“All Dressed in White”
Oil on panel
12 x 16 in.
Contact Roux & Cyr International Fine Art Gallery

www.rouxandcyrgallery.com

Leah Lopez is a devoted New York artist, painting between 4 to 12 hours a day. Her efforts are widely rewarded by the extraordinary oil paintings she produces. Often compared to the Dutch masters, Lopez brings emotion and sensitivity to the still life’s she creates. Working from her beautiful Union Square Studio, she delights us and captivates us with deep rich color and brightly lit objects that seem to emerge out of darkness.
 
“I’ve always been an explorer and a seeker, these experiences serve as inspiration for my paintings.”
 
Leah Lopez plays with light to lure her viewers into her delicate pieces. Her compositions dance the eye to explore every part of the artwork. Be it carefully rendered porcelain, brass, cloth, fruit or glass, a Lopez’s still life is unforgettable. Once drawn into her romantic spell, it is clear that her passion for color and value translate into an emotional creation that touches the soul.
 
Roux & Cyr International Fine Art Gallery
48 Free Street
Portland, ME 04101
 
207-576-7787
www.rouxandcyrgallery.com
[email protected]
www.leahlopez.com

The Fallbrook Art Center in California is hosting the 7th Annual Signature American Watermedia Exhibition February 7 through March 20.
 
The Fallbrook Art Center presents the 7th Annual “Signature American Watermedia Exhibition” featuring 90 paintings.   Selection & Awards Juror:  John Salminen, AWS-DF, NWS.  This show is presented with the Travel Exhibition from the 95th annual International National Watercolor Society Exhibition featuring 31 paintings.
 
To learn more, visit the Fallbrook Art Center.
 

Opening soon and on view through March 4 is a compelling retrospective exhibition for painter Laura Shechter.
 
Harmon-Meek Gallery in Naples, Florida, is overjoyed to be presenting painter Laura Shechter’s “Retrospective” exhibition this February. 
 
Speaking of her work, Shechter suggests, “I am a still life and cityscape painter and a contemporary realist. With in contemporary realism, I consider myself a perceptualist, which I define as being more concerned with usual vision than European painting conventions. I paint a moment of light with all if its visual contradictions. I have strong feelings about the objects in my still lifes. The relationships between my objects are formal but at times they have an implied narration. Although my approach tends to be linear and precise, I try to have a beautiful and sensual surface.
 
“My cityscapes, which are photo-based, also describe one moment of light. Many are organized into landscape space, parallel bands. The forms and space in these paintings are clear with decorative patterns, windows, trees…  I am also interested in graffiti.   I appreciate contemporary architecture, new or renovated that has incorporated rich intense color in their design
 
“My drawings are also closely observed with subtle tones built up in a single hatch technique.  Although my still lifes and cityscapes are different genres, they each borrow from the other. Some of my horizontal still lifes are like a skyline, while the spatial relationships in some cityscapes are more related to those of an interior.
 
“Some influences are northern Renaissance art, Indian Miniatures, and interacting with other contemporary realists. My work evolved during the feminist art movement and I have incorporated some of its ideas.  My teacher, Ad Rhinehardt,  {the father of minimalism} helped me evolve a philosophy of aesthetics. He was also a noted orientalist. I traveled around the world in 1966-67 and the 1970. This experience added complexity to my artwork which seems so rooted in western painting tradition, but also includes the aesthetics of the east, most notably India.”

To learn more, visit Harmon-Meek Gallery.
 

Acclaimed painter Juliette Aristides is an honoree during the 2016 Gage Collector’s Gala in Seattle.  Among the events include a lavish banquet and fine art sale.
 
To learn more, visit the 2016 Collector’s Gala.
 

Featured two weeks ago in Fine Art Today, Orazio Gentileschi’s “Danae” smashed the artist’s previous auction records. How much did it realize and who was the buyer? Find out here.
 
Sotheby’s expected vigorous bidding on January 28 when the radiant “Danaë” by Baroque master Orazio Gentileschi was made available — and they were right. With auction estimates between $25 million and $30 million, the picture was arguably one of the most significant paintings to head to auction in recent memory.
 
When the night was over, “Danaë” held the new world record for Gentileschi’s work at $30.5 million. The painting’s new home? The illustrious J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. The picture will add to an already world-class permanent collection at the Getty and is sure to draw robust crowds when on view. The painting displays a popular mythological subject, adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and represented by many of the period’s most accomplished painters, including Titian and Rembrandt. The beautiful Danaë is often represented as a reclining nude, locked away in a bronze tower. While her father attempts to keep her from mortal men, the lustful god Jupiter transforms himself into a shower of gold and impregnates her.
 
Gentileschi’s representation of the scene is nearly flawless and illustrates the painter’s mature period. A Mannerist early in his career, Gentileschi became very much inspired and influenced by the work of Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571-1610), whose dramatic, dark, and multi-figural compositions had taken Rome by storm in 1600. After Caravaggio’s untimely death in 1610, Gentileschi’s Mannerist roots began to resurface through his lighter palette and precision with detail, though the intense spotlighting and black backgrounds popularized by Caravaggio remained.
 
To learn more, visit the LA 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.
 

After extensive conservation and restoration at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the New York Historical Society’s masterful “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Ten Saints: Maestá” has returned and is on view.
 
Painted in 1334 by Taddeo Gaddi, “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Ten Saints: Maestá” is a masterpiece of 14th-century Gothic painting. The jewel-like panels were subjects of outstanding restoration and conservation efforts by the J. Paul Getty Museum over the past two years. The piece, which belongs to the New-York Historical Society, made its triumphant return on December 11, where it takes “pride of place in a small focus exhibition highlighting its conservation treatment,” as the society notes.
 
The NYHS adds, “With its lavish gold leaf background, Gaddi’s panel was an expensive commission for a private Florentine palazzo and for its time was cutting-edge art. Originally the central section of a folding triptych consisting of three panels, it will be exhibited with two wings (sportelli) from a private collection that recently have been linked to it. Their similar dates, measurements, traces of hinges, and related iconographies suggest that the trio may once have been part of the same triptych. At the very least, seen together they help us to envision and reconstruct how the ‘Maestà’ appeared in its original glory. Thomas Jefferson Bryan bequeathed the Gaddi panel to NYHS in 1867, along with his entire collection. Bryan was an early connoisseur of Italian ‘primitives,’ i.e., painters before Raphael, a taste then avant-garde. As New York City’s first museum, New-York Historical Society wrote an early chapter in preserving the culture of the City, and Bryan played a pioneering role in its collecting history, amassing works by both European and American artists. Fittingly, Gaddi’s painting will be displayed with a several other fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century Italian panels from the Bryan (both sacred and profane, such as a cassone front with the Triumph of Caesar) and Thomas Sully’s dashing portrait of the young Bryan. Other materials will illuminate this donor’s contribution to the history of American collecting.”
 
Gaddi’s “Maestá” will be on view through March 20. To learn more, visit the New York Historical Society.
 
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.
 

Historians and scholars are pleased to announce that a small painting — it spent decades in storage at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art — was indeed painted by Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch.
 
Monday was an important day in Dutch art history because the number of known surviving paintings by Hieronymus Bosch was increased by one. “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” — previously believed to have been painted by Bosch’s workshop — had sat in storage in Kansas City, Missouri, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, since 1930.
 
Over the past five years, a team of researchers has been implementing sophisticated infrared technology in an attempt to both identify and study Bosch’s works. The attribution was announced Monday at the Noordrabants Museum in Bosch’s hometown. In fact, the museum has made headlines recently for having brought together 20 of the artist’s 25 surviving works for a major retrospective opening next week.
 
To learn more, visit ArtDaily.
 
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.
 

On view now through May 22 are over 194 original watercolors from master Lars Lerin. Needless to say, the American Swedish Institute is overjoyed.
 
Works by contemporary Swedish master Lars Lerin are now on view at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Featuring over 40 large-scale masterpieces and 194 works in total, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of the artist’s exquisite skill, natural subjects, and more.
The institute suggests, “Lerin’s watercolors, with their masterly play of light, affect us almost like an invocation. His images stick in our memory despite their not displaying any oddities. Our gaze wanders across the details — house facades, trunks of birch trees, patches of snow, abandoned farms and industrial towns. His pictures range from the chill of the Lofoten islands to the heat of India, from the forests of his childhood in Sweden’s Värmland province to unexplored stretches of Iran. Near and far, nature and culture, brought together in one place. Widely celebrated in Nordic art world, ‘Watercolor Worlds’ is Lerin’s first North American exhibition in more than 30 years.”

To learn more, visit the American Swedish Institute.

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 late philanthropist Bruce Dayton — father of current Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton — left a vast array of his personal art collection to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Who are the household names included?
 
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts already boasts one of the nation’s top permanent collections of art from all periods and cultures. Its collection got another major boost when it was announced in late January that the institution had received numerous donations — a five-page roster, in fact — from the private collection of Bruce Dayton, who passed in November at age 97.

Among the artists included are household names: Rembrandt, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, and Pissarro. In addition to a robust Western collection, Dayton also left a host of Chinese earthenware dating back nearly 1,000 years. Minnesota Public Radio News reported, “Through more than seven decades as a MIA trustee, Bruce Dayton contributed 2,000 pieces to the state’s premier art institute. The 91 pieces being conveyed have been displayed throughout Dayton’s home in Wayzata. All but 13 will be given to MIA soon, with the rest remaining with his wife, Ruth Stricker, until she passes it along or her own death.”

Continuing, MNPR noted, “Dayton’s zeal for the arts was well-documented and his connection to MIA ran deep. He was recruited for the museum’s board in 1942 by Chinese art collector Alfred Pillsbury. Dayton acquired his own taste for Asian art, once telling MPR that he didn’t bother setting an annual budget for art spending because he figured he’d exceed it.”

To learn more, visit Minnesota Public Radio.

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