July 29 marks a special day in the world of maritime art as this lavish new space opens its doors for the first time with a whiskey and wine reception.

Newport, Rhode Island, will soon be home to an outstanding new gallery exclusively dedicated to maritime art. On July 29 from 5 to 8 p.m., Mariner Gallery will host its grand opening with a whiskey and wine reception. Father-and-son duo Andre and Peter Arguimbau have spent over two years refitting, restoring, and conserving a pre-1780 Colonial home into a lovely space for art display. “The gallery’s ambitious program will host events and exhibitions throughout the year,” according to the press materials. “Our leading artists, Richard Loud, Russ Kramer, David Monteiro, and Peter Layne Arguimbau, hang alongside 19th-century fine art depicting historical and modern sailing events and seascapes in a traditional style.

“In addition to restoring the post-and-beam construction and wide plank floors of the main gallery, Andre, a captain himself, built a lower deck of solid oak named the USS Constellation Room. The room is constructed in honor of the second warship built for the U.S. Navy. The room will also serve as home to the Maritime League of the Arts. A Summer Party will christen the hull August 26, from 6 to 10 p.m. Richard Thursby, a lifetime sailor and student of maritime history, has been appointed director.”

To learn more, visit Mariner Gallery.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Such a shame it was that Leonardo da Vinci’s Milanese masterpiece “The Last Supper” began chipping and deteriorating even before the artist died in 1519 due to an experimental fresco formula. However, a recent discovery has led two authors to publish a book that has heads turning and minds changing. On what?

Although no one disputes the genius of Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci, few realize exactly how poor a condition his Milanese masterpiece “The Last Supper” is actually in. In fact, only about 20 percent of the original fresco remains, which has led scholars to one simple conclusion: We really have a minimal conception of what the original painting looked like.

Two authors, however, have suggested in a new book that an extraordinary discovery — a life-sized canvas of “The Last Supper” discovered in a remote Belgian monastery — was by the hand of Leonardo and his studio, thus giving scholars the clearest picture of the fresco as it would have appeared upon completion.

Co-authored by Professor Jean-Pierre Isbouts and connoisseur Christopher Heath Brown, Young Leonardo: The Evolution of a Revolutionary Artist, 1472-1499 forwards a heap of evidence to suggest the above theory is indeed fact. Among the topics considered in the book are how the authors discovered that Leonardo and his workshop painted a second “Last Supper,” a life-size version on canvas, just seven years after the original fresco was completed; how the canvas still shows “The Last Supper” in all of its brilliant hues and tones; and how the canvas was discovered to have been commissioned by the French King, Louis XII, explaining Leonardo’s personal involvement with the project.

Regardless of where you fall on the argument, the book should be a fascinating read. To learn more, visit here.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

The Figurative Art Convention & Expo (FACE), along with the Representational Art Conference, has put out a call for ideas and scholarship. Think you fit the mold? Details here.

Via Michael Pearce (The Representational Art Conference):

Join our distinguished speakers Donald Kuspit and Stephen Hicks in sharing important ideas about the present and future of representational art.

Submit a paper to the Representational Art Conference at the Figurative Art Convention & Expo.

For details and to submit an abstract, please visit our website; second wave abstract submissions due August 12, 2017.

TRAC2017 is specifically interested in papers about the human figure in 21st-century representational art. What does it say about our current condition? What ideals of the self does it seek to express? How does it relate to the history of figurative art? What does it tell us about our current social reality? Does the artist have a new role? What cross-cultural themes will dominate 21st-century figurative art?

We invite paper proposals from academic writers and working artists.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

• New 21st-century figurative sculpture, painting, drawing
• Idealization of the masculine and feminine in 21st-century figurative art
• Magical realism in new American art
• How does the 21st-century figure differ from that of previous centuries?
• Why the figure? Why now?
• Figure to ground — the human figure in the landscape in 21st-century art
• Bo Bartlett
• Antonio López García
• Gottfried Helnwein
• 21st-century figurative art in museum collections
• Exploitation versus celebration of the erotic in 21st-century representational art
• Emotional rescue — the therapeutic role of figurative art
• What is the future of the kitsch figure?
• The meta-narrative of the 21st-century figure
• The discombobulated figure — when is a figure not a figure?
• Interpreting the Crystal Bridges collection
• George Lucas and the Museum of Narrative Art
• Graphic novels as fine art?
• Selfies, portraits, and self-knowledge — the self in 21st-century figurative art
• Censoring the 21st-century figure

The Representational Art Conference provides a platform for discussion. It does not aspire to establish a single monolithic aesthetic for representational art, but to identify commonalities, to help to understand its unique possibilities, and perhaps provide some illumination about future directions. The conference is planned as a focused but non-doctrinaire event of serious academic standards. Papers of high quality on a variety of topics in the aesthetics of contemporary representational art are invited and welcomed.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Death. It can be a frightening concept for some, a liberating one for others. The Egyptians were consumed by it, and most of their art and architecture that survives was in service of death. A fascinating new exhibition in Maine that delves into mortality — and morality — in Renaissance Europe may shake you to your core.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, recently unveiled a chilling but beautiful exhibition of nearly 70 objects from major North American and European museums titled “The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe.” Curated by the college’s Peter M. Small Associate Professor of Art History, Stephen Perkinson, the show reveals how “in an increasingly complex and uncertain world, Renaissance artists sought to address the critical human concern of acknowledging death while striving to create a personal legacy that might outlast it,” the museum writes. “[The exhibition] brings together exceptional examples of ‘memento mori,’ a genre of artistic and literary imagery that emerged in the early Renaissance to remind viewers of their inevitable death, to question how art historians have conventionally interpreted these objects and to propose new ways of considering their significance.

“‘The Ivory Mirror’ will bring together nearly seventy exquisite artworks, many of which have never been seen before in North America, from European and American institutions — among them the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Huntington Library in San Marino. New scholarship across the humanities features critical new discoveries, such as the attribution of several ivories, of previously uncertain authorship, to Chicart Bailly, a prosperous ivory carver active in Paris from at least the 1490s until 1533. The precious objects included in the exhibition — from ivory prayer beads and gem-encrusted jewelry to exquisitely carved small table sculptures — draw attention in spectacular fashion to the depictions of death, dying, and decay that proliferated in popular culture between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, when mortality rates were perilously high. The appeal of objects featuring macabre imagery urging us to ‘remember death’ — and, by implication, to consider how best to take advantage of our time on earth — reached the apex of its popularity around 1500, when artists treated the theme in innovative and compelling ways.”

The show, which opened on June 24, will continue through November 26. To learn more, visit here.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

A lighthearted and fun project via the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) that creatively uses cellphones and emojis has recently gone viral. Will you give it a try?

Whether you’re happy, sad, confused, angry, or a robot, texting emojis to the SFMOMA will get you art in return. Over the past few weeks, the museum has begun a project in which the public can text the number 57251 with the words “send me” followed by a word or emoji. The result? The museum will send you a related photo of an artwork in its world-class collection.

It’s easy, free, and requires no downloads, which has turned the small project into a viral hit in the digital world. Melena Ryzik of the New York Times reports, “The project, ‘Send Me SFMOMA,’ has been an ingenious, playful way to inject some rarefied culture into an everyday habit. And for art lovers, it has unearthed some unexpected artworks, long hidden in storage, along the way.

“Begun quietly last month, the project has become a viral hit, with over 2 million text messages delivered since Sunday alone,” said Keir Winesmith, head of web and digital platforms for SFMOMA. (The service is free.)

“It’s far more popular than the museum ever imagined, with people indulging in a long back-and-forth, binge texting. And it’s also revealed something surprising about its users — about how, and when, they want to interact with art, and how much they crave a personal connection with cultural authority.”

Among the top searches include “sad” and “inspiration,” but the potential is near limitless. To learn more, visit the New York Times.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

If you did not have a chance to see the outstanding new works by Kent Monkman this spring in New York City, a new opportunity waits in Santa Fe. Will you rendezvous with him?

Peters Projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 7 opened “The Rendezvous” — a solo exhibition of new works by talented painter Kent Monkman. On view through September 2, “these works are inspired by an actual time in the history of North America,” the gallery writes, “during which spring gatherings in the wilderness areas of the early to mid-nineteenth century Rocky Mountains was a period of utopia and non-violence.

“Beyond the frontier of European settlement, indigenous nations, mountain men and trappers assembled to trade goods for furs, and enjoy some revelry. These were often wild and boisterous events lasting for weeks that followed many months of isolation and deprivation during the winter. The revelers mated, fought, gambled, danced, drank to excess, and competed in various athletic competitions and games. Monkman is inspired by the style of nineteenth century western artist Alfred Jacob Miller, who attended one of these events and made drawings and paintings to document what he described as a saturnalia.”

Heavily populated with several figures in diverse costumes, Monkman’s paintings read like a well-composed onstage performance. Saturated color and strong light also aid in the sense of drama and activity in the pictures. Continuing, the gallery says, “This series of paintings features dynamic scenes of indigenous peoples, mountain men, and trappers in various scenes of revelry and interaction. The compositions draw inspiration from classical paintings such as bacchanal scenes and lamentation scenes, but gender and sexual identities are deliberately ambiguous to complicate the expected reading of this historical subject matter. As the world struggles to come to terms with new transgender identities and gender variations, the artist uses the allegory of the freedom of the American frontier to situate transgender and gender nonconformity at the edge of societal norms.”

https://vimeo.com/222862216

To learn more, visit Peters Projects.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

World-renowned master painter David A Leffel will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award and present an onstage demonstration in 2018. Details here!

David A Leffel will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award and present a demonstration during the opening ceremonies of the 7th Annual Plein Air Contention & Expo (PACE), to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 16-20, 2018. PACE is the largest gathering of landscape and plein air artists in the world. The award will be presented by PleinAir Publisher B. Eric Rhoads.

Leffel was born in Brooklyn in 1931, and as a young child spent years in hospitals battling a bone disease. He used this time to hone his drawing abilities, developing a passion for art. This eventually led him to enroll in Parsons School of Design, as well as Fordham University. At the Art Students League of New York, he flourished under the artist and instructor Frank Mason and ultimately taught there himself for 25 years.

In 1992 Leffel and his partner, the renowned painter Sherrie A. McGraw, moved to Taos, where their studios overlook the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Well-known to art students worldwide through his bestselling books and videos, Leffel conducts workshops throughout the country.

To learn more, visit the PleinAir Convention & Expo.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

In this occasional series, Fine Art Today delves into the world of portraiture, highlighting historical and contemporary examples of superb quality and skill. This week: Michelangelo Caravaggio, “The Betrayal.”

We know what you’re thinking. How can Michelangelo Caravaggio’s 1602 narrative masterpiece “The Betrayal” be featured as this week’s portraiture highlight? Indeed, Caravaggio produced little portraiture and even fewer self-portraits throughout his vexing career and life. The 1602 canvas — which today is housed in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin — comes into play with the artist’s seemingly remarkable and complex use of embedded self-portraiture.

In contrast to autonomous self-portraiture (i.e., the artist presenting himself or herself as a singular subject), embedded self-portraits are only part of a much larger context, which in many cases is a narrative whose primary subject is the story. “The Betrayal” has been a source of great allure and mystery for scholars in light of a possible embedded self-portrait in addition to Caravaggio’s surprising non-violent approach to — and involvement in — the subject.

“The Betrayal” is one of the artist’s most dramatic and compelling scenes, with figures painted in three-quarter length, forced so close to the picture plane that his viewers must have felt their presence. Seven men are included in the painting. To the left, a beardless youth in red and green flees the scene with arms raised as his robe flows in an arch over the heads of Christ and Judas. Christ somberly leans toward the left and gazes down, hands extended in front, still clasped in prayer. Continuing toward the right, Judas and an armored soldier grasp Christ’s right shoulder, their arms forming a complementing arch to the fleeing youth’s robe, framing the heads of Christ and Judas. Two other soldiers and a figure complete the right half of the painting.

Along the right edge of the canvas, the bearded figure peering into the scene has been identified as Caravaggio himself. This figure bears a lantern, providing an artificial point of illumination. Caravaggio appears — to some — to occupy a position of moral neutrality in this scene. Looking on with an expression of curiosity, if not wonderment, Caravaggio appears to place himself as a bystander rather than a soldier tasked with arresting Christ.

Scholars have also noted the visual “pairing” between the figure identified as Caravaggio and the fleeing youth (commonly identified as Saint John the Evangelist) along the left edge of the canvas. Consider: The two figures frame the scene, with one exiting as the other enters; one sees the principal action as the other turns away and does not see; one seeks to get away while the other seeks to get close and illuminate Christ. Considering the pose and treatment, both raise their right arms and have brightly illuminated faces.

Renowned scholar Michael Fried suggested, “It is as though the ‘Betrayal’ at once represents a particular instant in the biblical narrative and evokes a multiplicity of relationships that redirect our attention away from the events in the Garden of Gethsemane toward a very different ‘narrative,’ not declarable in any straightforward way, of the painting’s production.”

If granted, it does appear as though Caravaggio’s embedded self-portrait within “The Betrayal” has a range of interpretive possibility, including theories surrounding the artist’s own spirituality and philosophy of art.

We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Learn more about this magnificent Baroque masterpiece by visiting the National Gallery of Ireland.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Quietly working in her studio along the shores of the Mississippi River, artist Judith Bergerson continues to achieve profound joy by exploring the ways abstraction and representation can move the soul.

There is something calming and fulfilling when one gazes upon the beautiful multi-media works by Judith Bergerson, a feeling the artist shares during her intuitive creative process. “Often I have little idea of how a painting is going to turn out when I begin,” she says. “I love for the work to reveal itself, to evolve organically as it comes into being. I continuously play with different texture, shape, and line arrangements and compositions until I know where the work wants to go.” For Bergerson, it is precisely this process of give-and-take and visual problem met with design solution that gives her the utmost creative pleasure and serenity.

A Minnesota native, Bergerson has always been interested and fascinated by art. “I can distinctly remember when I was a little girl seeing this amazing painting by Lyonel Feininger at the institute [Minneapolis Institute of Arts], she says. “I recall loving how these tall buildings and forms would meld and interact with strong angular lines and planes of color. His inspiration really surfaces in my work.” Although she and her husband, Mark, would eventually own a custom framing business for over 30 years, Judith never lost her desire to create. Bergerson received her BFA from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, but has additionally studied at institutions all across the United States, including the California College of Arts and Crafts and the C.W. Post College of Long Island University.

Although Bergerson draws upon Feininger’s precedent, her artworks go much further, exploring the juxtaposition between representation and abstraction, each having an amazing process characterized by the methodical layering of acrylic paint, gesso, colored pencil, and found textures — among other elements. The resulting collages are exquisitely beautiful from a formal perspective, intertwining recognizable forms of trees and plants with abstract organic and geometric planes and shapes. “I enjoy that play between what is two-dimensional and three-dimensional, the oscillation between the transparent and opaque or a saturated color next to a muted tone,” says the artist.  Although she doesn’t keep count, some works could require as many as 50 layers of different media, or whatever the artist feels is necessary for a successful composition. Occasionally the design puzzle proves too much, in which case Bergerson sets the work aside and begins anew. She often has several pieces in process, the finishing touches and solutions sometimes coming quickly, while others take months, maybe years.

Asked what she hopes viewers take away from the works, Bergerson suggests, “That’s largely up to them. I want my audience to form their own relationships with the work, to bring their own subjective experiences to the piece and decide what the work means to them. I don’t necessarily want my interpretation of the piece to affect theirs. For me, that is one of the most beautiful elements of art.”

Bergerson’s “Evening Shadows” is an outstanding representative example. In a large vertical format, the viewer finds a wonderful arrangement of silhouetted trees of varying size and color that are layered and overlapped in a way to suggest spatial depth. One’s eyes play among what the brain interprets as foreground, middle, and background. Toward the bottom of the canvas, a group of birds stand perched on a strong horizontal line, a line that is repeated, moving up the center of the image. Quick consideration of the work offers the impression of pure abstraction, but closer and extended observation reveals representational forms. A common motif in Bergerson’s oeuvre can also be detected toward the upper right of the canvas, barely visible among the treetops: a perfect circle.

Future works will undoubtedly continue to play with a variety of media, but Bergerson says she’s looking forward to exploring drawing more in her works. “Rather than being paintings with drawing media and other collaged materials, I’m interested in exploring drawings with painting media,” she says. “Perhaps that could lead to more representation in my work — who knows?” Whatever they may be, she can rest assured that there will be many eagerly waiting and watching.

Bergerson is a signature member of the National Collage Society; her works can be found at Art Beat Gallery in Hayward, Wisconsin, Up North Gallery in Lindstrom, Minnesota, and Clay Bay Gallery in Door County, Wisconsin.

To learn more, visit Judith Bergerson.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.