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.
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***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.
We’d like to congratulate Ned Mueller for winning Overall First Place in the May 2023 PleinAir Salon.
Born in Wisconsin and raised in Montana, Ned Mueller has been drawing and painting all of his life. He is one of the few artists that have been designated as a “Master Artist” by both the American Impressionist Society and the Oil Painters of America. He graduated from the prestigious Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles where he also taught drawing while still a student. His love for life and art is reflected in his superb paintings of a wide range of subjects including Portraits, Figures, Animals, and Landscapes, both studio and plein air.
Ned worked as an illustrator for 25 years while building a solid foundation of professionalism and has worked as a successful full-time artist since 1984. He continued to enhance his knowledge and skills by taking workshops with master artists Harley Brown, Richard Schmid, Bettina Steinke, Del Gish, and Sergei Bongart.
He has written several articles on painting for the Artists Magazine, is called upon to jury shows, and is a popular and enthusiastic workshop teacher around the country and abroad. He was a consultant for Walt Disney Imagineering where he did wonderful concept work for Animal Kingdom, Tokyo Disney Sea, California, and other projects.
He is a signature member of The Plein Air Painters of America, Portrait Society of America, The California Art Club, The Northwest Watercolor Society, Northwest Pastel Society (Distinguished Pastelist), Northwest Rendezous Society, Laguna Plein Air Painters, Puget Sound Group of Northwest Painters and the American Society of Marine Artists.
He exhibits his work in some of the finest shows and galleries in the country and has won numerous awards. He has been invited to participate in the Great American Artist Show, Artists of America Show, Plein Air Painters of America, Oil Painters of America, National Academy of Western Art, Knickerbocker Show, The Northwest Rendezvous Group, The California Art Club, The Salmagundi Club, Puget Sound Group of Northwest Artists, Pastel Society of America, American Society of Marine Artists and the Autry Western Masters Show. Ned has had two exhibitions and put together two group exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum and gave a demonstration and workshop at the Seattle Art Museum. He continues to challenge and improve his work on location and in the studio.
In the spirit of the French Salon created by the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, this annual online art competition, with 11 monthly cycles, leading to the annual Salon Grand Prize winners, is designed to stimulate artistic growth through competition. The competition rewards artists with $50,000 in cash prizes and exposure of their work, with the winning painting featured on the cover of PleinAir™ Magazine.
Winners in each monthly competition may receive recognition and exposure through PleinAir Magazine’s print magazine, e-newsletters, websites, and social media. Winners of each competition will also be entered into the annual competition. The Annual Awards will be presented live at the next Plein Air Convention & Expo.
The next round of the PleinAir Salon has begun so hurry, as this competition ends on the last day of the month. Enter your best art in the PleinAir Salon here.
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View more artist and collector profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.
How did you get started and then develop your career?
Ivan Pazlamatchev: It started with graduating from Art school in Sofia, Bulgaria. And as the Berlin wall crumbled, I left for Germany. Year and a half later, after two solo shows there, I moved to the US. Did a lot of different things in New York. Had solo shows and participated in group exhibitions in the US and Europe. Then I joined the local Scenic Artists Union and have been working on film and theater productions ever since. Splitting my time between my studio and the scenic shops. All of these experiences have had and still do impact my career as an artist.
How do you find inspiration?
Ivan Pazlamatchev: Curiosity is the foundation. From that position there are always things, external or from within, that would make me want to take a multi view approach at understanding them. Would invite me to interpret them for myself. In that process, visual ideas and decisions will start to take shape.
To see more of Ivan’s work, visit:
Instagram: @ivan_pazlamatchev_art
Nina Cobb Walker: Nina continues to paint the landscape looking for peace and tranquility in an effort to create a moment in time which may touch the soul of the viewer and connect with humanity.
Nina’s Mountainside Gallery is the perfect location to study and paint daily, sunrises and sunsets. These paintings, all sunrises, represent an ongoing study of light. All three painted from her studio view in El Paso, Texas on the East side of the Franklin Mountains.
To see more of Nina’s work, visit:
www.ninacobbwalker.com
www.catezane.com
Instagram
Facebook
Douglas Whittle: Token Creek, a small stream passing through a sedge meadow in central Dane County, Wisconsin, gives its name to the county park which it traverses just a mile or two from Douglas Whittle’s home. He makes many visits to the park to paint and photograph the changing seasons, and his series of Token Creek paintings will be exhibited in his upcoming solo show at the Monroe Arts Center, in Monroe, Wisconsin, in April 2024.
To see more of Douglas’ work, visit:
Website
Woodland Studios Gallery
George Davis Fine Art
Monroe Arts Center
From the Fine Art Connoisseur July/August 2023 Editor’s Note:
Embracing the Future, Carefully
Every day I seem to be reading another story about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential benefits and drawbacks. Despite stern warnings from the very people who pioneered this new technology, our society is moving full steam ahead, introducing programs like ChatGPT to the public at breakneck speed. Though I lean a little Luddite, I am not automatically opposed to the idea that a chatbot might save us time and brainspace by performing tasks we normally dread. The Internet itself, initially developed for military purposes, has proved a boon to humanity (with the downsides inherent to any technology), so why not AI? 
Setting aside the proliferation of — just for example — “deep fake” AI videos designed to mislead viewers, my chief worry for the field of fine art is one that has already existed there: deceptiveness. Years ago I noticed, at an art fair, that visitors were excitedly admiring an enormous oil painting with wonderfully expressive brushwork.
Upon closer inspection, I realized this was actually a photograph onto which the “artist” had applied masses of paint to make that underlying fact less obvious. Problem is, the dealer’s wall label did not mention anything about photography — it was simply an “oil on panel.”
I don’t know whether the painting sold, but the experience immediately reminded me of the phrase “buyer beware,” and that trickery has always been around. Indeed, one reason we publish Fine Art Connoisseur is to show readers the best art so that they can keep refining their aesthetic “eye”; I doubt our longtime readers would have taken the bait at that fair. They would have sensed something was amiss, that it was not an entirely handmade painting.
I relate this tale from the past because now we can fully expect AI technicians to start moving digitally created “artworks” onto the fine art market. Some distributors will acknowledge this heritage right up front, but less scrupulous ones may pretend the art is handmade. This is, obviously, a direct threat to the real-life artists who devote way more time than any software does to creating a genuine work of fine art.
But — and this is crucial — such deceptiveness will only be a threat to artists if potential buyers cannot tell the difference and do not ask sellers how these artworks came to exist. One of the many things I love about looking at art is learning the story of the person who made it. I know I will be amused the first time I encounter an AI-created work (properly labeled!) and learn from its seller about the software that was used; surely I will feel a touch of wonder, but then — within minutes — the boredom will set in.
That software (or app, or program) does not have a human being’s backstory: it did not grow up drawing on the living room walls, it did not drop out of art school, it did not suffer a trauma and then discover it could paint the pain away. “This artwork was made by AI” will be where the dealer’s pitch starts and ends. Boring.
So here is the challenge I assign you today, dear reader. When you are moving through a gallery or fair or festival, do not hesitate to ask the seller about the artist who made the work you admire. First, it will be genuinely interesting to learn who that person is. Second, you will implicitly be putting the seller on notice that you are really looking and listening. Third, sellers will be entering fresh legal territory if they lie to you about who or what made the art. (Please see Daniel Grant’s comprehensive article on page 107 in our July/August issue about the legal rights a buyer has when the seller has been misleading.) The more sellers have to talk, the more power you as the viewer-customer accrue, and the more uncomfortable the unethical sellers will become.
My prediction, then? AI-generated artworks will sell best online, where the buyer sees only the flat, digitized image and cannot inspect the surface closely. That’s also the setting where sellers don’t have to say much — the encounter is transactional, and that’s just the way unethical sellers want it.
I do not mean, for a minute, that we should not be buying art online; if it’s a reputable dealer or artist offering works online, go for it, just as you already have. But, let your “buyer beware” kick in when unfamiliar names and images start appearing on your screen. Ask questions and look not only with your eyes, but also with your ears.
What are your thoughts? Share your letter to the Editor below in the comments.
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Worcester Art Museum
Worcester, Massachusetts
worcesterart.org
Through September 10, 2023
The Worcester Art Museum is home to one of America’s best collections of watercolors, yet their sensitivity to light means that many of the finest examples have not been exhibited since the 1980s. Now the museum has organized “Watercolors Unboxed,” its first show on this subject in more than a decade.
Curator Nancy Kathryn Burns has selected 40 works dating from the 1870s through the 1950s, encompassing American talents like Hassam, Kent, Sargent, and Wyeth, as well as such European counterparts as Modigliani, Kokoschka, and Nolde.
Together their watercolors trace how this medium was used to document the artists’ travels, often while working outdoors, and also how it leaves little room for mistakes, as the colors can easily get muddy or the paper soggy. Illustrated here is Winslow Homer’s “Old Friends,” a brilliant example of how he made adjustments as he worked, sometimes even scraping the paper to create spatial depth.
The museum is also debuting examples of its watercolors from the San Ildefonso School, a collective of Native American modernists who worked in the Southwest during the first half of the 20th century.
In addition, a selection of watercolors created by locals who have studied art at the museum will be displayed in a community gallery just outside the exhibition entrance.
View more art museum announcements here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.
Stanka Kordic: The Space Between
Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia
stanekgallery.com
Through August 19, 2023
Stanek Gallery is presenting the first solo show mounted in a decade by the artist Stanka Kordic. In 2018 she made a powerful impression on Philadelphia art lovers as a participant in Stanek’s groundbreaking group exhibition, “Disrupted Realism.”
Its title became universal shorthand for the growing number of contemporary figurative painters who deploy abstraction strategically. The title of Kordic’s upcoming show, “The Space Between,” points to her ongoing interest in the areas between reality and abstraction, between light and dark, between the emotions they evoke.
Born in Cleveland to Croatian parents, Kordic studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art and worked as an illustrator before devoting herself to fine art in 1988. Today, based in Bedford, Ohio, she proceeds slowly to capture the sensations vibrating all around, applying and removing layers of paint over weeks or months. Like a shoot unfurling from a seed, the process is gradual, the effect dynamic.
Much of her work meditates on the interconnections between man and nature — or, more accurately, woman and nature: feminine forms in sylvan settings are Kordic’s most frequent motif. She uses models she already knows, but believes that a compelling portrait transcends likeness; it is not the subject so much as the sensation that registers most strongly in her images, which emit a natural energy, a maternal vitality, a rare melding of rhythm and stillness.
For most viewers, Kordic explains, “The figure is the trigger to the familiar. They follow the figure to the painting’s more ambiguous passages. Then, something changes — a subtle shift that is actually felt, not visible. An expansiveness occurs, and so many possibilities of seeing and feeling become apparent.”
Never exhibited before, the paintings at Stanek will underscore Kordic’s capacity to disrupt, overlay, and represent various realities while creating distinctive images rooted in the actual. “This is my declaration of independence as a woman in the world,” she declares.
View more artist and collector profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.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.
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***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.
Laura Pollak: Laura Pollak’s works have gained global attention in Curated Shows, Museums, Private Collections and Publications worldwide. Her ability to create visual magic has garnered her top awards.
Pollak’s paintings have a unique characteristic: “They Glow”.
“Creating art is only part of the process. Like a dialogue between friends, art must be shared and seen in order to close the circle and convey the idea. I invite you to join me on this magical journey.”
To see more of Laura’s work, visit:
www.laurapollak.com
VEFA Gallery: +1 (310) 408-2672
