Famed photographer Jesse Alexander was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1929 where he continues to reside. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara in 1953 with a degree in Political Science, he has earned worldwide recognition for his motorsport and nature photographs. Alexander’s photographs are known for capturing movement with utmost precision. He uses silver gelatin for photographing movement and presenting a nostalgic tone through the image. His image of Phil Hill racing in the Grand Prix in Germany is able to capture the car and driver still with a blurred crowd cheering in the background. His photographs of nature are similar in that he creates a world of still birds mid-flight in sunny Southern Californian skies. Whether the images were of Grands Prix or the waves along Santa Barbara’s coast, he photographs the movement of any subject with a blurry background and freeze action as it develops.
Michael Arntz is known for large and monumental scale landscape stoneware sculptures and vessels. He was born in Los Angeles, California in 1939, and went on to receive his BA in 1962 at California State University in Long Beach. Two years later, he received his MFA at the same University. Arntz is based in California, where he has lived and worked for much of his life. Along with creating his sculptures, the artist has also worked as a teacher at UC Santa Barbara and as a designer at the Architectural Pottery Corporation. He has exhibited throughout California and the United States, as well as internationally, in Japan and the U.K. He will be remembered as one of the pioneers in Southern California’s 20th Century Modern trail-blazing list of craftspeople and designers. In high fire stoneware, porcelain and Raku he created an extensive body of small and monumental work. Each thrown piece or sculpture embodies a freedom of form and zest for experimentation with his distinctive style and energized strength. Early in his career, Arntz' in the vessel form was influenced by southwestern Native American pots and those of other cultures.
High Renaissance painting in Rome was dominated by masterpieces from the three geniuses Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Raphael (1483-1520), and Michelangelo (1475-1564), with Leonardo specializing in portraiture. The Renaissance, for the first time in history, saw a notable increase in portraits of women. Northern Italians excelled in portraits of beautiful women dressed in exquisite and costly clothing. Portraits of this type depicted women of various levels of social standing. The Italian Renaissance peaked in the mid-16th century as domestic disputes and foreign invasions plunged the region into the turmoil of the Italian Wars (1494–1559). A number of Italy's greatest artists chose to emigrate. The most notable example was Leonardo da Vinci, who left for France in 1516, but teams of lesser artists invited to transform the Château de Fontainebleau created the School of Fontainebleau that infused the style of the Italian Renaissance in France. From Fontainebleau, the new styles, transformed by Mannerism, brought the Renaissance to the Low Countries and thence throughout Northern Europe. This Mannerist style was characterized by the exaggeration of human anatomy. A portrait is typically defined as a representation of a specific individual, such as the artist might meet in life. A portrait does not merely record someone’s features, however, but says something about who he or she is, offering a vivid sense of a real person’s presence. The three-quarter face, which allows for greater engagement between sitter and viewer, was also widely favored. In addition to recording appearances, portraits served a variety of social and practical functions in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Miniatures were given as gifts of intimate remembrance, while portraits of rulers asserted their majesty in places from which they were absent. In courtly settings, portraits often had diplomatic significance. A portrait was often commissioned at a significant moment in someone’s life, such as betrothal, marriage, or elevation to an office. The making of a portrait typically involved a simple arrangement between artist and patron, but artists also worked on their own initiative, particularly when portraying friends and family.
Milton Avery was an American painter celebrated for his portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Working with both oils and watercolors, he used broad swaths of luminous color and stylized forms, to capture the essence of a scene without fixating on details. Avery's work is seminal to American abstract painting — while his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations and is not concerned with creating the illusion of depth as most conventional Western painting since the Renaissance. Avery was often thought of as an American Matisse, especially because of his colorful and innovative landscape paintings. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era. Born in Sand Bank, New York, Milton Avery moved to Hartford, Connecticut, with his family in 1898. He held many jobs, working as an assembler, latheman, and mechanic before enrolling in a lettering class at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford in 1905. The school’s director persuaded Avery to transfer to a life-drawing class, which launched his career in fine arts. From 1926 to 1938, he attended sketch classes at the Art Students League in New York, where he became a friend of Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. In 1938, Avery worked as an artist in the Easel Division of the WPA Federal Art Project. Avery’s early training had prepared him for a career as an academic painter. But by 1930, references to Matisse and Picasso can be discerned in Avery’s paintings, and he began to introduce the simplified forms and flattened space that would, along with clear, unmodulated color, become the hallmarks of his later work. A quiet man who seldom participated in conversations about his art, Avery constantly sketched—landscapes, people, interiors—whatever was at hand. In 1946, Avery spent three months in Mexico, where not only the landscape but the peasants and city streets offered new subject matter. Three years later Avery suffered a heart attack from which he never fully recovered. Prevented by his health from working out doors, Avery began making monotypes, a medium that requires rapid execution. These monotypes affected his painting style, and after about 1950, Avery increasingly eliminated extraneous detail from his work and began focusing on the harmony of the overall canvas rather than the interrelation of its parts. His independent vision, distilled, vibrant color, and acutely refined forms had secured his recognition as one of the most subtly powerful artists in mid-century America.
Ludolf Bakhuizen was a German-born Dutch painter, draughtsman, calligrapher and printmaker. He was the leading Dutch painter of maritime subjects after Willem van de Velde the Elder and Younger left for England in 1672. He also painted portraits of his family and circle of friends. He was born in Emden, East Frisia, and came to Amsterdam in about 1650, working as a merchant's clerk and a calligrapher. He discovered so strong a genius for painting that he relinquished the business and devoted himself to art from the late 1650s, initially to pen drawings. He studied first under Allart van Everdingen and then under Hendrik Dubbels, two eminent masters of the time, and soon became celebrated for his images of the water, which often depicted rough seas. He was an ardent student of nature, and frequently exposed himself on the sea in an open boat to study the effects of storms. His compositions, which are numerous, are nearly all variations of one subject, the sea, and in a style peculiarly his own, marked by intense realism or faithful imitation of nature. Backhuysen’s canvases are often large and frequently depict stormy scenes. In addition to the seascapes for which he is famous, Backhuysen painted some portraits, allegorical compositions, and townscapes. Besides his work as a calligrapher, he was also a printmakerIn his later years Backhuysen employed his skills in etching.
New York–based artist Peggy Bacon trained from 1915 to 1920 at the Art Students League, where she studied with modernists George Bellows and John Sloan. Like her instructors, Bacon created works that record scenes from daily life. Citing the nineteenth-century French satirist Honoré Daumier as an artistic influence, Bacon depicted the people around her as caricatures, generating a body of work notable as much for its humor and wit as for its virtuosic technique. She is perhaps best known today for her drypoint prints, made by incising lines into a metal plate using a needle—a technique she taught herself using a printing press and zinc plates that she came upon while a student at the League. Several New York City exhibitions of her caricatures, starting in 1928, attracted positive critical attention, which buoyed a trend during the Depression in which art galleries regularly exhibited caricature. She was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut to artist parents, Charles Roswell Bacon and Elizabeth Chase, and spent much of her youth traveling internationally with them, to paint. In the late 1920s, she began to explore lithographs, etchings, and pastel, but drypoint remained her favorite medium until the 1950s when she concentrated on oil painting. Although Bacon had trained as a painter, she eventually became famous for her satirical prints and drawings of New York life. Her caricatures were first published in a single issue spoof, entitled Bad News. Her early portrait caricatures in Bad News, like her early drypoints, depended upon a hard, controlling outline, filled in with shading or an obscure pattern. The intensity of the hues, the highly selective and organized palette, and her visually satisfying compositions all contribute to the high quality and formal aspects that distinguish Bacon's pastel portraits from others. She went on to illustrate over 60 books, 19 of which she also wrote, including a successful mystery book, The Inward Eye, which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award in 1952 for best novel.
Louis Breslow, also known as Lou Barlow, worked for the Graphics division of the New York City WPA. He studied in Europe and at the National Academy of Design. He belonged to the American Watercolor Society and the Philadelphia Print Club. Many of his WPA prints are in the collection of Fort Sam Houston. Later he became a medical illustrator. To make a wood engraving, the artist cuts into a wood black with metal tools. It is possible to create great detail and texture in this medium. The cut-away areas will remain white, while the raised areas of the block will take the ink. Born in New York City, Barlow graduated from the National Academy of Design in 1930. He worked for the Public Works of Art Project until it was liquidated in 1934, after which he was employed by the Federal Art Project from 1935 until 1941 when he began work as a medical illustrator for the United States Army during the Second World War. After discharge from the army, Barlow began a civilian career as a medical illustrator and, in addition, designed and created prosthetics. Since retirement he has resumed printmaking and, in 1994, was named National Academician in recognition of his long and distinguished professional career. Through a social realist style, Barlow’s printed engravings subtly comment on the socio-political context in which he was living.
Gifford Beal was a painter, draughtsman, muralist, and chronicler of American life. Influenced by French impressionism, Beal developed a unique ability to synthesize his surroundings and exude the human form’s rhythms. His scenic landscapes and lyrical depictions of the American lifestyle appealed to critics and collectors alike, and Beal achieved commercial success early in his career. Born in the Bronx, New York, Beal studied with William Merritt Chase at age twelve, continuing his art education while he attended Princeton University in New Jersey until graduation in 1900. After marrying Maud Ramsdell, the couple vacationed in Maine and Rockport, Massachusetts, both sources for his coastal landscapes. He was a member of the National Academy of Design and served as president of the Art Students’ League from 1914 to 1929. As his style matured, Beal explored line and form, giving a newfound sense of weight and solidity to his compositions. In the late 1920s, he focused on austere, realistic depictions of seafaring life, using earth tones, rugged brushstrokes, and monumental forms. This period in Beal’s oeuvre coincided with the American regionalism movement and was inspired by the work of his colleagues Rockwell Kent and George Bellows. Theater and circus subjects pervaded his work in the 1940s. By observing the pictorial elements of performance, assimilating elements of abstraction, and incorporating brilliant color and light effects, he captured the glamour and energetic nature of these public spectacles. Beal’s style became increasingly free-spirited with frenetic brushstrokes, and his abstract artworks were some of his boldest and brightest during the last years of his life.
BELLINI, Giovanni (Attributed to)
Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini (who was more highly regarded than Giovanni during his lifetime, although the reverse is true today), and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practiced in 15th-century Venice. His religious works show him gradually throwing off the last restraints of the Quattrocento manner and delving into the perfect fusion of colors and atmospheric gradation of tones that characterizes the post-Giorgione, High Renaissance period. Mid-career, Giovanni seems to have switched his focus to the color technique (aka colorito), that is using the juxtaposition of contrasting colors to define a composition. As Bellini’s style changed so, too, did the focus of his subject matter: from religious devotional scenes to many more naturalistic mythologies. Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. Through the use of clear, slow-drying oil paints, Bellini created deep, rich tints and detailed shadings. This may reflect the influence of the celebrated oil painter Antonello da Mesina (c. 1430-1479 CE) following his stay in Venice between 1475 and 1476 CE. Messina had himself been in contact with the methods of Flemish oil painters who were pioneering in their realism and iconographic symbolism in art. Bellini was considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it towards a more sensuous and colouristic style that highlighted the emotions of his subjects. A master in the expressive rendering of light and color, it was Giovanni who, having absorbed the lessons of the central Italians, established the tradition in which his pupils Giorgione and Titian, as well as Tintoretto, and Veronese later flourished.
Californian artist Eric Beltz was born in the city of Orange in 1975. After graduating with a BFA in art from CSU Fullerton, Beltz received his MFA in Art from UC Santa Barbara in 2004. His post-graduate education at the university transitioned into a teaching position, which he has held for over fifteen years. Working primarily in graphite on Bristol paper, Beltz’s drawings pulse with activity, fusing nature with geometry and history with mythology to create darkly charming scenes with a psychedelic slant. Many of his drawings also have a distinctive political element, incorporating decorative text to caption satirical portraits of American culture and history. Beltz’s work figures in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Kansas’s Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. Appearing in gallery exhibitions across California and the United States, he has also been featured twice in Flaunt magazine, and in 2015, was awarded PULSE Art Fair’s annual PULSE Prize.
Benton fits the familiar mold of Jack London, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway–the roughneck artist and temperamental genius disguised as a Joe. Named after his great-grandfather, a prominent U.S. senator, Thomas Hart Benton emerged from a political background with a love for America and its back roads. As the son of a popular Missouri congressman, Benton traveled extensively with his father on the campaign trail. In 1907, he left Missouri to study at the Art Institute in Chicago and the Académie Julian in Paris. Returning to the United States in 1911, Benton became an instructor at the Art Students League in New York City. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Navy and was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia where he was directed to make drawings and illustrations of shipyard work. Benton was classified as a "camoufleur", and drew the camouflaged ships that entered Norfolk harbor. This war-related work had an enduring effect on his later style. After his service in the military, Benton travelled throughout the country, and was exposed to a panorama of American experience. He was associated with Regionalism, an artistic movement best known for its emphasis on agrarian cultural ideals. The raw expressionistic and individualistic tone of his work reflected his conscious decision to adopt American subjects and themes in order to create a truly American art that speaks to its people, its history and its culture. Although characterized as a regionalist, Benton’s work often had a social realist bent. In 1932, the relatively unknown artist won a commission to paint the murals of Indiana life planned by the state in the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago. The Indiana Murals stirred controversy; Benton painted everyday people, and included a portrayal of events in the state's history which some people did not want publicized. Critics attacked his work for showing Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members in full regalia. The KKK reached its peak membership in 1925. Thus, Benton, a self-declared “enemy of modernism” depicted reality as it was despite the inevitable backlash. By the time of his death in 1975, Benton had authored a body of work that remains perhaps the most sweeping chronicle of American culture in the 20th century.
Isabel Bishop was an American painter best known for her urban scenes of Union Square and candid portraits of women. Her works have a golden light and curvilinear quality, often reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens. Born on March 3, 1902 in Cincinnati, OH, to well-educated parents, Bishop went on to pursue illustration at the New York School of Applied Design for Women in New York when she was only 16 years old. She later studied painting under Guy Pène du Bois and Robert Henri at the Art Students League, and even spent time traveling throughout Europe to see the work of the Old Masters. Eventually, Bishop would be famed as the only full-time female instructor at the Art Students League. In addition, she learned from other early modernists including Max Weber and Robert Henri. Bishop was described as an eager intellectual who was naturally inquisitive and independent in her ways. In this period, women were becoming very active in the arts community, yet weren’t taken seriously. Bishop pushed against this attitude toward women artists with her insistence on applying herself both academically and politically in the art realm with the financial support of a cousin. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s she developed a realist style of painting, primarily depicting women in their daily routine on the streets of Manhattan. She became interested in the interaction of form and ground and the mobility of everyday life, what she called "unfixity", life and movement captured on canvas. Her style is noted for its sensitive modeling of form and a submarine pearliness and density of atmosphere. During this time, Bishop began working in various printing techniques, most notably aquatint. Bishop's mature works mainly depict the inhabitants of New York's Union Square and the surrounding area. Her portraits are often studies of individual heads; the emphasis securely on the subject's expression – or of solitary nudes. Bishop also painted multiple-figure compositions, often containing two females engaged in various workday interactions. In the post-war years, Bishop's interest turned to more abstracted scenes of New Yorkers walking and traveling, in the streets or on the subways. In the mid-1940s, E. P. Dutton commissioned Bishop to illustrate a new edition of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Bishop produced 31 pen-and-ink drawings.
California-based artist Hilary Brace ​was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1956. She received her​ BFA in painting from Western Washington State University in 1983, and went on to acquire her MFA in painting from UC Santa Barbara in 1985. Brace is best known for her imaginative cloudscapes, where careful gradients of charcoal on Mylar instill the fantastical scenes with a stunning photographic realness. Through the dramatic interplay of clouds, snow, and mountains, Brace’s artworks push the limits of imagination, often unfolding in unexpected ways as she chooses to forego any overly-complex, premeditated artistic process. Her work has been the subject of various solo exhibitions, and has also featured in group exhibitions across California and the United States. She has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the California Arts Council Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Works on Paper. In 2010, Brace was awarded the Santa Barbara Arts Fund’s Individual Artist Award.
Painter, printmaker, designer, and teacher Harry Brodsky is best known for lithograph images of Philadelphia and the surrounding area made in the 1930s and 1940s. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Brodsky graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art and also attended the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1920s, he painted decorative works in the interiors of movie theaters in Haddon Township, New Jersey, and Ambler, Pennsylvania. During the 1940s and 1950s Brodsky taught at vocational schools in Philadelphia. He later worked as a commercial artist for the Campbell's Soup Company, for the weekly entertainment magazine TV Guide, and for Philadelphia advertising agencies. Brodsky made both color and monochrome lithographs of a variety of themes and in a wide range of styles reflecting current trends in American art in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Still lifes, landscapes, city scenes, and interiors showing ordinary Philadelphians comprise his subjects; he also created purely nonobjective compositions. During the Great Depression, Brodsky emphasized themes of social justice in portrayals of workers and those facing socio-economic challenges. In the 1940s his work more frequently emphasized formal qualities as he experimented with abstraction. He also began making prints in various relief media and screen print techniques.
Bernard Brussel-Smith was born in 1914, raised, and lived most of his life in New York City, a constant source of imagery for the artist from Depression-era 40's, and the post-war 50s until his death in 1989. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the New School for Social Research in New York, studying lithography with Roy Cleveland Nurse and Henry McCarter. He later discovered engraving when he attended courses at the New School for Social Research in New York, studying under wood engraver Fritz Eichenberg beginning in 1941. He proved adept at the precise medium, and Eichenberg soon elected him for the position of teacher's assistant. Wood engraving would become Brussel-Smith's preferred medium for the next five decades. Brussel-Smith established himself as America’s foremost wood engraver, capturing the lives of the American urban working class during the 1940’s and 1950’s. He taught art classes at the Brooklyn Museum, Cooper Union, City College and the National Academy. Although Bernard spent most of his life in the New York area, he managed to travel widely and regularly spending many summers with his wife, Mildred, and son, Peter in France. From l957 to 1958 he studied with Stanley William Hayter in Paris, developing a form of relief etching inspired by the process used by William Blake. Brussel-Smith supported himself through work as a commercial artist and illustrator, and was hired by publications such as Life, Reader's Digest, Time and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as major corporations including Seagram's and the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French. He was widely known for his posters of the New York Auto Show in the 1950’s and 1960’s. However, his commissioned work was not always relegated to commerce. His fine art pieces often depicted the lives of ordinary citizens – on the subway, in the city and countryside, sailors, fishermen, street musicians, railroad workers – and his work became synonymous with American working-class life.
BRUYN THE ELDER, Barthel
Artistic contacts between cities in Italy, like Florence, Siena and Venice, and those of Germany, like Cologne, were ongoing during much of the 15th century. The humanist attitudes and novel visions of Italian Renaissance art were taken northwards both by wandering Italian artists, and by the engravings that had been discovered in the mid-15th century, which enabled people to make cheap editions of the most important Renaissance works. Important as the influences of Early Renaissance painting were on the development of German art, of equal relevance were the events in their homeland, where the Reformation was continuing to make its presence felt. In the country that had seen the success of the Protestant Reformation movement which had declared itself hostile to painting, there was no longer any demand for religious art. This was a great blow to artists, because it meant that they lost their most important source of commissions and income, and helps to explain why court patronage and painting increased in importance. To compensate for the collapse of their main patron, the Church, German artists were obliged to turn to other subjects, notably portrait art and landscape painting, which they sold to the nobility and bourgeoisie. Thus, naturally, Barthel Bruyn the Elder was a German artist especially known for his portraits. He was the first important portrait painter in Cologne, and the founder of a prolific school of portraiture that was continued by his sons Arnt and Barthel Bruyn the Younger. His subjects are usually portrayed at half-length against a flat background; the face is the center of attention, but costume details are crisply described, and prominence is given to the hands. Bruyn's depictions of the upper-middle-class citizens of Cologne are lively and expressive, and they are realistic, showing no vain flattery. Bruyn did not sign his portraits, and some of them have in the past been misattributed to Hans Holbein, whose influence is apparent in Bruyn's works after 1539. Nevertheless, a large body of independent portraits has been established for him through comparison with donor portraits in securely documented retables, such as the high altarpiece that Bruyn completed for Xanten Cathedral in 1534. The large irises, prominent chins, fleshy noses and lips, and high-contrast modeling characteristics of the Xanten portraits are typical in Bruyn’s work. Material and iconographic evidence suggests that many of Bruyn's portraits with rounded tops were originally attached as folding diptychs.
Da Treviso The Elder, Girolamo (Attributed to)
Born in the northern Italian city of Treviso, Girolamo Da Treviso The Elder worked as a painter and sculptor in Bologna, and eventually worked as an engineer for Henry VIII when he was killed by a cannon shot during the Siege of Boulogne in 1544 (which allows for the inference that any works created during his later years were likely commissioned by Henry). Working in Bologna during the 1520s, Girolamo was exposed to Raphael's St. Cecilia. Standing alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo as the third great painter of the High Renaissance was the younger Raphael, who in a short lifespan painted a great number of life-like and engaging portraits. Girolamo’s work in Bologna reveals a bold, highly expressive adaptation of the classical vocabulary of form seen in the late works of Raphael. Stylistically, Girolamo is associated with Giorgionismo and the continuation of Giorgione's style. Giorgionismo is devoid of devotional, allegorical, and historical objective focusing instead on adding character to work using a gradual shading of colors revealing perspective and light - also known as sfumato and chiaroscuro. Furthermore, Giorgione pioneered the practice of using oil paints – the practice which enabled Girolamo to create incredibly detailed and emotionally evocative works within a classical framework. Besides working in Bologna, which included sculptural decoration on the portal of San Petronio and grisaille paintings inside, Girolamo also worked in Genoa, Faenza, Trent, and at the Palazzo del Te in Mantua.
DAVID, Gerard, Studio of
Gerard David was an Early Netherlandish painter and manuscript illuminator known for his brilliant use of color. Only a bare outline of his life survives, although some facts are known. He was very successful in his lifetime and probably ran two workshops in Antwerp and Bruges. Like many painters of his period, his reputation diminished in the 17th century until he was rediscovered in the 19th century. Today, most view him as a master colorist, and a painter who worked in a progressive, even enterprising, mode, casting off his late medieval heritage and proceeding with a certain purity of vision in an age of transition. David's surviving work mainly consists of religious scenes. They are characterized by an atmospheric, timeless, and almost dream-like serenity, achieved through soft, warm, subtle colorisation, and a masterful handling of light and shadow. He is innovative in his recasting of traditional themes. In Bruges, David came directly under the influence of Hans Memling, the master whom he followed most closely. It was from him that David acquired a greater realism in the rendering of human form, and an orderly arrangement of figures. Furthermore, visited Antwerp in 1515 and was impressed with the work of Quentin Matsys, who had introduced a greater vitality and intimacy in the conception of sacred themes. Together they worked to preserve the traditions of the Bruges school against influences of the Italian Renaissance.
Mark di Suvero, born Marco Polo di Suvero September 18, 1933 in Shanghai to Italian parents, is an American artist who welds scrap metal into monumental sculptures. Di Suvero’s family immigrated to San Francisco after the onset of World War II, and he went on to attend the San Francisco City College and UC Berkeley. Moving to New York in 1957, during his early years as an artist he worked in construction, and brushed elbows with Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. He built dynamic sculptures that matched the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists in exuberance and size. His early works were large outdoor pieces that incorporated wooden timbers from demolition buildings, tires, scrap metal and structural steel. Often visually off-balance and asymmetrical, Di Suvero's works lend themselves to the idea that they are "drawings in space" and related to the gestural abstraction that became prevalent during the mid-20th century. No matter how large or heavy his sculptures are, Di Suvero often allows a certain degree of motion to be possible within the finished works. The moving elements, while heavy because of their industrial materials, are meant to give the illusion of ease and suspending gravity. Furthermore, Di Suvero is a politically committed artist: in 1966 he designed the fifty-five-foot-high Peace Tower (now destroyed) in Los Angeles as a protest against the war in Vietnam. Soon after, he left the United States for several years, in voluntary exile
Ann Diener (MFA 2005) earned her Bachelor’s degree from UCLA and her Masters of Fine Arts from UC Santa Barbara, where she also taught. Through drawing, Diener maps​ the layered history of place, charting ways that spaces are changed over time by those who inhabit them. Diener’s artworks investigate, record, and trace the diverse elements that comprise the complicated history of place. Often large in scale, the works are multi-layered narratives. By incorporating maps, charts and printed materials, the artist examines the social and political ramifications of how land and urban spaces are cultivated, manipulated, developed and controlled. Through references to land, culture, time and memory, her complex works move beyond mere geographic representations and engage with the anthropological layers of place. They chart the way a location is inevitably changed by its inhabitants over many generations and are often informed by the changing sociological and topological landscape of Central California amidst agricultural development. In 2016, she expanded her practice to include lithographs and tapestries.
DUJARDIN, Karel (attributed to)
Karel Dujardin was a Dutch Golden Age painter. Although he did a few portraits and a few history paintings of religious subjects, most of his work is small Italianate landscape scenes with animals and peasants, and other genre scenes. Dujardin spent two extended periods, at the beginning and end of his career, in Italy, and most of his paintings and landscape etchings have an Italian or Italianate setting. After supposedly training with Nicolaes Berchem, the young Dujardin went to Italy, and joined the Bentvueghels group of painters in Rome, among whom he was known as "Barba di Becco", "goat-beard", or Bokkebaart. Here he encountered his first artistic successes. He painted in Rome for three years; in fact, his last dated painting is from 1678. He was in Venice when he died in 1678. Some of his pastoral scenes from the 1650s are set in the Dutch countryside – other works from this period are set in Italianate landscapes, warmly lit, and often with peasant genre scenes in the foreground. Dujardin began etching in the 1650s, primarily landscapes and animals; about fifty etchings have been attributed to him. He was also an excellent portraitist and his large religious pictures show that he was familiar with the pictorial ideas of Italian Baroque art. Like so many of the 17th-century Dutch artists who made the journey to Italy, Dujardin was a Catholic. By 1659 Dujardin was living in Amsterdam, where he stayed for the next fifteen years. During this time he executed portraits, religious scenes, allegories and large history paintings in addition to Italianate landscapes.
Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history roughly spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) for Dutch independence. The new Dutch Republic was the most prosperous nation in Europe and led European trade, science, and art. The northern Netherlandish provinces that made up the new state had traditionally been less important artistic centres than cities in Flanders in the south. The upheavals and large-scale transfers of population of the war, and the sharp break with the old monarchist and Catholic cultural traditions, meant that Dutch art had to reinvent itself. The painting of religious subjects declined sharply, but a large new market for many secular subjects developed. Portraiture, less affected by fashion than other types of painting, remained the safe fallback for Dutch artists. Although Dutch painting of the Golden Age is included in the general European period of Baroque painting, and often shows many of its characteristics, most lacks the idealization and love of splendour typical of much Baroque work, including that of neighbouring Flanders. Most work, including that for which the period is best known, reflects the traditions of detailed realism inherited from Early Netherlandish painting. Portrait painting thrived in the Netherlands in the 17th century, as there was a large mercantile class who were far more ready to commission portraits than their equivalents in other countries; a summary of various estimates of total production arrives at between 750,000 and 1,100,000 portraits. From what little we know of the studio procedures of artists, it seems that, as elsewhere in Europe, the face was probably drawn and perhaps painted at an initial sitting or two. The typical number of further sittings is unclear - between zero (for a Rembrandt full-length) and 50 appear documented. The clothes were left at the studio and might well be painted by assistants, or a brought-in specialist master, although, or because, they were regarded as a very important part of the painting. Lace and ruff collars were unavoidable, and presented a formidable challenge to painters intent on realism. Rembrandt evolved a more effective way of painting patterned lace, laying in broad white stokes, and then painting lightly in black to show the pattern. Another way of doing this was to paint in white over a black layer, and scratch off the white with the end of the brush to show the pattern.
Fritz Eichenberg (October 24, 1901 – November 30, 1990) was a German-American illustrator and arts educator who worked primarily in wood engraving. His best-known works were concerned with religion, social justice and nonviolence. Eichenberg was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, where the destruction of World War I helped to shape his anti-war sentiments. In 1923 he moved to Berlin to begin his career as an artist, producing illustrations for books and newspapers. In his newspaper and magazine work, Eichenberg was politically outspoken and sometimes both wrote and illustrated his own reporting. In 1933, the rise of Adolf Hitler convinced Eichenberg, a public critic of the Nazis, to emigrate with his wife and children to the United States, where he settled in New York City for most of the remainder of his life. He taught art at the New School for Social Research and at Pratt Institute and was part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Project. In his prolific career as a book illustrator, Eichenberg worked with many forms of literature but specialized in material with elements of extreme spiritual and emotional conflict, fantasy, or social satire, illustrating such authors as include Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Poe, Swift, and Grimmelshausen. He also wrote and illustrated books of folklore and children's stories. Though he remained a Quaker until his death, Eichenberg was also associated with Catholic charity work through his friendship with Dorothy Day—whom he met at a Quaker conference on religion and publishing in 1949—and frequently contributed illustrations to Day's newspaper the Catholic Worker until he died in 1990.
Evergood was born in New York, but grew up in England and graduated from Eton in 1919. He had been studying abroad when he returned to the United States during the Great Depression. He took odd jobs and hired on with the Works Progress Administration, earning a small salary that allowed him to support his family. In the 1920s and 1930s, he experimented with etching and lithography, focusing mainly on Biblical themes, and often utilizing a distorted style reflective of both Cezanne and El Greco in that his figures seemed to be in fanciful worlds or imagined space. Like many artists of the 1930s, Evergood was sympathetic to the plight of workers. His participation in strikes and protests often landed him in jail, and he believed that art was a weapon and a means for social change. By 1935, he did American Scene painting with politically and socially-charged message works whose themes were the unhappiness of people caught in the Depression. His best-known works are gritty, populist images of contemporary life, and are full of vitality and imagination. A blend of reality and fantasy gives his paintings an appealing, cartoonish quality, and his incisiveness as a social critic emboldens his work. His art is founded on contradiction: sophisticated intent is matched by intentionally crude technique, and tawdry overstatement is balanced with delicate lines. Though he experimented with etching and lithography in the 1920s, he did not begin to devote himself on a large scale to original printmaking until after 1945. At this time he studied printmaking techniques at the New York studio of Stanley William Hayter. During the following twenty-five years he produced many works of art in both lithography and etching. He maintained a socially conscious attitude in his art for the remainder of his career, and was in fact considered to be something of a maverick. He was a figurative painter when much of the art world placed greater value on abstraction, and he was a moralist when moralizing was not considered an option for serious painters. During the 1950s Evergood departed from his established "Social Realism" style and concentrated more on symbolism, both biblical and mythological.
Macduff Everton was born in 1947 in Pearl River, New York. He received both his BA and​ MFA at UC Santa Barbara in 1981 and 1984 respectively. His photography work was sparked by the spontaneous trip he took at the age of 19, soon after landing work at an educational film company. His big photography breakthrough involved his deep interest and inspiration he garnered from Mayan culture, publishing a book in 2012 entitled, The Modern Maya: A Culture​ in Transition. ​This was influenced by his travels to the Yucatan peninsula and centered on the age of globalization and crucial change in the region. Through his photographs Everton wanted to send the message that the heart and soul of the culture is the ordinary people in it. Everton is praised for his use of panoramic photography and his spotlight on rural areas. He has made several writing contributions to archaeologists’ books including The Code of Kings​ and The Language of Seven Sacred Temples & Tombs​. Everton’s work is showcased in many public collections such as in the British Museum, Museum of Modern Art New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Musee de l’Elysee.
Born in Shanghai in 1943, Ming Fay ​(​ 费明杰) moved to the United States to pursue the​ arts in 1961. His mother and father, an artist and art director in the Hong Kong film industry, introduced Fay to sculpture during his childhood in China. After studying at the Columbus College of Art and Design and Kansas City Institute of Art, Fay earned a graduate degree in sculpture at UC Santa Barbara in 1975. After graduating, he relocated to New York City and, in 1982, founded an art collective with other New York-based Chinese artists. As newcomers to the cultural epicenter, Fay describes working together with his collaborators “to decipher the secret codes of the New York art scene.” Fay’s talent of visualizing the relationship between humanity and nature soon entered the national sphere, with his public sculptures featured prominently from coast to coast. Akin to his personal journey, Fay’s art merges Western and Eastern influences. Resulting in a versatile range of creations, his work includes sculptural benches and glass mosaics within New York City terminals, as well as depictions of traditional Chinese gardens. His inspirations typically come from natural forms, with plants, bones, seashells, fruit, and the human body serving as common subjects.
Jud Fine is an American contemporary artist born in 1944. He received his BA in History from UC Santa Barbara in 1966 and subsequently earned an MFA from Cornell University in New York. He is a sculptor and former Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in the Roski School of Fine Art at the University of Southern California, where he currently teaches. Fine has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships and his work is exhibited and collected in museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Australia and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow. He has also completed multiple large scale public projects, both individually and in collaboration with artist Barbara McCarren.
Born around 1460 in Flanders (modern Belgium), Juan de Flandes is first officially accounted for in the Spanish court. He evidently trained in his home country, most likely in Ghent, as his work shows similarities to that of Joos van Wassenhove, Gerard David and other Ghent artists. He is only documented after he became an artist at the court of Queen Isabella I of Castile, where he is first accounted for in 1496. By 1498, he is described as a court painter in royal record, and apparently continued in the queen's service until her death in 1504. He mostly painted portraits of the royal family, but he also contributed a series of small panels to a polyptych altarpiece for the queen. After Isabella’s death in 1504 Juan de Flandes turned to ecclesiastical commissioners from Spanish churches, beginning in Salamanca, where he worked from 1505-1507. His work demonstrates the Early Ghent-style of biblical narrative-realism, adapted to the Spanish taste and landscape. His colouring was refined, with a preference for acid hues, while his feeling for space and light is sophisticated, with a tendency to divide space into a succession of thin planes in his later work. Furthermore, he employed natural symbols like rose buds when portraying royal sitters which allow for a variety of interpretations. Softly constructed, defined by delicate lights and shadows that increased the sense of volume, Juan de Flandes’ subjects, both portrait sitters and Biblical characters, typically conveyed a dreamy elegance. This new style is classified by art historians as Hispano-Flemish. The Catholic Kings played an important role within the development of this trend, reflecting their own artistic preference for the realist art of Flanders. Aware of the importance of their image, these monarchs inserted their own portrait into religious works with the expertise of Flemish artists like de Flandes.
After the removal of the three original Pietro Perugino panels from an altarpiece at The Certosa di Pavia monastery and complex in Lombardy, northern Italy, at the end of the 18th century, each underwent significant alterations. Firstly, all three panels were cut down soon after they were purchased in 1786. These fragmentary details were then painted out by the Follower of Pietro Perugino. Furthermore, while the paintings were in the Melzi collection in the first half of the 19th century, additions were made at all of the edges, most notably the upper edges. The panels entered the collection of the National Gallery in 1856 with all of these amendments and within a framing element defined by arched tops. The panel copies that are attributed to the Follower were made in the 19th century, likely during the first half of the century when the Perugino’s originals were still in the Melzi collection. Furthermore, the Follower’s panels serve as concrete and important visual documents that record the appearance of Perugino's originals for a short period of time within their history. Pietro Perugino most likely began studying painting in local workshops in Perugia (Umbria) such as those of Bartolomeo Caporali or Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. As he gained experience, he was eventually apprenticed to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio alongside Leonardo da Vinci, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippino Lippi and others. Of the scenes completely by Perugino’s own hand, only the fresco Giving of the Keys to St. Peter has survived. Perugino was very often interested in creating a sense of space in his works, especially between the main action in the foreground and precisely rendered examples of architecture in the background. The artist’s use of space and perspective was influential on many Renaissance artists who followed, notably his one-time pupil Raphael. Perugino’s paintings were very different from those of other Florentine artists. He preferred to place his figures at the front of his pictures with a large space behind leading to precisely drawn examples of architecture in the background. His figures were static, non-dramatic, gently classical in pose and clothed in soft, relatively heavy material falling in simple folds, his figures mark the changeover from mid-century linearity. His pictorial architecture is likewise characterised by uncluttered, grave simplicity and the eschewing of unnecessary details.
Don Freeman was born in San Diego, California, in 1908. After graduating high school and attending a summer course at San Diego School of Fine Arts, Don moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students' League and developed a passion for theater. Don spent much of his time on Broadway and could often be found backstage, sketching actors and capturing everything that happened both on and off the stage in his sketchbook. He supported himself by playing his trumpet in a dance band, but after losing his trumpet on the subway Don decided to turn his attention to his sketches. During the 1930s and 40s, he was a brilliant illustrator of New York City life in the best traditions of Social Realism. His subjects were the actors and actresses of Broadway—from the LGBTQI+ icon Orson Welles to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne to the man in the street or the charwomen who scrubbed the stage after the actors and the audience went home. His cartoons and other illustrations appeared regularly in the New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Theater Magazine. Freeman also self-published Don Freeman's Newsstand, a short-lived quarterly magazine, each page of which was an original lithograph. Freeman was also a jazz musician and the brother of hotel entrepreneur Warren Freeman. As Freeman's career progressed, he lightened his palette and depicted more upbeat subjects. In 1951, he began illustrating children's books. He took his first step into children's literature when he was asked to illustrate for William Saroya. He quickly began writing and illustrating his own children's books, including Corduroy, A Pocket for Corduroy, and the Caldecott Honor Book Fly High, Fly Low. Through his writing, he was able to create his own theater. He created many beloved characters in his lifetime, perhaps the most beloved among them the stuffed, overall-wearing bear named Corduroy. He collaborated frequently with his wife, Lydia, a fellow author and artist. Don died in 1978, and his wife went on to establish The Lydia Freeman Charitable Foundation.
The German Renaissance, part of the Northern Renaissance, was a cultural and artistic movement that spread among German thinkers in the 15th and 16th centuries, which developed from the Italian Renaissance. Many areas of the arts and sciences were influenced, notably by the spread of Renaissance humanism to the various German states and principalities. There were many advances made in the fields of architecture, the arts, and the sciences. Germany produced two developments that were to dominate the 16th century all over Europe: printing and the Protestant Reformation. Artists working in 16th century germany included the pupils of Albrecht Durer. In December 1520 Dürer visited Zeeland and in April 1521 traveled to Bruges and Ghent, where he saw the works of the 15th-century Flemish masters. Dürer’s sketchbook of the Netherlands journey contains immensely detailed and realistic drawings. Dürer died in 1528, before it was clear that the split of the Reformation had become permanent, but his pupils of the following generation were unable to avoid taking sides. Most leading German artists became Protestants, but this deprived them of painting most religious works, previously the mainstay of artists' revenue. Martin Luther had objected to much Catholic imagery, but not to imagery itself, so the commissioning of portraits experienced a boom during the Reformation – as well as during the Counter-Reformation. Art of the Baroque era (c.1600-1700), including portrait art, was driven by several factors. First, the growing commercial strength of Holland, France, Spain, and Britain. Second, sponsorship of the visual arts by the Catholic Church in order to heighten its influence during the Counter-Reformation.
German or Flemish
Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting represents the 16th-century response to Italian Renaissance art in the Low Countries. These artists, who span from the Antwerp Mannerists and Hieronymus Bosch at the start of the 16th century to the late Northern Mannerists such as Hendrik Goltzius and Joachim Wtewael at the end, drew on both the recent innovations of Italian painting and the local traditions of the Early Netherlandish artists. In demand in courts all over Europe for his reliable portraits in a style that combined Netherlandish precision with the lessons of Titian and other Italian painters. A meticulous handling of jewellery and sumptuous fabrics are typical Flemish characteristics sought after by courtly sitters. As Renaissance art styles moved through Northern Europe, they changed and were adapted to local customs. In England and the northern Netherlands the Protestant Reformation brought religious painting almost completely to an end. As in Italy, the decline of feudalism opened the way for the cultural, social, and economic changes associated with the Renaissance in Europe. The golden age of painting in the Netherlands was aided by the wealth of the region at this time as well as the presence of King Philip and the Burgundian court, which allowed court artists to flourish. The influence of art of the Netherlands on the European scene grew significantly at this point, with many of its masters gaining the respect and following of numerous Italian artists. The growth of the status of ‘artist’ in the Netherlands is demonstrated by an increase in artists who sign their name and paint self-portraits. Despite several very talented artists of the Tudor Court in England, portrait painting was slow to spread from the elite.
b. United States, 1978 Judy Glantzman is an American artist born in 1978. She is mostly known for her figurative and gestural paintings and drawings, however she also works with sculpture. The human figure is prominent in her compositions, which echo of de Kooning, Bacon and Baselitz by their elongated, distorted proportions. As exemplified by the sculpture in the AD&AM’s collection, Couple Seated, see link, where contorted figures are bent into a seat. Glantzman graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1978 with a BFA. Although she began learning artistic strategies from her mother, an abstract painter and trained interior designer, while at RISD her drawing teacher, Victor Lara, and painting teacher, Roland Belhumeur, are noted as prominent influences. In the 1980s she was a mainstay in the East Village art scene and was represented by Civilian Warfare and Gracie Mansion. She often exhibited and sometimes collaborated with David Wojnarowicz, Luis Frangella, and Mike Bildo. Since 2006, she has been represented by the Betty Cuningham Gallery. She has taught at RISD, New York Studio School, MICA, and Purchase College. Among the numerous awards she has received, a few are the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous is a Woman Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts in Painting, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. Bibliography: “Judy Glantzman.” Betty Cuningham Gallery. Accessed October 27, 2021. http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/artists/judy-glantzman. Samet, Jennifer. “Beer with a Painter: Judy Glantzman.” Hyperallergic, April 26, 2019. https://hyperallergic.com/497234/beer-with-a-painter-judy-glantzman/. Schwabsky, Barry “Judy Glantzman HIRSCHL & ADLER MODERN.” Art Forum, December 1997 https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/199710/judy-glantzman-53129 Duncan, Michael. “Judy Glantzman at Betty Cuningham.” Art in America (1939) 95, no. 1 (2007): 140.
Penelope Gottlieb is an American artist born in 1952. After attending the Art Center College for Design in Pasadena and receiving a BFA, Gottlieb received her MFA from UC Santa Barbara. She currently lives and works in Santa Barbara and continues to create her unique vintage-inspired paintings. Gottlieb uses her designs to reinvent the classical floral still-life by incorporating her background in graphic design. Organisms are shown stylized in a way which brings attention to the ecological crises they are facing, and many are even extinct. Gottlieb has also completed realist pencil portraits and abstract enamel and aluminum compositions as part of the series Trans-Ethnic and 10,000 Memories. While her work is distinctly modern, it has been stated that they are clearly related to works of Kandinsky and Lichtenstein in their color and stylistic choices. Notable accomplishments in Gottlieb’s life are an Emmy in motion picture title design from 1993, and her art is featured in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Chicago Art Institute collections.
GREENE, isabelle
Like the landscapes she designs, Isabelle Greene is an amalgamation of equally important influences: the Arroyo Seco landscapes of her youth, the design heritage of her grandfather Henry Mather Greene and grand-uncle Charles Sumner Greene, her education and early career as a botanist and illustrator, and finally her designs as a landscape architect. Similarly, Greene’s gardens fuse her clients’ tastes, inspired engineering, the surrounding environment, and a keen sense of the immutable qualities of nature itself. “Designing a garden is all about movement,” explains Isabelle. “Never does a garden arrive — it is forever becoming. Time is the factor which renders to the garden its special character. There are also weighty elements: craggy, eternal things like rocks; earthy things like tractors, imponderable things like ‘regulatory bodies’... And there are also the gossamer, unpredictable overlays: frost, reflections, shadows, dews. The interplay among these different spectrums provides a garden’s intense richness.” Isabelle nurtures a particular passion for southern California landscapes, originally engendered by family camping trips when she was a child. Her respect for the lay of the natural landscape informs even her most highly crafted designs — if there is no water element, she might, for example, create a ‘stream’ of flagstones to punctuate the contours or lead the eye subconsciously from one space to another. Textures, as well as shapes and colors, inspire her designs, and found objects often become part of her palette as well. An artist of nature, Isabelle has an almost mystical connection to her work. “Final outcomes,” she notes,” are a glimpse into meanings far beneath the surface and far beyond our consciousness. They let the visitor in on secrets that are so satisfying, they needn’t even be comprehended.”
Nathan Hayden is an American artist from West Virginia who began his art career as a child, drawing and carving the outdoors that surrounded him. He earned a BFA from Miami University in 2001, and in 2009 earned an MFA from UC Santa Barbara. His childhood experiences of woodcarving, as well as early interests in biology and engineering are present in his multi-media works which portray landscapes superimposed with organic psychedelic patterns. Hayden’s pieces are surrealist in nature, and his more recent works are minimalist depictions of alien worlds that are inspired by the American southwest. He constructs new environments which have been likened to Dr. Seuss and Grimm Fairy Tales because of the elements of cartoon and mythology displayed therein. While Hayden currently works and resides in Santa Barbara, his art has been on display in the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville, the David Shelton Gallery in Houston, and numerous galleries and museums throughout Southern California.
Born in Los Angeles on April 19th, 1951, Mary Heebner’s work is rooted in the spirituality of ancient relics, land, and the emotional power they hold as they are weaved into foundational cultural narratives. Through fragmentation and collage in her abstract and figurative pieces, Heebner explores the intimate process of creating historical narratives that occurs by piecing together physical and fictional references. Grounded in an anthropological lens, Heebner draws subject matter from her travels, attentive to the local culture and distinct mythologies surrounding the ancient objects and landscape she reinterprets. Through reworking these physical articles, she expresses the intangible responses they illicit. Her range of mediums include handmade paper works, drawings and paintings, with overarching aesthetic qualities including muted colors and fluid brushstrokes. Graduating in 1973 with a BA from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara and later receiving an MFA in 1977, Heebner based her artistic career in Santa Barbara. Beyond art, Heebner is a writer as well, founding Simplemente Maria Press in 1995 and publishing over 15 multimedia books. Her works can be found in public and private collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art.
Mary Heilmann is an American artist born in 1940 in San Francisco, California. She received a BA in English from UC Santa Barbara in 1962, and she earned a MA from the UC Berkeley, in 1967. Her works are mostly abstract paintings, ceramics, and furniture. These works cover a rich backstory woven from her imagination and references to musical and aesthetic influences. She sometimes draws inspiration from the saturated colors of cartoons, which is why her work emphasizes a rich sense of color. Her abstract works are often mixed spatial environments, combining several canvases into new pieces, or creating two-color paintings and photographs in the form of prints, slides, and videos. Heilmann sometimes displays her artworks next to chairs and benches she designs, openly inviting viewers to socialize and reflect on her work.
HONDECOETER, Melchior de
Melchior de Hondecoeter, a Dutch animalier painter, was born in Utrecht and died in Amsterdam. After the start of his career, he painted virtually exclusively bird subjects, usually exotic or game, in park-like landscapes. Hondecoeter also painted wall hangings with views of buildings and parks. His earliest works are more conscientious, lighter and more transparent than his later ones. At all times he is bold of touch and sure of eye, giving the motion of birds with great spirit and accuracy. Hondecoeter was greatly favoured by the magnates of the Netherlands and in 1659 was made a member of the painters’ academy at The Hague, where he lived until he moved to Amsterdam in 1663. During these years the artist began to specialize in paintings of birds and still lifes with hunting motifs and dead game. His mature style can be related to the work of the animal and still-life painter Frans Snyders, whose paintings Hondecoeter admired and collected. From Snyders, Hondecoeter borrowed the compositional device of locating birds and other animals in the centre of the foreground with others to one side, on occasions cut off by the edge of the canvas. He used this formula throughout his career. All his compositions of this type have a wall, fence, tree or classical ruin that occupies half of the middle ground, while the remainder is occupied by a landscape. Despite repeating this formula in most of his works, his paintings reveal a degree of individuality with variations evident in the animals and birds in the foreground. He also depicted scenes in which the birds are attacked or frightened by other animals, allowing for a depiction of movement. Hondecoeter was a prolific artist and highly regarded in his own lifetime. His works were appreciated for their technical skill and decorative qualities and were much imitated by his contemporaries.
Yoshiro Ikeda was a Japanese contemporary ceramic artist born in 1947 in Kagoshima, Japan. As a child, he was taught Zen meditation and calligraphy, which informed his future artistic endeavors. His artistic career started in 1970, when he received his BA in painting and drawing from Portland State University. He went on to work under avant-garde ceramist Yagi Kazuo in Kyoto City College of Fine Arts, and afterwards received his MFA in Ceramics in 1977 from UC Santa Barbara. Just one year later, he became a professor at Kansas State University's Department of Art, where he worked until 2012. Kazuo’s avant-garde influence is seen clearly in Ikeda’s ceramic work, as he was not afraid to experiment with asymmetricality, bold carvings, and nontraditional glazing techniques. His childhood experiences with Zen Buddhism as well as the rise of modernist formalism in the 1970s are also seen in his art, as his compositions tended to show geometric forms and large fields of brushstrokes. He died in 2014 in Oregon at the age of 67.
Garrick Imatani currently resides in Portland, Oregon where he works as a multimedia artist​ and university educator. He has received an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and​ a BA in Art Studio from UC Santa Barbara. Imatani has been an artist-in-residence at the​ Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Ragdale Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and was a Ford Family Foundation Resident Artist for the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in 2015 and at the Ucross Foundation in 2016. Imatani’s interests and observations in his work revolve around the physical use and organization of public space, social rituals, performative history and monuments. His work often integrates whimsical elements with anger and outrage, creating a delicate balance that puts into question the intricacies of socio-political conflict in public spaces. Imatani’s work has been exhibited at Art in General (2004), Asian American Arts Centre (2003), Incident Report in New York (2012); the Schneider Museum of Art (2015), as well as the Portland Museum of Art (2014) and Institute for Contemporary Art in Maine. He has received awards and funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Maine Arts Commission, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Percent for Art Program and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
Receiving his MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 1966, Jerry Kearns was born in Petersburg, Virginia in 1943 and creates large-scale whimsical and dark graphic paintings. Since the 1980’s Kearns has created “psychological pop” paintings, which have been exhibited in the United States and internationally, focusing on the impact of consumerism and mass media on people’s conceptions of themselves and reality. His artistry draws on his own experiences growing up in the United States and witnessing the blending of politics, entertainment, and truth in the media. He personally saw this transformation occur first-hand beginning with the Reagan administration. The subject matter is also based in personal tragedy, as his wife passed away in 2016 due to pancreatic cancer caused by the toxic air in New York City, an environmental crisis denied and covered up by the Bush administration. His sought-after pop art pieces juxtapose famous images and figures from Western iconography in violent scenes of conflict but without a clear victor. Sometimes humorous, sometimes morbid and often both, these acrylic on canvas artworks reflect the hypocrisies and absurdities that lie within the confusing landscape of American cultural politics and ideologies.
Dimitri Kozyrev lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah. He received his BFA from Ohio University in 1997 and his MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2000. Having been born and raised in Leningrad, U.S.S.R., his paintings consider the covert and overt remains of war and trauma on landscapes, while also nodding towards the capacity for our landscapes—and hence us—to heal. Kozyrev’s style is characterized by dynamic bursts of color and by Modernist and Constructivist arrangements of space. His work has been displayed in solo exhibitions in Modern West, The Mark Moore Gallery, Cirrus Gallery, and Perception Gulf Coast Museum of Art, and he has been featured in The L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, and Artweek, among others. In addition to producing art, he has served as a Lecturer at UC Santa Barbara and as a Professor of Painting at the University of Arizona.
Laura Krifka, born 1985 in Los Angeles, CA, incorporates cinematic elements borrowed from modern film in the composition of her paintings. In 2008, Krikfa received herBFA. from California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo; in 2010, she received her MFA from UC Santa Barbara. Her portraiture often depicts figures in the intimacy of domestic spaces, gazing out at the viewer and inviting our gaze in return. Her figures “occupy various states of undress, preparation, or play, expressing an ease with intimacy and an acknowledgement that the act of looking is a central component of desire.” Krifka’s psychologically-charged paintings hence construct and deconstruct the shifting tensions between subject and object, observer and observed, powerful and powerless. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, and the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art. She has also exhibited individually and collaboratively at the Torrance Museum of Art, CB1 Gallery, and BravinLee Programs, among many others. In 2017, she was awarded the Davyd-Whaley Artist Teacher Grant for her professorship at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, and has been reviewed in The L.A. Times, ARTPULSE Magazine, and The Huffington Post.
Visual artist Joyce Lightbody was born in 1954 in Providence, Rhode Island. She studied art at Kalamazoo College and the University of Rhode Island, until her junior year of college when Lightbody and her family moved to California. There, she received her BA in Art at the UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies in 1975. Lightbody is best known for her unique collage work, often presenting central elements of cartography, stamp use, and notation systems, both phonetic and musical. She has been included in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art and the Art Museum of South Texas, and spotlighted in solo shows at ACME Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Beyond visual arts, Lightbody has a notable passion for music, focusing on experimental, contemporary, and world beat genres. She has pursued this passion through a decade of a capella choral composition, as well as the release of her LP, Bear Ears and Other Songs. Lightbody has also had a career in teaching, at both UC Los Angeles and Otis College of Art and Design.
Lungren, Fernand b. United States, 1857-1932
Fernand Harvey Lungren was among Santa Barbara’s most distinguished artists of the early twentieth century. Although he began his career as part of the circle of the American artist William Merritt Chase and spent an extended period in Paris where he was influenced by the work of James McNeill Whistler, it was Lungren’s journey to the American Southwest that most profoundly affected him. Sponsored by the Santa Fe Railroad which wished to commission images of the Southwest to entice eastern tourists, Lungren made his first excursions west in the early 1890s. By the 1920s, Lungren’s Santa Barbara studio became a center for the local arts scene where the artist displayed his Native American artifacts alongside canvases depicting the glowing, solitary beauty of the American desert. It was Lungren’s intent that his collections be given to “people of the City of Santa Barbara” for public enjoyment and edification. In his will, the artist bequeathed his painting collection, a body of 188 paintings and 131 drawings, to the Santa Barbara Teachers’ College, the forerunner to the UC Santa Barbara, and his collection of Native American artifacts to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. It was Lungren’s wish that the gift of his collection “will result in as much pleasure to the community as I have in making it.”
Mahu was born in Antwerp. Little is known about his training before he became master of the Guild of St. Luke in 1638. In 1633 he married Brigitta Wolfvoet, who was the daughter of the painter and art dealer Victor Wolfvoet I and brother of the painter Victor Wolfvoet II. It is possible that his father-in-law was his master. Mahu was a versatile painter who practiced in various genres including still lifes, genre scenes and seascapes. He was not always an original painter but showed a very high level of craftsmanship in his compositions – his work captures the spectator's eye with its vibrant contrasts of light and dark. An important influence on his still lifes were the monochromatic "breakfast pieces" (ontbijtjes) or 'banquet pieces' (banketjes) of the Haarlem school of still life painters such as Pieter Claesz. He stressed realism in his still lifes while also incorporating the vanitas symbols so typical in northern Europe at the time. Furthermore, Mahu was one of a few Flemish artists who painted 'guardroom scenes'. Guardroom scenes are a type of genre scene that had become popular in the mid-17th century, particularly in the Dutch Republic. They often included mercenaries and prostitutes dividing booty, harassing captives or indulging in other forms of reprehensible activities. Reminiscent of the work of 16th century painters in Antwerp, Mahu was known to often include a religious scene within his guardroom compositions. Although better known for his still lifes and genre scenes, Mahu produced a number of seascapes usually depict ships in distress surrounded by a raging sea and heavy clouds. His palette uses a mixture of greens and browns.
The Master of the 40s is the name given by the art historian Max J Friedlander to the painter of an anonymous group of approximately thirty known portraits. This artist is called the Master of the 40s because most of his paintings are dating to the 1540’s. He worked mainly in Antwerp, painting portraits of wealthy, middle-class men and women. During the 1540’s, Antwerp was the center for art in Northern Europe. It was also one of the most populated cities in Europe and the leading trade and banking center of the Netherlands. Portraits were regarded as an essential part of the interior decoration of the houses of the well-to-do which naturally led to a strong demand in the market. As the painting of portraits was regarded as more of a craftsman-like imitation of nature than a creative invention, the names of artists tended not to be recorded. Furthermore, with two exceptions, the Master’s sitters are unidentified. The Master is often regarded as a follower of Joos van Cleve (1485-1540), because his period of activity from 1540-1551 began immediately after van Cleeve’s death. Where van Cleeve’s varietous clients at court pushed his artistic range, the Master worked primarily for the bourgeoisie merchant class and demonstrated a sense of uniformity in his depictions of facial features. These portrayals, executed with a qualitative assurance and objectivity, also suggest neat and solid craftsmanship. They are also devoid of coats-of-arms or other distinguishing emblems, which marks them as members of the upper middle class rather than the aristocracy. The Master typically painted portraits in half-length formats, in which the sitter’s head is viewed frontally or slights turned to the side, set close to the top of the panel. Furthermore, he often painted a monochrome backdrop of intermediate brightness in order to emphasize the sitters’ silhouettes and allow the flesh parts to stand out. The velvety rendering of sitters’ eyebrows is another noteworthy characteristic of the artist, as are long, conical fingers with oval nails. Often, his sitters hold a glove in their hand – holding a glove (or pair of gloves) was a standard trademark of a gentleman in early Netherlandish portraiture. This gesture, along with the sitters’ severe expressions and the painterly clarity epitomise how the Master conformed with the traditional conventions Netherlandish portraiture, which aimed to stress the decency, respectability, and moral purity of the sitter. Overall, the impression of his portraits is one of vivid clarity encapsulated in a veneer of high gloss
MASTER OF THE INVESTITURE OF ST. ILDEFONSO
The Master of St. Ildefonso was named after his most important work, a triptych depicting The Investiture of St. Ildefonso. The unidentified master, a close follower of Hans Memling, was active in Bruges in the late 15th century. Bruges was a flourishing port city and the favored residence of the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century. Trade in the port of Bruges and the textile industry turned the Netherlands into the wealthiest part of Northern Europe at the end of the 15th century. Thus, nobles and rich traders in the area were able to commission artists, creating a class of highly skilled painters and musicians who were admired and requested around the continent. This led to frequent exchanges between the Low Countries and Northern Italy. After this we begin to see Renaissance influences, but unlike the Italian Renaissance, Gothic elements remain important. Biblical scenes were depicted with more naturalism, which made their content more accessible to viewers, while individual portraits became more evocative and alive. Though the medium of oil paint had been in use since the late Middle Ages, the artists of the North more fully exploited this medium’s unique characteristics. Using thin layers of paint, called glazes, northern artists created a depth of color that was entirely new, and because oil paint can imitate textures far better than fresco or tempera, it was perfectly suited to representing the material reality that was so important to Renaissance artists and their patrons. In the Northern Renaissance, we see artists making the most of oil paint—creating the illusion of light reflecting on metal surfaces or jewels, and textures that appear like real fur, hair, wool or wood.
Mary Miss is a trained sculptor specializing in site-specific art and architecture as well as installation art and landscape design. She was born in 1944 in New York City and spent much of her childhood moving around particularly in the Western United States. In 1966, she graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a BA in Art, and obtained an MFA from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture within the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1968. From the 1970s, Mary Miss has worked with the subject of art in the public sphere and addressed relevant issues, such as environmentalism and feminism. In her art. South Cove (1984), in Battery Park City, New York, and Framing Union Square (1992-2000) at the Fourteenth Street Union Square Subway Station, New York, are just a couple among many significant engaging works she has created in public areas for viewers to interact with. She has also been featured in exhibitions including Weather Report: Art and Climate Change (curated by Lucy Lippard at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists (Aldrich Museum, 1971), and many more in museums, universities, and other artistic institutions. Her work highlighting pressing issues in tangible artworks has received a considerable amount of attention and she has been presented with awards such as the Urban Land Institute’s Award for Excellence.
John Nava was born in 1947 in San Diego, California. He pursued his undergraduate studies at​ UC Santa Barbara in 1969 completing his MFA at Villa Schifanoia, Graduate School of Fine Art, Florence, Italy in 1973. Nava’s renowned work is held by both private and public collections in Japan, Europe, and the United States. His famed work includes paintings and original tapestries commissioned as public works, and in Japan he was commissioned to design and sculpt a mural and large fountain for the Tokyo Grain Exchange. Nava’s most celebrated works are the large tapestries he designed for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles titled, The Communion of Saints​ and The Baptism of the Lord​​. In 1999, commissioned by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, he designed a series of panel tapestries that were able to enhance the musical quality and acoustics of the vast space. Nava perfected the balance of this forgotten artform with the new work media and showing the beauty of faith with the work entitled, The Communion of Saints​​. His other tapestry designs include the Trojan Family tapestry for the University of Southern California. His latest exhibition in 2019 was partnered with the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks titled, Empathy Beneath the​ Surface​.
PSEUDO PIER FRANCESCO FIORENTINO
Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino is a name coined by the art historian Bernard Berenson in 1932 to describe an artist whose work was previously confused with that of Pier Francesco Fiorentino. The numerous works attributed to this anonymous master do not in fact resemble Pier Francesco's oeuvre and are instead well-crafted adaptations of paintings by Pesellino and Filippo Lippi. A few are copies of whole compositions, such as the Virgin Adoring the Christ Child in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence, which replaced Lippi's original. The Pseudo-Pier Francesco’s works derived from Lippi's designs (all from paintings dating from the 1450s) often combine motifs from more than one composition. Pesellino's Madonnas were another frequent resource for the master. Works by Pseudo-Pier Francesco are all characterised by a lavish, archaic use of gold leaf, and many include elaborate rose-hedge backgrounds. In 1976 the art historian Federico Zeri noted that this "artist" was in fact a workshop of artists imitating the compositions, figural groups, and motifs from Filippo Lippi and Pesellino. It is possible that the artist or workshop had direct contact with these two artists and copied from their original paintings. Yet another art historian, Creighton Gilbert, proposed in 1988 that the Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino is actually the Italian artist Riccardo di Benedetto, also known as "Riccardo delle nostre donne" for his painted Madonnas. In any case, this artist or workshop specialized in half-length Madonna and Child compositions with limited variations in the background or in the attendant saints or angels.
Harry Reese, one of UC Santa Barbara’s many pioneers, created and developed the university’s highly regarded Book Arts Program. With the intention to study Political Science at UC Santa Barbara in 1965, Reese eventually graduated and earned a Master of Arts degree in Religious Studies. As well as a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Brown University. While earning his MFA at Brown, Reese established his own publishing imprint and printed his own books, much to his success. In 1977 Reese and his wife, Sandra, decided to return to Isla Vista, and after asking to serve UC Santa Barbara’s staff and being initially rejected, Reese started a class called “The Art of the Book” at UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies. After gaining much praise and popularity, “The Art of the Book” class transformed into the Book Arts Program, officially established in 1985. After many years as the Book Art Program Director and other positions, such as the Chair of the Art Studio from 1996 to 2000 and again in 2004, Reese decided to retire in 2018.
Adam Ross was born in Los Angeles, California in 1962. After graduating from UC Santa​ Barbara with a BA in Art in 1984, Ross began his career as a painter. His work balances abstraction with realism by layering bold explosions of color, texture, and shapes, resulting in landscapes reminiscent of urban cities falling into chaos. Ross’s meticulous and labor-intensive​ process of layering paint often results in incredibly nuanced, intricate variations of saturated color that lend his surface an immersive, almost vortex-like quality. In 1988 Ross became a​ fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He then​ returned to UC Santa Barbara​ in 1988 to receive his MFA. He currently works and resides in Los​ Angeles, and has since become a William Dole Fellow and research grant recipient at the UC Santa Barbara. His artwork has been featured in exhibitions in the United Kingdom, France, The Netherlands, and all across the United States in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C, and Seattle. In addition to his artistic achievements, Ross has also been a major contributor and featured author in multiple books and articles on contemporary art.
Ilene Segalove, a Los Angeles native born in 1950,​​ is a conceptual artist best known for​ her work in videography. Segalove’s introduction to video art began with the guidance of Billy Adler, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. Segalove received her BA in Fine Arts from UC Santa Barbara in 1972, before going on to receive a master’s degree in Communication Art at Loyola Marymount University in 1975. She continues to live and work in the Los Angeles area, with exhibitions spanning from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to contemporary art museums in Paris. Since the 1970s, Segalove has received several National Endowment for the Arts grants for her contributions to photography, video, and radio. Segalove’s love of these mediums developed as she watched television as a child, becoming infatuated with notions of projected façades and realities. In a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, she stated, “I​ think the fine line between fact and fiction, that line was what I saw when I watched television.” In the midst of creating witty and self-reflective art, Segalove has also taught new generations of artists at several California universities, including her Santa Barbara alma mater.
American sculptor, Richard Serra, was born in San Francisco in 1938 and died in 2024. He is well known for his abstract, large-scale steel sculptures reaching up to 14 feet. Serra studied at UC Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and later attended Yale University to study painting. He was introduced to metalworking as a child through his father’s occupation, and worked in steel mills in his college years. Serra is not concerned with pictorial representation, but rather the sheer materiality of sculpture and how it interacts with real time and space. There is a timeless quality to Serra’s work, considering how it depends on the environment in which it inhabits. His large installations are unapologetic: blocking off a space or demanding viewers to alter their path of walking. Tilted Arc​​, one of Serra’s most controversial installations, occupied the New York City Federal Plaza from 1981 to 1989. It garnered so many complaints from civilians forced to walk through the plaza, that it was ultimately removed. This instance exemplifies Serra’s intention to challenge viewers’ perceptions of space, gravity, and weight.
Wolfgang Stoerchle was a conceptual artist born in 1944 in Titisee-Neustadt, Germany. Stoerchle later lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Los Angeles, California in the United States. He attended the University of Oklahoma for his undergraduate degree and UC Santa Barbara for graduate studies, receiving an MFA in 1968. His works that followed employed the media of performance and video, many of which were made in Southern California. He performed in a group called California Time Machine, which included artists Miles Varner and Daniel Lentz, and in 1970, Stoerchle was enlisted by Allan Kaprow to teach in the Post-Studio Art program at the California Institute of Arts. Stoerchle was known for his new perspectives about what constitutes art, even using technological visuals of his own body as works. Many of his artworks and public displays also engaged themes of sexuality and psychosexuality. Even after his death in 1976 while he was living in New Mexico, Stoerchle’s impact on art was honored through exhibits such as Art on Camera: Photographs by Shunk-Kender, 1960-1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2015.
TAEKO, Tomiyama b. Japan
Tomiyama Taeko was a visual artist born in Kobe, Japan, in 1921. After living as a young woman in Manchuko, a puppet state of the Japanese empire, and briefly studying art in Tokyo, Taeko created works in various media to tell the stories of Japan’s marginalized groups, reckon with Japan’s history of colonization, and address other sociopolitical issues of east Asia. From the 1980s onward, her work incorporated indigenous Asian mythology to critique Euro-American-centric values in modernism. A Tale of Sea Wanderers ties together threads of her previous works, ambitiously tackling imperialism, environmentalism, capitalism, traditional folklore, and transnational history in a single series of paintings and mixed media collage. Taeko died in 2021 in Tokoyo, Japan. Her work has been exhibited globally in Japan, South Korea, and the United States.
Contemporary artist Andy Warhol, born in Pittsburg Pennsylvania in 1928, is a seminal figure of the American Pop-Art movement and often considered one of the most important postwar artists of the 20th century. His practice spans from photography, sculpture, film, painting, and most notable, silkscreen images. Originally hoping to be a teacher, Warhol studied art education at the University of Pittsburgh then went on to study commercial art at Carnegie Mellon University. At the beginning of Warhol’s professional career as an artist, he worked as an illustrator for women’s magazines in New York. During this time Warhol began experimenting with a style that appeared to be mass production, which brought him later fame with his silkscreen works exploring the commercial obsessions of postwar America. Warhol’s practice typically takes people and objects from mainstream America and flattens both their dimension and color to create and mass-produced image. In 1963 Warhol opened his infamous studio, dubbed ‘The Factory’ where he would host large parties and work on a variety of multimedia projects including silkscreens, pictures, film, and sculpture. Here, collaboration became an important part of his practice with members of his Factory retinue, which included Edie Sedgwick. In 1987, at the age of 58, Warhol died of complications following a gallbladder surgery. Today his artworks remain some of the most recognizable contemporary imagery. Sources: "Andy Warhol: Biography". Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. 2002. Archived from the original on July 24, 2010.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Leslie Wayne was born in Germany in 1953, and later moved to California where she attended UC Santa Barbara. She then moved to New York and received her BFA in sculpture from the Parsons School of Design in New York. She settled in New York, taking advantage of its artistically stimulating environment. Wayne is well known for her highly dimensional oil paintings. With many of her pieces taking a literal three-dimensional form, her work challenges traditional painting and sculpture by combining aspects of both disciplines. Using various colors, she builds up paint layer by layer to create visually interesting and organically shaped works. In an interview with Figure/Ground Communications, Wayne mentions that her work is inspired by geological forces such as compression, subduction, and morphogenesis. Her more recent work plays with ideas of illusion by portraying realistic scenes of three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional manner.
Stephen Westfall was born in 1953 in Schenectady, New York. Westfall attended UC Santa Barbara for 8 years, receiving his BA in 1975, followed by his MFA three years later. In 1984, Westfall’s first solo exhibition at the Tracey Garet Gallery in New York was wonderfully received by critics for his particular, dynamic style of abstract geometry. This gave way to numerous future group and survey exhibitions as well as a number of solo shows, in the United States and internationally. He has received awards and grants including, but not limited to, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Westfall’s style is geometric, vibrant, clean, and consistent. He draws inspiration from architecture and its bold, ever present nature, as well as colors, and the way in which the two elements collaborate. Since 2007, wall painting has become an essential genre of Westfall’s work, effectively combining his favorite aspects of both architecture and painting. Along with his career as a visual artist, Westfall also teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, as well as the graduate program at Bard University. Additionally, Westfall is a contributing editor for contemporary art magazine Art in America. Please enjoy his work at the AD&AM by clicking on the following http://128.111.216.62/admin/items/edit/4666 http://128.111.216.62/admin/items/edit/3122
Renowned for his rolling landscapes and detailed depiction of horses, Philips Wouwerman was born in Haarlem in 1619. He was the eldest son of the painter Pouwels Joosten and his fourth wife, Susanna van den Bogertwaga. Philips most likely received his first painting lessons from his father but none of his father’s work has been identified making impossible to determine the extent of his influence on his son’s work. Wouwerman next apprenticed to Frans Hals and then travelled to Germany were he spent several weeks working in Hamburg and studying with history painter Evert Decker. He also married Annetje Pietersz van Broeckhof. In 1640, Wouwerman became a member of the Haarlem painters' guild and beginning in 1646 held the office of vinder (painting inventory). In the following years his presence in Haarlem is well documented but because of the many southern elements in his landscapes it has been suggested that Wouwerman travelled to France or Italy. However, there is no documentary evidence of his having left Haarlem for any length of time. Wouwerman died in May of 1668 and was buried three days in Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem. Having attained a certain degree of wealth, upon his widow’s death, large sums of money were left to each of his seven childern. Wouwerman has been celebrated as one the most prolific artists during the 17th and 18th century and was highly collected by European princes.