”, Wiggle Room Series, 2000, Oil on Canvas, 147.3 x 132 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Greg Drasler, “Slide Lecture”, Cave Painting Series, 1995, Oil on Canvas, 147.3 x 132.1 cm, Private Collection

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

Keisuke Yamamoto

Stone Lithographs by Keisuke Yamamoto

Born in Osaka in 1961, Keisuke Yamamoto is a Japanese lithographer and painter known for his still lifes and landscape images. He graduated in 1986 from historical Kanazawa’s College of Art and Design with a Master of Fine Arts in Oil Painting and then studied lithographic techniques at a printing studio. Since his graduation, Yamamoto has been an independent painter and lithography artist. He currently lives and works in Kyoto where he maintains his atelier.

Lithography, in essence, requires clear systematic planning in its execution; errors can not be corrected. Yamamoto’s hand-drawn stone lithographs, although appearing simplistic, required great forethought and skill in carving. His work does not contain any narrative but instead focuses on the incredible stillness of a moment in time. The beauty of Yamamoto’s work is created by the interactions between time, silence, light and shadow, the composition of which places the viewer as an observing visitor.

In his “Light, Time, Silence” begun in 1992, Keisuke Yamamoto created a series of lithographs which reconstructed three recurring elements, chairs, stairs and windows, which were arranged in multiple settings with different lighting conditions. The main theme for this series was the conception of the natural flow of time. To achieve this, Yamamoto had to depict the surrounding spaces as well as the gradation of light with great accuracy. He was aware that our ability to see and understand the world visually was based on the light that reflected off various objects. Upon light entering our eyes, our brains process the information and present it to us as a particular object with a particular color and shape. Yamamoto understood the illustration of the visual world depends actually on the depiction of light; and the flow of time must be illustrated through changes in that light.

Keisuke Yamamoto is represented in the United States by the Davidson Galleries, a collection of nearly twenty-thousand works on paper, which is located on Occidental Avenue South in Seattle, Washington. His works can be seen at: https://www.davidsongalleries.com/collections/keisuke-yamamoto

Top Insert Image: Keisuke Yamamoto, “Apple Tree”, 1961/2013, Lithograph, AP, 38.1 x 60.1 cm, Davidson Galleries

Bottom Insert Image: Keisuke Yamamoto, “Sea Breeze B”, 1961, Lithograph, “Light, Time, Silence” Series, Edition of 20, 30.2 x 20 cm, Davidson Galleries

Ottilie Roederstein

The Paintings of Ottilie Roederstein

Born in 1859 to German parents in Zurich, Ottilie Wilhelmine Roederstein was a painter who gained attention mostly in her homeland of Switzerland, but also in France and Germany. Her interest in painting began with the visit to her family home by Swiss painter Eduard Pfyffer who had been commissioned to do the family’s portraits. Beginning in 1876, Roederstein was allowed by her father, against her mother’s wishes and the prevailing social customs, to study painting under the tutelage of Eduard Pfyffer, so she would remain close to home

Three years later, Roederstein moved to the Berlin residence of her married sister Johanna and found a position in a special women’s class at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School under the tutelage of portrait painter Carl Gussow. Her first exhibition of paintings at a Zurich gallery in 1882 was well received. That same year, Roederstein followed her colleagues to Paris where she joined the women’s studio of portrait painters Charles Auguste Émile Durand and Jean-Jacques Henner. In addition to these classes, Roederstein also worked with academic painter Luc-Olivier Merson and painted nudes in special private evening classes.

In order to sustain herself as an artist, Ottilie Roederstein had chosen the genres of portraiture and still life, for which she used a dark-toned color palette. She soon departed from that traditional canon and began to paint religious imagery and nudes. By the very end of the 1890s, Roederstein had embraced the tempera medium which was in vogue among both traditional and avant-garde artists. She experimented with Symbolism and Impressionism in the latter part of her career before returning to her signature style in the 1920s.

Initially dependent on financial support from her family, Roederstein was able by 1887 to support herself with sales and commissions for her work. She returned to Zurich but continued to maintain her Paris studio on the Seine where she would work and exhibit several months of the year. Roederstein moved to Frankfurt, Germany, in 1891 to be with her partner, Elizabeth Winterhalter, a physician and one of the first female surgeons in Germany.

In 1891, Elisabeth Winterhalter had just taken over a practice in Frankfurt am Main’s newly founded hospital, the Vaterländischer Frauenverein. She also set up the first gynecological polyclinic through a branch of the Red Cross organization. Although unable to obtain a German medical license despite her internships and Doctorate, she established a reputation as an obstetrician and gynecologist. In 1895, Winterhalter became the first female surgeon in Germany to perform a surgical procedure involving an incision through the abdominal wall. She also conducted research that led to the discovery of the ganglion cell of the ovary and published a major paper on the subject in 1896.

Soon after her 1891 move to Berlin, Ottilie Roederstein quickly gained a wide circle of clients and, in 1892, began giving women artists painting lessons at her studio in the Städel Art School. She exhibited her paintings in Paris’s Salon and won a Silver Medal at the city’s 1889 Exposition Universelle. Her work was also shown at the Woman’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, Illinois. In 1902, Ottilie Roederstein’s application for Swiss citizenship was granted; however, Frankfurt remained at the center of her life. Five years later, she and Elisabeth settled in Hofheim am Taurus, a western Frankfurt suburb surrounded by forest.

Roederstein was a member of the Frankfurt-Cronberg Artists’ Association, a group which was attempting to establish the Impressionist technique of open air painting in Germany. She was also the only female artist to exhibit at Cologne’s 1912 International Art Exhibition. In 1913, Roederstein became a member of Frankfurt’s Women’s Art Association which campaigned for women artists’ rights to equal training and admission to art academies. During the first World War as exhibition opportunities shrank, she gave up her Paris studio and withdrew into the privacy of her Hofheim estate. Beginning in 1920, Roederstein bequeathed her own collection of important French and Swiss paintings to Kunsthaus Zürich, one of the most important art collections in Switzerland.

In 1929 on the occasion of Ottilie Roederstein’s seventieth birthday, a large anniversary exhibition of her work was held at Frankfurt’s Art Museum and the city declared both Roederstein and Winte halter as honorary citizens. The rise of the National Socialist Party to power in Germany and the persecution of her Jewish friends and colleagues deeply affected Roederstein. She herself, as an artist, became subject to the state and had to contend with the government’s increasing control over the arts. After the war, Roederstein continued her painting and did a number of portraits of women widowed by the war.

Ottilie Roederstein continued to exhibit regularly until 1931. She produced a large body of work, of which more than eighty were self-portraits. She usually staged herself in a self-confident pose with a stern gaze, a posture that signified her emancipation. On the 26th of November in 1937, Ottilie W. Roederstein died of a heart condition in Hofheim am Taunus. The first posthumous exhibitions of Roederstein’s work were presented in 1938 in Frankfurt, Zurich and Bern in recognition of her artistic legacy and tireless work as a mediator between Switzerland and Germany. After a long period of obscurity, a retrospective of seventy works by Roederstein was held at Kunsthaus Zürich in December of 2020.

After her partner’s death, Elisabeth Winterhalter created a joint legacy, the Roederstein-Winterhalter-Stiftung. She died in February of 1952 in Hofheim am Taunus. Winterhalter was buried alongside Roederstein in an honorary grave cared for by the community. For her efforts in opening the medical profession to women, a street in the Niederursel district of Frankfurt is named after her.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Ottilie Roederstein in Her Atelier, Date Unknown

Second Insert Image: Ottilie Foederstein, “Self Portrait with Keys”, 1936, 105.3 x 74.6 cm, Städel Museum

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, ” Ottilie roederstein and Elisabeth Winterhalter, Date Unknown

Fourth Insert Image: Ottilie W. Roederstein, “Self Portrait with Hat”, 1904, Oil on Canvas, 55.3 x 46.1 cm, Stäadel Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Photogapher Unknown, Ottilie Roederstein and Elisabeth Winterhalter, Date Unknown, Studio Portrait Print

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

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.

Edward Ladell

Edward Ladell, “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, c 1880, Oil on Canvas, 30.5 x 26 cm

Edward Ladell was a British painter known for his still-life paintings of flowers, fruit, and glass vessels, done in the style of seventeenth-century Dutch traditions.

Born in April of 1821 in Hasketon, United Kingdom, Edward Ladell spent his early years working at his father’s coach building business. He married Juliana Roope in July, 1848, and moved to the East Hill neighborhood of Colchester, with a daughter being born in 1860. It is thought that he may have been apprenticed as a pattern designer of a Flemish textile company in Colchester, a business central to the city’s economy since the seventeenth century.

Despite the lack of information on his art training, it is evident Edward Ladell was deeply familiar with the still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish schools, either through museums or private collections. He successfully submitted an oil painting entitled “Study from Nature” to the Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1856. Ladell again exhibited his work three years later, at the annual exhibition, and established his career as a painter.

Throughout the first half of the 1860s, Edward Ladell painted his characteristic still-lifes, always with meticulous attention to detail and realism. By 1865, he stopped submitting works to the Royal Academy; listed as single on the 1871 census, it is suspected that serious illness or accident took the life of Ladell’s wife and daughter. It was not until 1868 that Ladell began to exhibit paintings again.

During the 1860s, Ladell, with an acknowledged reputation as a still-life artist, accepted a small number of private students. One of his students was Ellen Maria Levett, who most likely joined his studio class in the mid- 1870s. Ellen became his wife in October of 1878, after which they made their home in the city of Exeter, where Ellen gave birth to a son in 1880.

His domestic life settled, Ladell continued to expand his clientele through both regional exhibitions and the annual shows at the Royal Academy, the British Institute and the Suffolk Street Galleries in London. It was at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1880 that Ladell presented his “Still Life with Prawns and a Delft Pot”, which attracted attention from a number of critics who admired it for its realism and success at expressing shades and reflections.

Between 1880 and 1886, Edward Ladell became a highly regarded member of the Exeter community. He died after a brief respiratory illness on November 9, 1886, at the age of sixty-five, and is buried in the Higher Cemetery behind St. Mark’s Church in Exeter. Today, Edward Ladell’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of Croydon in London, the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, the Reading Museum in Berkshire, and the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, United Kingdom.

Max Dupain

Max Dupain, “Tea Towel Trio”, 1934, Silver Gelatin Print, 29.5 x 22 cm

Born in April of 1911 in Sydney, Australia, Maxwell Spencer Dupain was an Australian photographer whose influential style of commercial photography emphasized the geometric forms of his industrial and architectural subjects. He studied at both the East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton Art School between 1933 and 1935, and apprenticed with commercial photographer Cecil Bostock from 1930 to 1934.

During World War II, Max Dupain worked for the army camouflage unit; upon deployment, he worked for the Australian Department of Information until 1947. When he returned to his studio work, Dupain concentrated on more abstract architectural and industrial imagery instead of his previous portraiture and landscape work. This more abstract imagery established him as one of the most significant Modernist photographers in Australia.

Living in Sydney all his life, Dupain photographed the city from the 1930s until his death in July of 1992. Although traveling a few times abroad, including photographing the Seidler Australian Embassy in 1988, he was chiefly interested in the beaches and cities of Australia. Dupain’s photographic series of Australia’s beach culture are his most enduring images, with his 1937 “Sunbaker”, a low-angle shot of a male sunbather on the beach, becoming an icon of the Australian life.

Simple and direct in his work, Max Dupain, feeling that color was restricting in its objectivity, remained an adherent to black and white photography. His work has been collected by most of the major galleries in Australia and resides in many private collections. Dupain’s work was featured at the Photographer’s Gallery in London to celebrate his eightieth birthday, At the age of eighty-two, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1982. Maxwell Dupain continued his work in photography until his death in July of 1992.

Note: Max Dupain’s collection of twenty-eight thousand archived negatives are now catalogued and preserved in the New South Wales State Library located in Sydney.

Bohnchang Koo

Photography by Bohnchang Koo

Born into a prominent Korean family in 1953, Bohnchang Koo attended Yonsei University in Seoul, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Business, and began his life working in an office. Dissatisfied with this career, he moved to Hamburg, Germany, in 1980 to study design and photography.

In 1985, Koo returned to Korea, taking up careers as a teacher and photographer with exhibitions in Germany, Iceland, Australia, Japan, Korea, and the United States. He was a professor at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, the Chung Ang University, Institute of the Arts in Seoul, and holds a visiting professorship at London’s Saint Martin School. Koo currently teaches at Kyungil University in Korea.

One of Bohnchang Koo’s latest work series is “The Allure of Blue”, delicate photographs of porcelain pieces from the Joseon dynasty. Captivated by its charm, Koo began studying and photographing these traditional Korean ceramics fourteen years ago. After visiting sixteen museums throughout Korea, he compiled a body of work to highlight the simplistic beauty of Korea’s cultural heritage of that time.

Bohnchang Koo’s work can be found in several published collections which include the 2004 “Vessels for the Heart” and the 2006 “Deep Breath in Silence”, both published by Hangil Art, and “Hysteric Nine”published in 2003 by Nobuhiko Kitamura.

Bohnchang Koo’s works have been exhibited in over thirty solo exhibitions including: Seoul’s Samsung Rodin Gallery in 2001, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts in 2002, Paris’ 2004 Camera Obscura Exhibition, Kukje Gallery, the Goeun Museum of Photography in Busan in 2007, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2010, among others. His work can be seen at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Paris’ Musee Guimet, Hamburg’s Museum of Art and Craft, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Reykjavik Museum of Photography in Iceland.

Note: The gallery images are from the March to April 2020 exhibition at the Choeunsook Gallery, a modern art and contemporary hand crafts exhibition space in Seoul, South Korea. The black and white images are from Bohnchang Koo’s photographic series “In the Beginning”, set in the landscape of modern Korea, which focuses on physical conflict and the frustration of things gained and things postponed.

Dick Hendrik Ket

Paintings by Dick Hendrik Ket

Born in 1902 in the small port town of Den Helder, The Netherlands, Dick Ket was a magic realist painter. He was born with a serious heart defect, probably a symptom of Fallot, incurable at that time and causing insufficient nourishment of tissues and organs.

In his childhood, Ket was encouraged by two teachers who appreciated his artistic talent. His drawing teacher, Johan C. Kerkemeijer directed him toward the techniques of oil painting. His science teacher Henri Adrien Naber, an author and theosophist, encouraged him to look into the relationship between geometry and mysticism.

After studying art at the Kunstoefening Arnhem Academy from 1922 to 1925, Ket could no longer travel, becoming debilitated by chronic fatigue and growing phobias. He lived in seclusion with his parents in the small town of Bennekom, not venturing out of the house until after 1930. Ket’s exposure, through reproductions, to the art of painter Neue Sachlichkeit in 1929 led him to concentrate his work in the magic realist style.

Housebound by his illness, Dick Ket painted still lifes and self portraits. His meticulously composed still lifes are always centered on the same themes and are often composed of the same objects: empty bowls, eggs, bottles, newspapers and musical instruments. These objects are arranged in different angles to each other, painted as viewed from above, and seen casting strong shadows.

During the period from 1930 to 1940, Dick Ket’s health progressively deteriorated, leading to his early death at age thirty-seven in September of 1940. Over the course of his career, Dick Ket produced approximately one hundred-forty paintings, a third of which were self portraits. Among the museums containing Ket’s work in their collections are the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Arnhem Museum, and the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

Top Insert Image: Dick Ket, “Self Portrait”, 1935, Conté Crayon and White Crayon on Paper, 113 x 75 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Bottom Insert Image: Dick Ket, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Conté Crayon on Paper

Maurice Brazil Prendergast

Artwork by Maurice Prendergast

Born in 1858 in Saint John’s, Newfoundland, Maurice Brazil Prendergast was a post-impressionist artist who worked in watercolor, oil paints, and mono-type. At a young age with very little schooling, he was apprenticed to a commercial artist in Boston, where he became influenced by the bright-colored and flat-patterned work. A shy, reserved individual, Prendergast remained a bachelor throughout his life, closely attached to his artist brother Charles, a gifted craftsman and artist.

Starting in 1892, Prendergast studied for three years in Paris at the Atelier Colarossi, under painter Gustave Courtis, and at the Académie Julian. During one of his early stays in Paris, he met the Canadian landscape painter James Morrice. Under the influence of Morrice, Prendergast began sketching on wood panels scenes of elegantly dressed women and children at the seaside resorts of Saint-Malo and Dieppe. Later, drawing inspiration from the post-impressionists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, he developed a more sophisticated modern style, with boldly contrasting, jewel-like colors, and flattened, patterned forms rhythmically arranged on a canvas.

Returning home in 1895, Prendergast shared a studio with his brother, continuing in his work to focus on people strolling in parks, on the beach, or traveling the city streets. A trip to Venice in 1898 exposed him to the genre scenes of early Renaissance narrative painter Vittore Carpaccio and encouraged him toward even more complex and rhythmic arrangements. Prendergast also became one of the first Americans to embrace the work of Cézanne, understanding and using Cézanne’s expressive use of form and color.

A successful exhibition of the work Prendergast produced in Venice was held in 1900 at the Macbeth Galleries in New York. In 1907 he traveled to France; where, after contact with the Fauvist movement, he started painting works with startling bright colors and staccato brushstrokes. Later in 1907, Prendergast exhibited his new work in a show with the group of artists known as The Eight, exponents of the Ashcan School.

In 1913 Prendergast was invited to participate in the famed Armory Show in New York City which was largely arranged by his friend, landscape painter Arthur B. Davies. In 1914, he settled in New York, along with his brother Charles, where he enjoyed great success with collectors such as Duncan Phillips, and attracted a number of important patrons, including John Quinn, modern art collector Lillie B. Bliss, and Dr. Albert Barnes, the founder of the Barnes Foundation.

During his final years of his career, Maurice Prendergast spent his time sketching during the summers in New England and painting in New York in the winters. In frail health by 1923, he died a year later, in February of 1924, at the age of sixty-five.

Andreas Feininger

andreas feininger, skeleton of gaboon viper, 1952

Andreas Feininger, “Skeleton of Gaboon Viper”, 1952, Silver Gelatin Print

Son of the late acclaimed artist Lyonel Feininger, American photographer Andreas Feininger was born in Paris in 1906, and graduated with highest honors in architecture from schools in Germany. At that time, Feininger was using a camera as his mechanical sketchbook for a reference aid in creating his building designs.

After a year’s work in France for architect Le Corbusier, followed by a struggle to find employment in Stockholm, Feininger turned his attention full-time to photography. He sold his first photos in 1932 and moved with his family to the United States in 1939. Feininger became a staff photographer in 1943 for LIFE magazine where he completed more than 430 assignments in a twenty year span.

Feininger’s works are known for their technique and panoramic grandeur. Such timeless images as the “New York Landscape Seen From Eight Miles Away in New Jersey”, taken in 1947, are notable for their harmony, balance, and grand scale. Through Feininger’s trained eye, the intricacies and beauty of both the natural and man-made world were magnified and intensified. His images revealed a new aesthetic of order and geometric perfection from the span of bridges to the symmetrical perfection of the skeleton of a carbon viper.

Bi Jianye

Born in 1985, Bi Jianye is an emerging artist originally from Dandong city in the Liaoning province of China. He now lives and works in Shenyang. Jianye has been showing with Platform China, one of Beijing’s most important contemporary art galleries, since graduating in 2008 from the Department of Oil Painting at the LuXun Academy of  Fine Arts in Shenyang.

Bi Jianye’s recent paintings feature scenes from nature, but with a difference, as they reveal an out-of-place still life motif, or box, carefully placed into the composition. The box may be a comment that refers to the artist as a lonely and isolated figure in society, or perhaps refers to humanity’s forceful intervention with nature and the environment.

Bi Jianye uses thick paint that reveal carefully painted surfaces, using a muted palette of browns and creams to create quiet and assured compositions made by an artist confident in his art.