Wildflowers
By Megan J. Seiter
Colored pencil with pastel on sanded paper
13.75 x 18.5 in. (20.75 x 25.5 in. framed)
For purchase inquiries, please contact the Artist
$5,800
My fixation with realism began the moment I picked up my first crayon. Like most children, my drawings consisted of simple stick figures and smiley-faces. I drew them by the dozens, transforming my house into a gallery of colorful artwork. My goal, even then, was to create pictures that would accurately represent the world around me.
As a young adult I began attending figure drawing sessions and fell in love with the human form. Each model offered a unique opportunity to explore texture, shape, and unconsidered beauty. I continued to study portraits and figures as an undergraduate student, and though my focus eventually shifted, this exploration of the figure left a lasting impression on how I approach my work today. I infuse many of my still life drawings with the same quiet intimacy that I did in my portraits. I’ve discovered that, like people, I can find surprisingly emotive qualities in inanimate objects. My compositions focus on the subject alone, without a contextual background, so as to shine light on the details that make each object distinctive.
I build my drawings with light layers of wax-based and oil-based colored pencils. Each of my drawings reflects my love for color, texture, and subtle value shifts. An uncommon medium among professional artists, colored pencil offers a relatively new approach to fine art work. They’re distinguished by their exceptional ability to render fine detail, and they become luminous and vibrant when applied in soft layers. Through my pencil work, I’m able to get close to the goal I set as a young girl. I continue to push the boundaries of my medium to achieve the highest level of realism that I can.
Within Silence
By Jhenna Quinn Lewis
11 x 14 inches
Oil on linen panel
$5,500
Available through Meyer Gallery
The birds painted by Jhenna Quinn Lewis inhabit different worlds within each of her oil paintings. In each piece that’s part of her upcoming one-woman show, “Avian Realms,” opening at Meyer Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, on December 17, she singles out a bird who rests amid a still life setting, creating a momentary pause in their individual stories.
This painting, “Within Silence,” features a Golden-crowned Sparrow with an all-knowing look and a Chinese altar from Lewis’ collection of antique shelves. Intriguing light flows into cool shadow as one’s eye moves down the piece.
“It imparts a meditative atmosphere and signifies the benefits of silence, hence the jewel,” says Lewis. “The jewel is what you get from inner reflection. You gain insight. It offers a different perspective on life and who you are, offers you the chance to truly live in the moment, which is invaluable.”
Lewis is known for her meditative compositions and detailed realism, which blend a sense of light like the old masters with the tenets of Japanese wabi sabi.
“My art invites the viewer to slow down. To be patient and look. Notice the beauty in imperfection. To appreciate our connection to the natural world. And sense what resounds within themselves.”
Lewis is represented by galleries across the United States, including Meyer Gallery; Trailside Galleries in Jackson, WY; InSight Gallery in Fredericksburg, TX; and Hanson Howard Gallery in Ashland, Oregon. She has been included in many museum exhibitions and collections, such as Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum’s Birds in Art show, the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s Western Visions show, and several Society of Animal Artist exhibitions in museums across the country. She was an artist in residence at the Lassen Volcanic National Park in 2017 and has been featured in publications and media such as Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Collector, Southwest Art Magazine, Western Art & Architecture, and Oregon Art Beat. One of her paintings was recently used as a cover illustration of Die Zeit newspaper in Germany with a circulation of almost 600,000.
You can learn more about Jhenna Quinn Lewis on her website: jhennaquinnlewis.com.
Boca Set
By Karen Ann Hitt
An Original Hitt
28 x 60 in.
Oil on linen panel
Available at the Hughes Gallery, Inc. Phone: 941-964-4273
Artist Statement:My paintings seek to capture influential daily moments, and the lasting effects these memories play on our hearts and minds throughout our lives. As an artist the passion is to reflect light, life, land, expressions as genuinely experienced ‘At That Moment…’. I paint in the hope to transport the viewer while also exposing them to the very emotion that stops us both now in our tracks to experience a view; simply, seeking with my art to bring you into viewing your own, “At That Moment…” too. – Karen Ann Hitt
Featured Art is of an iconic landmark as viewed from the water in Boca Pass at sunset. For many, this is not only Boca Pass at its best, it is sport fishing and south west Florida at its best, sunset with the Tarpon Running. The landmark is the Original Boca Grande (Gasperilla Island) Lighthouse, 1927 was the rear range light of Port Boca Grande. Its light decommissioned as of 2017, yet its iconic landmark continues to shine. As its landmark is a highlight at Boca Pass, it adds perspective to the grand scale of this cloudscape.
Framed in a custom, hand carved, hand made in the USA ‘signature’ frame – designed exclusively for Karen Ann Hitt – An Original Hitt, Gallery Paintings
Upcoming Solo Exhibit 15 February 2022 at The Hughes Gallery Inc. 333 Park Ave. Boca Grande FL 33921 Phone: 941-964-4273
If you would like to follow, and Discover more behind the scenes of An Original Hitt, Karen Ann Hitt: Facebook: Karen Ann Hitt An Original Hitt Instagram: @anoriginalhitt.com
Blackberry Vines in Winter
18 x 24 in.
Oil on linen
$5,400
Available through LeQuire Gallery, Nashville, TN
Red blackberry vines once covered the property where Lori Putnam built her studio in 2015. This studio painting is part of Lori Putnam: Close to Home, a solo exhibition of 24 new works on exhibit and available at LeQuire Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, through Dec. 31st.
Painting the landscape near Putnam’s home meant rediscovering her artist’s eye for all things familiar. In the exhibition catalog, she expresses how childhood memories came flooding back as she explored, painted, and gathered resource materials for her show, two years in the making. View the exhibition catalog free online: https://bit.ly/PutnamClosetoHome
Tennessee has four, distinctly different seasons. Close to Home is a celebration of that and the beauty that surrounds each of us every day.
Lori Putnam is an artist and instructor working primarily in oil. Her work is available in the following fine art galleries: Meyer Vogl Gallery, Charleston, SC; Rosslare Gallery, Wexford, Ireland; FoR Fine Art Big Fork, MT, Whitefish, MT, and Tucson, AZ; Jack Meier Gallery, Houston, TX; Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT; and online at 1225Gallery.com
She is a $15,000 Grand Prize Winner of the Plein air Salon. Putnam maintains a studio in Charlotte, TN. Learn more about her and see her work online at loriputnam.com
William A. Schneider, “Clark Street, Night Effect” 20 x 30 in., oil, 2018
William A. Schneider in his studio
How did you get started and then develop your career?
William A. Schneider: I was an art major at the University of Illinois in the late ‘60s but was also a musician. My band got a record deal, and I suddenly found myself performing 4 or 5 nights a week. I could no longer handle getting up early for the life drawing and painting classes, so I switched majors and ended up with degrees in psychology and business. I played in a number of touring bands for the next 12 years. My wife was the lead singer in my last band. When she became pregnant with our son, we decided to take a year off, and I entered the business world. The year off turned into twelve, and I ended up co-founding an investment firm, DiMeo Schneider & Associates (now called Fiducient Advisors).
In 1992, for fun I started taking classes at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. I was fortunate enough to study with the legendary Bill Parks for the next eight years! I also began to take workshops with Richard Schmid, Harley Brown, and Dan Gerhartz among others. As my skills developed, painting became more and more of a passion. Finally, I sold my shares in the investment firm to become a full-time artist.
Fast forward a decade and a half; I’ve been fortunate enough to be awarded Master Signature status by OPA, The American Impressionist Society, Pastel Society of America, and IAPS (who has also named me an Eminent Pastelist). My work has been featured in articles in all the major art publications and I’m represented by The Illume Gallery of Fine Art, The New Masters Gallery, and Reinert Fine Art. My Videos are distributed by Liliedahl Video Productions. I’m living the dream; I get to make a living doing what I love!
How do you describe success?
I’m privileged do something which is an all-consuming passion! Just to have a career in art is success. Painting and drawing are Zen-like activities. If an artist is daydreaming or thinking about lunch or being anyplace other than here and now, the painting won’t work! It takes enormous concentration; but that’s what makes it so interesting. Also, unlike sports or even music, art is a mental discipline, not a physical one. So, we can keep learning and growing right up till the day we die. Nobody ever retires from being an artist!
How do you find inspiration?
It’s everywhere I look! The graceful arch of a model’s neck, the beautiful harmony of a wet landscape in the drizzling rain, the mysterious shadows under a full moon…all these marvelous sights were placed in the world for our enjoyment and wonder. I think in ancient times, the artist was the shaman, capturing the spirit of bison and deer on cave walls. Even today, most people stumble blindly through the world ignoring the beauty and magic…until we reveal it in our paintings. What could be more inspiring than that?
What is the best thing about being an artist?
I never have to “go to work.” Can you believe it? They actually pay me to play with my crayons!
Who do you collect?
In addition to purchasing paintings, I trade with other artists. If you could go back in time and buy works by Monet, Sargent, or Zorn for a couple of thousand dollars, would you do it? We live in a new Renaissance; for a relative “song” one can acquire pieces that will one day fill the world’s top museums! My collection includes Dan Gerhartz, Carolyn Anderson, Jeremy Mann, Harley Brown, and many others I consider today’s masters!
William A. Schneider, “My Wild Irish Rose,” 20 x 16 in., pastel, 2021William A. Schneider, “Red Heat,” 30 x 20 in., oil, 2020William A. Schneider, “Young Widow,” 16 x 12 in., oil, 2021William A. Schneider, “Demure,” 16 x 20 in., oil, 2020
THEODORE VAN SOELEN (1890–1964), "Adobe, Snow, and Sunshine," 1926, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 40 in., Tia Collection, photo: James Hart, Santa
Private Art Collection On View >
New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West
Through January 2, 2022 National Cowboy Museum
Oklahoma City
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is the latest venue for the important touring exhibition “New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West.”
This project uses superb artworks from the renowned, yet seldom seen, Tia Collection of Santa Fe to offer a fresh view of the evolution of art in New Mexico during the 20th century.
On view will be more than 100 works by 70 artists, including Oscar Berninghaus, Andrew Dasburg, Leon Gaspard, Victor Higgins, and Will Shuster. They reflect the early 20th-century shift from classicism and romanticism, with their evocations of narrative and idealized or realistic forms, toward varieties of modernism such as cubism and abstraction that prioritize geometric form or the emotion of color over verisimilitude.
Most date from the 1920s and ’30s, when artists flocked from all over the world to northern New Mexico, eager to escape the effects of industrialization and urban pollution, world war and revolution, the 1918 flu epidemic, and the Great Depression.
Though the vision of an unspoiled Eden that beckoned them did not always prove real, many found — as the project’s title suggests — new beginnings here.
Northern New Mexico has always been ideal for visual artists thanks to its wide-open spaces, angular mesas, vivid colors, clear air, and intense light. In the early 20th century, artists arriving from America’s East Coast or Europe also admired the interaction of Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American cultures they saw here; though far from perfect, the “live and let live” ethos of this region certainly trumped the all-out hostility many of the artists had witnessed during such catastrophes as World War I and the Russian Revolution.
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Monet to Matisse: Masterworks of French Impressionism from the Dixon Gallery and Gardens
Through January 9, 2022
Crocker Art Museum
Sacramento, California crockerart.org
Jean-Louis Forain (French, 1852–1931), “Intermission, On Stage,” 1879. Watercolor, gouache, india ink, and pencil on wove rag paper, 13 7/8 x 10 11/16 in. Dixon Gallery and Gardens; Museum purchase with funds provided by Brenda and Lester Crain, Hyde Family Foundations, Irene and Joe Orgill and the Rose Family Foundation, 1993.7.3.
“Monet to Matisse: Masterworks of French Impressionism from the Dixon Galleries and Gardens” features 50 works by some of the most well-known artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
From the organizers:
The exhibition boasts significant works of art by the most dynamic artists to work in this period in France, including Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse. From plein-air landscapes to scenes of modern life in Paris, the exhibition illustrates the radical innovations launched by artists we know today as Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.
Georges Hausmann’s transformation of the French capital from a chaotic web of medieval streets to a more orderly system of wide, tree-lined boulevards coincided with a bustling energy in Paris’s many cafés and parks. Keenly observing the new world around them, a group of artists dedicated themselves to “painting modern life” on location to capture a quick impression of a particular moment in nature. Ultimately known as the Impressionists, the artists organized eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, changing the course of art history and revolutionizing the way art was viewed in Paris and, eventually, around the world.
The term “Impressionism” was coined by the artist and art critic Louis Leroy, when he witnessed the first of these exhibitions. Focusing on Claude Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise, he reacted to its seemingly unfinished, hazy evocation of the sun reflected on the sea, finding it the epitome of a type of art he disliked. The artists themselves soon embraced the term, branding themselves “Impressionists.”
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Installation view in the Thornton Portrait Gallery at The Huntington. Left to right: Joshua Reynolds, ”Diana (Sackville), Viscountess Crosbie,” 1777; Kehinde Wiley, “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman,” 2021; Thomas Gainsborough, ”Elizabeth (Jenks) Beaufoy, later Elizabeth Pycroft,” ca. 1780. Photo: Joshua White. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
The institution’s newly commissioned work reconceives its famous painting “The Blue Boy” (ca. 1770) by Thomas Gainsborough in a contemporary context. The work is now on view through Jan. 3, 2022, opposite the recently restored Gainsborough icon. The acquisition of the Wiley portrait celebrates the 100th anniversary of the purchase of “The Blue Boy” by Henry and Arabella Huntington, the institution’s founders.
“The Blue Boy” (ca. 1770) by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788). Post-conservation photo. Photo: Christina Milton O’Connell. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
“Just as scholars come to The Huntington to study and reinterpret our significant collections, with this commission we are delighted that Kehinde Wiley has re-envisioned our iconic work, ‘The Blue Boy,’ and Grand Manner portraiture in a powerful way,” said Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence. “Across the breadth of our library, art, and botanical collections, we are inviting perspectives that alter the way we see tradition itself.”
Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Brad Ogbonna.
Wiley has long talked about the role The Huntington played in his formative years as an artist growing up in Los Angeles. When he was young, his mother enrolled him in art classes at The Huntington, where he encountered a formidable collection of Grand Manner portraits—large-scale depictions of England’s 18th- and 19th-century noble class. The portraits made such an impression on Wiley that he would later incorporate their stylistic representations of wealth, glory, and power into his own artistic practice, focusing on the Black and brown bodies missing from the museums he visited.
“I loved The Huntington’s galleries; the paintings by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and John Constable were some of my favorites,” Wiley said. “I was taken by their imagery, their sheer spectacle, and, of course, their beauty. When I started painting, I started looking at their technical proficiency—the manipulation of paint, color, and composition. These portraits are hyperreal, with the detail on the face finely crafted, and the brushwork, the clothing, and the landscape fluid and playful. Since I felt somewhat removed from the imagery—personally and culturally—I took a scientific approach and had an aesthetic fascination with these paintings. That distance gave me a removed freedom. Later, I started thinking about issues of desire, objectification, and fantasy in portraiture and, of course, colonialism.”
Wiley painted “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman” in Senegal, where he has been living during the COVID-19 pandemic and where Black Rock Senegal, his artist-in-residence program, is headquartered.
Wiley, who earned a bachelor’s in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and a master’s in fine arts from Yale University in 2001, became famous for full-length depictions of everyday Black men and women in street clothes. The subjects are painted in classical poses against vibrant, patterned backgrounds, reminiscent of West African fabrics as well as wallpaper and textile designs by William Morris and Co.
Wiley’s portraits have come to include depictions of a number of public figures, the most well-known of which is the presidential portrait of Barack Obama, which coincidentally will be on view just a few miles from The Huntington at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) this fall, as part of a national tour.
“By adding a work by Kehinde Wiley to our collection and offering it on view in our most lauded gallery of historic art, we are examining our shared history and beginning to curate our future,” said Christina Nielsen, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Museum at The Huntington. “I fully expect that Wiley’s portrait will speak to 21st-century audiences just as Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy did to its original audience when it was first unveiled in 1770.”
In conjunction with the commission, The Huntington is developing plans for a related book.
In January 2022, “The Blue Boy” will travel to London for an exhibition at the National Gallery, opening 100 years to the day it departed from England for its new home in California.
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CATHERINE MADOX BROWN HUEFFER (1850–1927), "At the Opera," 1869, watercolor and pencil, heightened with white, on paper, 22 2/3 x 20 1/8 in. (framed), private collection
UNCOMMON POWER: LUCY AND CATHERINE MADOX BROWN
Watts Gallery–Artists’ Village Compton
Surrey, England wattsgallery.org.uk
through February 20, 2022
On view 35 miles southwest of London is the first exhibition dedicated to the lives, art, and legacies of two remarkable sisters, Lucy Rossetti (1843–1894) and Catherine Hueffer (1850–1927).
Both were daughters of the well-known British artist Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893), for whom they often posed. Soon they began training under him alongside their brother Oliver and the one-time model Marie Spartali. Brown himself “freely admitted” that his use of color “was greatly improved by the more opulent and refined color-sense of his daughters,” who began exhibiting while still in their 20s.
This retrospective’s title, “Uncommon Power,” is drawn from a flattering review of Lucy’s watercolor exhibited in 1871: the critic wrote that it showed “uncommon power and warrants high expectations of the young artist’s future.” Dressed in the latest fashions, the two sisters socialized and portrayed other creative women, including novelist Mary Shelley and radical poet Mathilde Blind. Lucy co-signed the 1889 Declaration in Favor of Women’s Suffrage.
The new exhibition contains rarely exhibited works from public and private collections, as well as a family photograph album, personal correspondence, and the artists’ palettes. It has been organized by Watts Gallery curator Abbie Latham and independent scholar Ruth Brimacombe, who have both contributed to the accompanying publication. Brimacombe adds, “One of the extraordinary things about Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown’s story is the way their families have safeguarded their works — handing them on from generation to generation until the time was right to bring them back to critical attention. This exhibition marks that moment.”
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MARY CASSATT (1844–1926), "Young Girl at a Window," 1883–84, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 25 1/2 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Corcoran Collection
“Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France”
Denver, Colorado Denver Art Museum
Through March 13, 2022
The Denver Art Museum is the first of two U.S. institutions that will present “Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France,” a touring exhibition that explores the powerful impact of French art on American painting between 1855 and 1913.
Curator Timothy J. Standring has selected more than 100 works created by a broad range of Americans who include not only the artists mentioned in the title (James McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassatt), but also such fascinating figures as Cecilia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Elizabeth Nourse, Lilla Cabot Perry, John Singer Sargent, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Standring has organized the show into seven sections, opening with a dramatically installed gallery that evokes the spectacular density of the influential Salon exhibitions once mounted in Paris.
The following sections explore such themes as classicism, realism, tonalism, impressionism, and hybrids of these approaches. There are particularly deep dives into how American students were trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and the ateliers nearby, and also how they looked at landscape anew during their summertime stays at artist colonies throughout Normandy and Brittany.
Among the many careers highlighted are those of H.O. Tanner, a gifted Black artist who fled racism in the U.S. to train at the Académie Julian, and also the first three Americans whose works were acquired by the French government — Walter Gay, Henry Mosler and Frank Biggs.
Not surprisingly, both Whistler and Cassatt get their own galleries. Cassatt is represented by nearly 20 works. At age 21, she arrived in Paris from her native Philadelphia and was quickly admitted to the atelier of the academician Jean-Léon Gérôme. She supplemented her studies by making copies of masterworks at the Louvre, as women then were not allowed at the École des Beaux-Arts or to socialize in the cafes where their male peers gathered.
This show will be on view at its second and final venue, Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, from April 16 through July 31, 2022. It is accompanied by a handsome catalogue distributed by Yale University Press. On November 30, Standring will give an illustrated talk about the exhibition’s preparation, and on January 22 University of Denver professor Annette Stott will discuss the summer art colonies. On March 2, Auburn University’s Emily C. Burns will examine the careers of H.O. Tanner and other Black artists who worked in Paris around 1900.
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Within Silence
