As part of our effort to continue to help artists and art galleries thrive, we’re proud to bring you this week’s “Virtual Gallery Walk.” Browse the artwork below and click the image itself to learn more about it, including how to contact the gallery.
Want to see your gallery featured in an upcoming Virtual Gallery Walk? Contact us at [email protected] to advertise today. Don’t delay, as spaces are first come, first served, and availability is limited.
Among Forests and Lakes
National Nordic Museum
Seattle, Washington
nordicmuseum.org
through October 17, 2021
The National Nordic Museum (NNM) is the only North American venue for “Among Forests and Lakes: Landscape Masterpieces from the Finnish National Gallery,” an exhibition co-organized by NNM and Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum.
It offers a rare opportunity to see paintings, prints, and even video art created by Finland’s finest artists, few of whom are much known in the U.S. They include Fanny Churberg, Albert Edelfelt, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Marja Helander, Eero Järnefelt, and Hugo Simberg. Together more than 50 scenes dating from the mid-19th century through today reveal how Finnish landscapists have helped form their young country’s sense of itself. The terrain represented spans 800 miles, from the Baltic coast heading north to the Arctic Ocean, even encompassing works related to the nomadic Sámi people.
This project has been co-curated by NNM deputy director Leslie Anderson with Hanne Selkokari and Anu Utriainen of the Ateneum.
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Through October 31, 2021, the National Gallery (London) will reunite five views of the fortress of Königstein for the first time in 250 years. These were painted by Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780) at the peak of his career, when he was court painter in Dresden.
Once overlooked in favour of his more famous uncle and master Canaletto, with whom he trained in Venice, Bellotto is today recognised as one of the most distinctive artistic personalities of his age. This Room 1 exhibition will shine a spotlight on the National Gallery’s 2017 acquisition, “The Fortress of Königstein from the North” (1756-8) – the first 18th-century German view to enter the Collection.
August III (1696–1763), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, commissioned these five paintings in about 1756 as part of a larger series of thirty views of Dresden and its surroundings. Bellotto received payment for the pictures in 1758 and, although completed, they were almost certainly never delivered to the elector due to the escalation of the Seven Years’ War. All five views were probably imported into Britain during Bellotto’s own lifetime and, until 1991, were to be found in three different British collections.
Today, “The Fortress of Königstein from the South” is in The Derby Collection, Knowsley Hall, Merseyside (the collection from which the National Gallery’s own view of the fortress also came), “Fortress of Königstein from the North-West” is in The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, and both “The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Brunnenhaus” and “The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Magdalenenburg” are in Manchester Art Gallery.
The fortress of Königstein, which is situated approximately 25 miles south-east of Dresden, appears largely unchanged from Bellotto’s own time. The five paintings – each of them 2 ½ metres wide – show the ancient fortress from outside its walls as well as from within. Bellotto succeeds in capturing both the drama and detail of this commanding site. Stand back and you can see the sharp, angular forms of the fortress but look closely and you can make out the crumbling stone walls, tiny soldiers on the ramparts and women hanging washing in the courtyard.
Applying what he had learnt in Venice to highly original panoramic depictions of northern Europe, Bellotto took the tradition of view painting in an entirely new direction. The works all demonstrate his outstanding technique and innovative approach to painting views, including the use of a camera obscura – the precursor of modern cameras – that helped Bellotto plan his compositions in minute detail.
Visitors to this Room 1 exhibition will be encouraged to take part in a dynamic viewing experience of the five paintings, moving from one monumental view to the next, as if moving around the site of the fortress itself, and will be able to appreciate the contrast between the fortress’s forbidding walls and the pastoral calm of its surroundings, with the hustle and bustle of everyday life on the inside, as seen in the courtyard views.
The exhibition is curated by Letizia Treves, the National Gallery James and Sarah Sassoon Curator of Later Italian, Spanish, and French 17th-century Paintings. She says: “In 2017 the National Gallery was finally able to acquire a painting that shows Bellotto’s exceptional skill and originality as a view painter. Since then, I have dreamt of reuniting his five views of the fortress of Königstein which, in their magnificence and grand scale, rightfully point to Bellotto being among the greatest view painters of his age.”
After London, a version of the exhibition will travel to Manchester Art Gallery, November 20, 2021 – February 27, 2022.
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Oil Paintings by Walt Gonske: “My best work comes when I’m able to give up control … Then the painting takes on a life of its own.”
BY KELLY COMPTON
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Walt Gonske grew up in Irvington nearby. After three years of art school in Newark, he worked for advertising agencies in New Jersey before another three years of study, this time in Manhattan with the legendary painter-illustrator-muralist Frank J. Reilly (1906–1967). Reilly advised his pupils not to expect to make a living as fine artists until, in his words, “you have a few gray hairs.”
Rather, he suggested they become illustrators to keep their skills sharp, so Gonske duly began freelancing in men’s fashion advertising in 1967. He recalls picking up garments at the agency or store one day and delivering his illustrations of them the next morning. This may not have been “high” art, but it was, in Gonske’s view, “a good experience of working under pressure.”
In 1971, Gonske visited his sister in Taos and promptly fell in love with New Mexico: “Having grown up in New Jersey,” he recalls, “I was fascinated by the quality of light at 7,000 feet.” He was also surprised that galleries in Santa Fe and Taos were selling so much representational art — something nearly impossible to find back in Manhattan. (Traditional modes never fully disappeared in the American West, fortunately.)
“I thought about how wonderful it might be to live in Taos and paint landscapes, maybe even sell some,” Gonske recalls. In Taos he took photos of the spectacular scenery all around, brought them back to New York, and painted watercolors from them. His sister found an Albuquerque gallery willing to accept them on consignment, and soon “I received a check for $66.67, my two-thirds share from the sale of a full sheet watercolor. Hot damn! A fine art check: that was all it took. I said, ‘I’m out of here!’” The timing was fortuitous, as fashion illustration was rapidly being replaced by photography.
So, early in 1972, when he was 29, Gonske moved to New Mexico, and began the new life he still leads today. At first, he was not prepared for the slower pace: When an Albuquerque gallery wanted him to mount a solo show, “I assumed the owner would want 30 works by the end of the week.” Happily, he had much longer to create them. Gonske continued to paint watercolors from photos, which sold very well, but in 1974 he shifted to oils, refusing to supply his (suddenly unhappy) galleries with more watercolors. This was a difficult phase, but he survived it.
Gonske’s first oil paintings were made in the studio, but at some point he got a French easel and began working outdoors. “In 1985,” he says, “I bought a van with an extended fiberglass top that allowed me to stand inside and paint out one of the three opened windows. After making that first painting, I remember thinking, ‘This is terrific. I’m out of the wind, rain, and snow, my eyes are protected from the sun’s glare, and nobody bothers me.’” Gonske is now on his fourth “paintmobile,” in which he creates both studies and larger, finished canvases.
FEELING INTO PAINT
When admiring Gonske’s oil paintings, many viewers struggle to describe what they see, or who his work reminds them of. It is brilliantly colored, highly expressive plein air imagery, of course, yet there’s something faintly recognizable about the handling — not derivative at all, just somehow connected to the past.
The answer eventually becomes clear — Nicolai Fechin (1881–1955), the great Russian-born painter who lived in Taos during the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1966 Reilly had sent Gonske and other students to see a Fechin show in New York, an experience that made a powerful impression on the young man.
That visit occurred six years before Gonske settled in Taos, where the Russian’s home and studio are now the Taos Art Museum.
About his technique, Gonske muses, “I went to art school to learn the rules of drawing and painting. After many years of developing skills and acquiring knowledge, I know what I will get as a finished product if I control the process. What I don’t know is where it will lead if I give up control. Now the idea is just the first impulse. From then onward, improvisation takes over.
“The end result is not about that first idea, but instead a record of all those impulses along the way. Each stroke of paint carries emotion and power. I work in a loose, painterly style in part because I want the viewer to see the process and not hide it behind ‘finish’ —for the viewer to maybe even feel how a particular piece of paint was put down. My goal is not to show what I know, but what I feel.
“The more intensely I can express emotion through paint about the subject, the more likely the viewer will respond. My best work comes when I’m able to give up control, to trust my impulses. Then the painting takes on a life of its own.”
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“How do they do that?” Enjoy a behind-the-scenes look into how the process of creating art, including the “unfinished” pieces, becomes the finished work for this portrait / figure painter.
BY JOHN WENTZ
At some point I realized I have always had a preconceived idea of how I wanted a painting to look. Even before I bought or stretched the canvas, I knew what I was trying to achieve with the finished result. Sketches were really just for placement and values. None of the linear elements, or the graphite medium for that matter, would make it into the painting. It was just shorthand. After all, it was how I was taught and what I thought painting was.
In school, we were taught by copying the old masters and appropriating the new ones. By this method, you were painting with an end game in mind. This, of course, is by no means easy, but the process involved is really just the road to getting somewhere. This was fine for awhile, but in time I began to feel that my experience in painting was lacking something.
One day, feeling unsatisfied with my work, I turned to an old sketchbook. On the first page I read some words I had jotted down: “Style is embedded in process.” This was a quote from Chuck Close that I had completely forgotten about, and it couldn’t have found its way back into my life at a better moment. It wasn’t that I was looking for a style, but I realized that maybe I was putting the cart before the horse. Maybe it would be interesting to focus only on process and see where the painting went.
With this shift, I found myself looking only at abstract art. Non-objective and Abstract Expressionist artists can be very process oriented and experimental with their tools and mediums. Their works are treasure troves of inspiration in mark-making vocabulary for us representational artists.
I quickly became obsessed with my materials and their possibilities in a way I never had before. Standard brushes were set aside for more unconventional tools. I even began working with paintings on the ground as opposed to on an easel. At first, it was a total disaster. However, I experienced something I hadn’t in a long time: fun, and a sense of exploration and discovery.
I began with portraits and went in with the idea of economy. I wanted to use as little as possible to get a result. I limited my palette to primaries and some earth tones and only allowed myself two brushes and a palette knife. With limited choices, I found that each step in the process was creative exploration and problem solving.
I started with my familiar approach, toning the canvas an earth tone, but tried adding textures to make just that one stage interesting. I dropped medium onto the wet surface of umbers and siennas as little pools of splotches appeared, making the canvas look like a topographic map. Because these initial layers were transparent paint, my preliminary drawing and compositional grids showed through like a ghostly blueprint.
This stage alone began to look like an interesting abstract painting, with each step of the process adding depth and design. As I began painting the figure, I found that I wasn’t as much concerned with the model and likeness as I was about enjoying the interplay between the opacity of this new layer and the transparency of the first layer. In this sense, it became very abstract—the process and the materials predicated every decision I was making, rather than the end game of depicting a human in paint. Because of this, it didn’t seem necessary to paint the model in her entirety. In fact, it seemed more interesting to leave features out or to abstract them.
This was a matter of repeatedly stepping back to judge all of the information as a whole, taking into account all of the formal qualities of balance, value pattern, focal point, etc. The composition grew and evolved with each new mark and passage.
I later came to believe that leaving information out, unfinished or abstracted, invites the viewer to participate in the image, just as simplifying does. But also disclosing less information allows the viewer to project themselves onto the picture, in some sense making them “vulnerable” and open to experience something more personal and emotional.
As I continued painting, the process evolved into this routine of establish, lose, re-establish. In continuing to measure, I found myself needing a line from the compositional grid, so I would “redraw” with a palette knife. This resulted in a few sharp lines like notes on a staff paper, which added to the picture in some way that I knew I just liked. It was later that I realized what I enjoy is to have the history of the process as the final image, with each mark having a purpose or intention.
After experimenting with painting the head, I found that I really wanted to work with more of the figure, especially multi-figure. People in groups have always fascinated me both psychologically and as form. I thought the cluster of shapes would lend itself to interesting compositions with this process and allow for more experimentation with materials and paint application.
The experience with multiple figures was quite a challenge, but the process was much the same. So I tried to play around again. This time for the initial layers, I tried using a variety of colors. I had many tubes of paint that I had never used so I thought, why not? Fully saturated blues and greens found their way in with the umbers and siennas.
I worked first with some small studies, a palette knife and a house painting brush. I enjoyed the look of this stage so much I couldn’t bring myself to paint over the figures. Instead, I just painted the background in heavy impasto layers of gray-greens, which contrasted nicely with the transparent negative shapes of clustered figures weaving in and out of each other on the city streets. It seemed to reflect the feeling of losing one’s identity amongst a big crowd in a city. We are no longer the individual, but just a part of a group. This led to a series of paintings I titled “Abstractions.”
Since the “Abstractions” were small—12 x 12 inches—I decided to see how this would translate to larger pieces. 40”x40” seemed like a good starting place. With the variety of colors in the toning stage, standard flesh tones didn’t seem to work as well on this larger scale. Again, in the spirit of simplification, I limited my palette to a cool blue-black. The warm undertone had a very appealing contrast against the cool foreground of figures.
It also had this quality of “illumination” that I really liked. Still, the idea of color in the figures still appealed to me, so I switched the first layers back to earth tones and let the process grow from there. This built into a series of works I called “Passages.” Here are some examples:
At the same time, I was taking this new approach of toning in saturated color back to portraits. The intimacy and quietness of portraiture has always appealed to me. But what’s really interesting to me about a portrait is that not only is it a portrait of a person, but also a portrait of an emotion, so to speak. There’s something about the modesty of a solitary person that can be very powerful.
Due to the variety of colors and their strengths in the initial toning stage, it was still difficult to see my preliminary graphite drawing. Instead of redrawing with a paintbrush, I decided to use a palette knife and pure black. The harsh, razor-sharp lines were fascinating and abrupt. It felt more like sculpting than drawing. I then tried using oil pastels to find quick gestures, which further evolved the process of establish, lose, re-establish—adding something new and interesting every time.
For the figure itself, I found my favorite brushes were brights. The rectangular strokes they left were harshly geometrical and a great contrast to the circular splotches in the undertone and the curvilinear liveliness of the gesture lines in oil pastel. If not applying with a brush, then passages were applied with the scraping of a palette knife, building thickness and texture. In building up the figure, I was more interested in the physicality of the paint and its tactile sensibility.
The fact that it was a person was almost secondary; a likeness, tertiary. The idea of how much detail or information to disclose was determined by the relationship of each stage to the other, building everything up like an abstract painting.
Each stage of the process became its own passage with line playing against tone, transparency against opacity, texture against smoothness and warm against cool. This led to another body of work: “Imprints.”
With each piece I really began to appreciate and trust pure process. It felt that in each stage there was an honest form of expression. In a sense it’s constructing rules for yourself. You create your own problems, and then find your own solutions. The process became part of the finished work; each stage left “unfinished” is a history of the process. Yet it all comes together in some sort of symphony of contrasts. And as finished pieces, I suppose there is a certain “style” that has been found, but that was almost incidental. At least, it wasn’t the goal. As the journey can be the destination, the process can be the art.
Learn more about John at: www.wentzart.net
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Fine Art Collection on Auction > Christie’s will offer “An Aesthetic Odyssey ~ The Peter Rose and Albert Gallichan Collection” in a live auction on September 30, 2021. The couple were pioneering collectors of 19th Century fine and decorative arts and this unique collection was a shared passion assembled over the course of a lifetime from the 1950s onwards.
More from Christie’s about the Art Collection:
The sale comprises approximately 300 lots of British decorative arts and paintings spanning the major movements of the later 19th century. Highly regarded and recognised as academically important, a number of bequests of both decorative and fine arts from the collection have been accepted by museums including The British Museum and The Ashmolean.
This sale provides the market with a unique microcosm of the best of the period. Albert Gallichan died in 2001; the sale takes place now following the death of Peter Rose last year at the age of ninety-three.
Ensuring that the scholarly legacy of their life’s work lives on, the proceeds from the sale – which is expected to realise in excess of £1 million, with estimates starting from £500 – will benefit The Albert Dawson Educational Trust. Established in 2003, using the middle names of the two collectors for its title, the trust promotes and supports the study of 19th century English fine and decorative arts. The increased resources raised will be used to develop a more substantial programme of grants and to enable the trust to offer other support from 2022.
For more information on the art collection sale, including the e-catalogue when it is live, please visit
www.christies.com/aesthetic-odyssey.
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Oil Paintings On View > Award-winning painter Rebecca Leer’s upcoming show “Ascent: A Perspective on Loss to Transformation” is the culmination of over 15 years and 60 pieces of still lifes, landscapes and seascapes.
The exhibit encapsulates Leer’s journey following the passing of Rob Kelley, the man with whom she had spent 24 years building a life. From the shock of learning of her husband’s pancreatic cancer to the acceptance that the illness had taken his life, Leer’s art explores how grief and loss can transform us.
“One of the hardest things about a loss is not only the event itself, but the loss of all that could have been,” Leer says. “As I was going through all of his belongings, some items were painfully meaningful while others were more incidental characters in a man’s life. Painting these works provided me a portal to healing; I could feel beyond what was directly in front of me to the sacred.”
Leer’s new exhibit, “Ascent – A Perspective on Loss to Transformation,” runs through September 29, 2021 at the Ridgewood Art Institute (New Jersey). The exhibition will raise funds for Lustgarten Foundation, the largest private funder of pancreatic cancer research.
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Blue Scarf II
By Amy Werntz
Oil, 2020
16 x 12 inches
$5,200
Amy Werntz is obsessed with time, of the fear of its passing to the feeling of not living in the correct moment. This passion plays out in her art, explored through translated vintage black and white photographs that bring forward the past to her current work, which seeks to capture the seemingly insignificant moments of everyday life. Her meticulously crafted and highly realistic figures are isolated from the environment, they are the only story and their features, gestures, and clothing and props offer the only cues to narrative. Wernzt leaves the viewer to fill in the details from their own life experience, to create a story from their history and perhaps to see the importance of every life in a society often too fascinated with the lure of youth.
Blue Scarf II is a stunningly rendered image of a woman struggling with the everyday tasks of life. This is a woman we know, the weight of years heavy on her frame. With her body and head shrouded in coat and scarf, her hands are left to communicate on her behalf. Wrapped in a struggle with a plastic bag, her hands are gorgeously and painstakingly detailed, bent and discolored by age with the veins and swollen joints clearly evident. Sympathetic and emphatic, this image reminds us of the passing of time and frailty and resilience of life.
Werntz is a practicing painter and interior designer, with a BFA in interior design from the Art Institute of Dallas, Texas. Her paintings have been exhibited widely in Texas and in group shows in Wausau, Wisconsin and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She has received recognition and numerous awards for her portraits from the Portrait Society of America and took first place in the Richeson 75 International Art Competition Portrait/Figure category in 2020.
You can find more information about the artist and her work at www.amywerntz.com or on Instagram @amywerntz_art.
How did you get started and then develop your career?
Chantel Barber: I started drawing at an early age and was mentored by a local San Diego artist when I was eleven. My mentor, who must have been in her seventies, introduced me to a world I had never known. I began subscribing to art magazines and buying art books. She taught me to paint in oil, and she encouraged the desire I already had in me, to paint people.
I continued to study and experiment with art in and out of college while living in such diverse places as Newport, Rhode Island, Keflavik, Iceland, and El Paso, Texas. While enrolled in a college art course, a fellow student introduced me to acrylic paints, and I soon fell in love with the medium but found it to be dominated by abstract styles. My first love was portraiture for which I found little advice. In perfecting my skills as an acrylic portrait artist, I continued to learn from professional oil painters and translated their teachings into acrylic techniques.
In 2006, I opened my professional art business in Bartlett, Tennessee. For the past 15 years I have continued to benefit from workshops and demonstrations with outstanding artists including Dawn Whitelaw, Rose Frantzen, and Marc Hanson. I work daily on commissions and create for my collectors. Periodically, I teach private workshops in my studio and throughout the United States and Canada.
How do you describe success?
There is a story about the explorer Ernest Shackleton, who placed an ad in the newspaper to recruit men for his Endurance expedition. It read as follows:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.”
I think this statement metaphorically describes the life of a professional artist, especially if the artist desires to create art that captures the human spirit in a non-traditional medium, like acrylic. Every artist’s journey is different. Some may achieve honor and recognition early. But this may rob them of adventure and growth that happens when the journey is hazardous and difficult.
I’ve learned that too much safety can mean stagnation. Danger stretches the heart and builds maturity and character through the times of rejection. To be a success, an artist must survive. Failures faced make successes all the sweeter! And success for me is growing stronger all the while creating work that enriches my life as well as others.
How do you find inspiration?
Observing people. Everywhere I go I am inspired by people around me. When I went to the Grand Canyon, I was more interested in the people than the view. I can’t help it.
Who do you collect?
So far, I have paintings by Olga Krimon, Dawn Whitelaw, Kevin Beilfuss, David Boyd Jr, Johanna Spinks, Jenny Buckner, Rose Frantzen, Kelli Folsom, Elena Katsyura, Adam Clague, Susan Hotard, Suzie Baker, Anne Blair Brown, Kyle Buckland, and Kim VanDerHoek. Collecting art enriches my life! These paintings bring beauty and inspiration, and they improve my own work because I am always studying and learning from them.
To see more of Chantel’s work, visit: www.chantellynnbarber.com
As part of our effort to continue to help artists and art galleries thrive, we’re proud to bring you this week’s “Virtual Gallery Walk.” Browse the artwork below and click the image itself to learn more about it, including how to contact the gallery.
Want to see your gallery featured in an upcoming Virtual Gallery Walk? Contact us at [email protected] to advertise today. Don’t delay, as spaces are first come, first served, and availability is limited.
