Joys and challenges of painting outdoors reflected in Plein Air exhibit
Plein Air painting, which is simply the act of painting outdoors, is an artistic practice that goes back centuries. Pushing beyond the traditional walls of a studio, artists take their chosen media and travel out into the community or countryside and paint what they see. The result can take the shape of a landscape or cityscape, but also can be a vignette or moment of life captured and expressed through what the artist is confronting. The challenge is that this practice is all done out in the elements, and weather and time often conspire to put limits on what the artist is trying to investigate or convey. Artists who often work in this way almost universally have stories of being caught in some type of weather; they also often have stories of having to deal with curious onlookers who want to watch, talk about how they love painting and/or relate a story about their own experiences. There is an exuberance and passion conveyed through this type of painting that is palpable when you look at the work, regardless of whether the artist has been particularly successful. The act of trying to get all the information on paper or canvas before the weather changes or the medium gets too dry comes through in the visual energy and makes the works interesting and enjoyable. Source: Akron Beacon...
Painting Michelle Obama brought Amy Sherald fame
On Thursday evening, the crowd at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis overflowed the room in which Amy Sherald was speaking, so late arrivals watched the artist talk on monitors in the atrium. It’s been a little over three months since Sherald, the artist who painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, became a public figure, admired and reviled according to the usual cleavages of race and culture that divide this country. But for an artist who confesses a “healthy amount of self-doubt,” she is poised, confident and funny when addressing a crowd of people who deeply appreciate what she has done for painting, for women, for the Obamas, and for the cause of African American artists. “I thought I was going to die when I was 39,” the 44-year-old Sherald says. Her life story is part of the bond that ties her to the people in this room, many of whom already know the basic outlines: She was a struggling painter from Columbus, Ga., when she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure at age 31. She lived with the fear of death through a fraught but formative decade that included a lifesaving heart transplant in 2012. She emerged from the nightmare stronger, more confident and with a deeper sense of artistic purpose. In 2016, the Baltimore-based artist won the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever competition, and she was then selected by Michelle Obama to paint the first lady’s portrait. “Everybody should be a donor,” she tells the crowd, deflecting their curiosity about her health onto a constructive message about organ donation. She is good at this, inviting people into her story and then steering them to something else — to her art, or the people she has painted, or some sense of constructive social purpose. Source: The Washington...
The ‘Beauty of Simple Things’
Lanesboro Arts presents “Beauty in Simple Things,” an exhibition of still-life oil paintings by Patricia Schu. The exhibit opens with an artist reception on Saturday, April 14, 2018, from 6-8 p.m., and runs through June 17, 2018. The reception will include wine and hors d’oeuvres, as well as live music. Always free and open to the public, the Lanesboro Arts Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday through April 28. The gallery will also be open on Sundays from 11-4 p.m. beginning on April 29. A Minnesota native, Schu was born in Minneapolis, where she now lives with her husband Carl and cat Goldie. Her love of art emerged as a child and has continued throughout her adult years. Although many of those years were spent working and raising her three children, she would eventually set aside time for art classes at various local colleges. As time moved on, so did the kids, and Schu was able to retire after 26 years in the financial services industry. The possibility of full-time art became a reality. After checking out several art schools, Schu enrolled in part-time classes at The Atelier Studio Program of Fine Art (formerly known as The Atelier Lack) in Minneapolis. Within a month, those part-time classes led to full-time studies. Using the techniques of the “old masters” in an environment of master artist/apprentice is the primary instructional method of this program. The fundamental principles of realistic drawing and painting in the classical style are emphasized throughout the four-year program, which Schu completed in May 2010. Source: Winona...
Carroll Davis brushes aside the conventional for a life of art
At 87 years old, Carroll Davis is still a work in progress, as he continues to pursue his life’s love and passion of art – and even more so today, having overcome a double pulmonary embolism and cheating death in the process. Perhaps what is keeping him so prolific in his work is that he maintains an incredibly rigorous routine for a man of his years, making the best of life in his studio inside his apartment home in East Ridge at Cutler Bay where he currently resides with his wife, Jacqueline. Yet after all these years and having lived in so many exotic spots around the globe, Davis recounts that life-changing moment for him when his parents, unsupportive of his dreams and aspirations, wanted him to pursue a law career and put aside his love of painting and art. Carroll Davis and wife Jacqueline. His father was a hard-nosed businessman raised the hard way, born in 1880 Texas. Founder of the nationwide auto parts chain Western Auto (remember Davis Tires?), Davis credits his dad with making a fortune and being a man of the world, yet he could not bring himself to support his son’s aspirations as an artist. Nonetheless, the young Davis persisted. Today, he believes “The more recognition you can achieve, the better.” One of the most recent paintings, from his China series, sold to a wealthy South American collector. He is also proud of the painting he sold to Chase Manhattan Bank years back which remains in their permanent collection. Through exposure here in Miami, he hopes his art will continue to be displayed around the world. Full article at: Community...
The Cosmic Landscapes of Matthew Lee
Matthew Lee is a phenomenal landscape painter, with the ability to absorb you into the world of his paintings. His work makes you want to spend time with it and ponder the message behind it. He grew up in Middleton, west of Madison, journeyed to Milwaukee when he was 18 years old, and never looked back. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in portrait painting from UW-Milwaukee, he went on a research adventure to Antarctica that would change his style and focus of painting, drawing from him the works that are currently wowing viewers of his Redline Milwaukee exhibition. When he is not showing his work in galleries Lee teaches art classes at MIAD and makes annual trips, with Carthage college, to Montana to excavate 65-million-year-old dinosaur remains. In all of his works you can see his appreciation for our earth and the amount of time and energy he has put into mastering the visual representation of it on canvas. I had the pleasure of sitting with Matt for an enlightening discussion. What is your favorite type of Art? I like early American Modernism, a lot. Peter Bloom, Edward Hopper, and those people. I always joke that my work is like Ed Hopper’s Antarctica, like if he had decided to get out of New England, if he had been to the Arctic and been around telescopes and painted like that. Read full article at source:...
Was Winslow Homer the Greatest American Painter of the 19th Century?
Winslow Homer occupies a prized place in the pantheon of American artists, beloved for his bright watercolor landscapes and tempestuous seascapes, as well as his depictions of soldiers during the Civil War, portrayals of African-American laborers in Virginia during the Reconstruction era, and his early illustrations of everyday New England life for Harper’s Weekly. Indeed some regard him as the greatest American painter of the 19th century, as Met curator H. Barbara Weinberg noted in the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. But does he deserve this accolade, in a century that also saw the development of the epic Hudson River School painters? As neither a teacher nor a member of a defined artistic group, Homer doesn’t categorize easily. But his art remains enormously popular, and he has long been regarded as one of America’s early artist icons. “The late 19th century was historically seen as being dominated by six artists,” Katherine Manthorne, a professor of American art at the CUNY Graduate Center told me via email, “the so-called ‘national’ triumvirate of Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, who spent most of their time at home…and the ‘internationals’ John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt, who were largely expats.”Six artists, each talented and renowned enough to merit inclusion in the country’s top tier of 19th-century painters—so what’s so special, and quintessentially American, about Winslow Homer? Source:...