Contemporary Paintings for Sale:
“Lisa Breslow: From This Place”
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
New York, New York
www.markelfinearts.com
February 20 – March 29, 2025

From the gallery:

Lisa Breslow painted this collection of work during a period of immense productivity following the devastating loss of her husband. The act of making became a solace for the artist and she focused this energy to push her painting further than ever before. Each distinct brushstroke is more confident and bold and each scene deeply emotionally resonant. Her rich surfaces reveal the time and care spent with every mark.

Breslow’s paintings are reflective, personal expressions of her everyday surroundings. The process of choosing what to paint is intuitive, as she describes it, “I tend to gravitate toward scenes that are quieter and more meditative. It’s always the lighting that draws me in initially, with its interplay of colors and forms that evokes a particular feeling or mood. When I see it, I know immediately that this is something I would want to paint.”

Each composition sits at an intersection of busy city life and the quiet of nature. The artist distills these experiences into introspective snapshots that feel both optimistic and tender as she captures the memory of a place.

Lisa Breslow has exhibited extensively in the United States, including recently at the Heritage Museum and the Heckscher Museum. She has been awarded two Pollock-Krasner Foundation awards, as well as an award from the National Academy Museum in New York, and was an Invited Artist at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking. She lives and works in New York City.

Attention Art Collectors!
May 20-22, 2025: Visit the Plein Air Convention & Expo’s robust pop-up art gallery at the Nugget Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, where hundreds of artists, including our master faculty, will have studio and plein air paintings for sale. Register for the full event at PleinAirConvention.com now.

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“Rachel Ruysch — Nature into Art,” the first-ever retrospective of the Dutch still life painter Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), is set to launch its international tour at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, part of the Bavarian State Painting Collections. Until now, relatively scant attention has been paid to this successful female artist who spent her six-decade-long career in Amsterdam.

Rachel Ruysch — Nature into Art
Alte Pinakothek
Munich
pinakothek.de
Through March 16, 2025 (and more)

Ruysch became renowned for painting large, highly detailed flower arrangements — sumptuous bouquets and fruits teeming with insects and butterflies. She was the daughter of Frederik Ruysch, a professor of anatomy and botany, whose collection of specimens inspired her. In 1701, she became the first woman admitted to the artistic society Confrerie Pictura in The Hague, and seven years later she was appointed court painter to the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf. Moreover, she was the mother of 11 children.

On view are more than 200 exhibits, including Ruysch’s most important works borrowed from public and private collections across Europe and the U.S. These are complemented by manuscripts, prints, drawings, and specimens, as well as paintings by her teacher Willem van Aelst and her contemporaries, including other women. The curatorial team has partnered with botanists, zoologists, and historians of science to contextualize Ruysch’s work.

The exhibition will move to Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art (April 13–July 27, 2025), which was the first American museum to acquire Ruysch’s work (in 1956), and finally the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (August 23–December 7, 2025).

Art Collection Spotlight > Ever since Dennis Elliott met the artist Judith Linhares in 1978, he has followed her work, along with the white rabbit she has frequently included in her paintings. Like Alice who chased that animal down the hole into Wonderland, Elliott, a prolific artist himself as well as the founder of the International Curatorial Studio Program (ICSP), has followed the progression of scenes Linhares paints and produces in her Brooklyn studio.

“Much of her work is a bit like what you’d find in Wonderland, as if Lewis Carroll might have constructed his stories in paint,” says Elliott, who in 1994 founded ICSP, an influential nonprofit which, to date, has brought some 2,500 mid-career artists from 88 countries to New York City for residencies.

While Elliott has long admired the fantastical nudes for which Linhares is best known, he has developed a particular penchant for her still lifes. This work above, “Go Tell Alice” (2022), represents exactly what Elliott most admires about Linhares’s canvases. “It’s very lush, it’s radiant, it’s easy to like, it’s delicious,” he says. “I consider her flower paintings second only to Van Gogh’s, though I have to admit I like hers even better.”

Although Linhares has had a successful career as an artist and teacher since she moved to New York from her native California in the 1970s, she has long been regarded as “an artist’s artist,” Elliott observes. But with a solo show at Florida’s Sarasota Art Museum in 2022, multiple shows and ongoing representation at the New York gallery P.P.O.W., and a solo show in 2023 at London’s Massimodecarlo, Linhares is increasingly known to a wider public.

Elliott particularly admires her ability to paint still lifes from memory. “In that sense, this painting and others are very un-still life,” he says, noting that it wasn’t until the early 1990s that she embraced the genre as one of her preferred forms. “With this particular work by Judy, there are references that draw people into the painting right away.” He points not only to the rabbit, seemingly about to hop off the canvas, but also the depiction in a corner of an iconic photograph that shows the late abstract painter and actress Deborah Remington playing a set of bongos.

“I happen to know that Deborah was a hero of Judy’s, and she likes how this photo of her represents a significant kind of freedom. What could sum up freedom more than playing the drums on a hot day on a Southern California beach with not much on?”

As a painter who describes his own canvases as “featuring forms that often look like things floating in outer space,” Elliott admires Linhares’s ability to carefully construct paintings. “She is like Van Gogh in that way,” he says, “for she understands how to develop space on a canvas and then be very attentive to brushwork. She’s always conscious of the position of the painting and where the edges of the canvas are.”

Having watched her progression over the decades, Elliott knows that paintings of hers that may look easy and spontaneous are, in fact, the result of weeks of work. “Nothing of hers is done in an afternoon. She paints and erases and takes paint away and then adds paint again. It’s a process.”

Elliott confesses that it took years for him to admire still lifes by any painter. “It came with age,” he recalls. “Normally, as a young snotty grad student at what’s now called the California College of the Arts, where coincidentally Judy was studying at the same time, though we didn’t know each other, I would have been dismissive of the genre. Now, I find great, radiantly colored still lifes like this one to be sources of solace, to be contemplative. All of Judy’s paintings provide that for me.”

View more art collection spotlights here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

For art collectors, a behind-the-scenes look at how one contemporary artist creates a still life painting helps us appreciate even more the vision and skill it takes to do this, and makes us even more informed about why we buy art to enjoy at home.

Endless Inspiration! How I Create a Still Life Painting

by Pat Fiorello

I recently completed a series of paintings that I thought might be an opportunity to share a bit of the thinking process behind how I create my still life paintings.

I started with a couple of bouquets of white/blush/peachy roses as the initial spark to get things going. Once I had them on hand, cut them, put them in fresh water and let them set for a day to open up a bit more, I started the process of arranging them as inspiration for a painting.

I arrange the flowers in a way I would find pleasing as an arrangement in my own home, mindful of which flowers will be the main flowers or focal area and which are supporting cast to provide contrast in terms of size, orientation (i.e. facing front, sideways, down), texture, direction, etc.… I group flowers to create bigger masses of shape and color rather than separate things too much. Leaves can also be used to add contrast and define edges, especially near the main flowers.

Since there were quite a few flowers, I split them into two containers of different sizes and still had some I didn’t use. Sometimes I go into a painting with a specific idea of the mood or feeling I want to convey and select items that support that and other times I just play around with different props to see what sparks my interest. For the first painting, I chose some darker, more colorful containers as a contrast to the light flowers.

In my studio, as I’m creating a still life “setup” that will serve as inspiration, I will often take lots of photos, changing the background from dark to light which dramatically alters the mood and degree of contrast in the painting to come. The background is one of the most powerful tools you have to set a mood and often students will leave that as an afterthought, (later asking, “What should I do with my background?”), but it’s an integral part of the overall painting design and must be considered upfront, before the brush ever hits the canvas.

To me, having a darker, classical background projects a more dramatic mood, emphasizing the big shape of light against dark, while having a light background can feel a little fresher and contemporary, more upbeat with emphasis more on color than value. I’ll take photos both ways and see which one I have a greater personal response to that day. I follow my instincts on which one excites me more. I have to be excited to paint it. I want my paintings to have a sense of aliveness. If I’m feeling energized, that will show up on the canvas and vice versa. What artists choose to paint and how they choose to paint it are both part of the personal and authentic artistic voice.

I’ll often take photos in different formats – vertical, horizontal, even square, again paying attention to what feels most exciting. I might even look in a viewfinder (see below) to consider a different format. As I narrow down the mood, background, and format, I continue to add props (like smaller dishes, fruit, flowers on the tabletop, fabric), to add interest, contrast, or repetition of color, but also importantly provide a path of light, and eye movement throughout the painting.

I’ll also adjust direct lighting to make sure it emphasizes what I want. Objects will be added in, taken out, moved until the movement, spacing, and balance feel just right. This could take some time, but it’s worth it because, unlike a landscape or portrait, with a still life you are creating your composition from nothing, rather than just editing what’s already there. That can be a little intimidating, but also empowering, freeing, and fun once you get into it.

The first painting I did was in a vertical format, which reinforced the height of the primary vase. I was envisioning light coming in from the top right flowers, traveling down the main bouquet through the smaller bouquet, and then over to the gold dish and white flower on the table in somewhat of a figure “S” pattern. I simplified the texture on the containers since I wanted more detail on the main flowers and not too much competition from other areas of the painting. The title is “Wonderland,” based on the name of the flower bouquet I ordered.

While the flowers were still fresh, I decided to do a second painting – a simpler scene that allowed me to have greater detail on the vase itself. The composition has fewer elements and while the background is light, the shadows still hold the bouquet in and offer some contrast.

In this one, I think the vase is more of the story and I have called it “Emerald.” I had a lot of fun figuring out how to convey that beautiful pottery with a palette knife (while holding my breath at first).

After about a week, the flowers were starting to die off, but I pulled the surviving ones out and rearranged them in a copper pitcher for a totally different look and color palette, with warmer lighting. This painting is titled “Copper Tones.”

All three of these paintings were in a vertical format, but I also was attracted to the horizontal format with more drama, so did a fourth, larger painting in that type of composition. For this painting, I used photographs I took the first day since the real flowers were long gone. The result was “Winter Wonderland” which clearly has a different feel from the first painting, even though most of the elements were the same, except for the background and format of the canvas.

These four paintings started with the same bunch of flowers but ended up in very different places. I think I could have done 100 paintings based on that one bouquet. The opportunities are endless!

Yes, what they have in common are the same flowers – but that is just one element in a painting. As I am designing a still life, I am thinking beyond “things” (i.e. flowers) and considering all the tools of art: shape, value, color, edges, paint application. Plus considering the more intangible aspects of mood, energy, emotion. Making different choices in those tools, which make up the language of art, can evoke different feelings. And of course, the viewer brings his or her own lens and experiences resulting in their own personal emotional response.

As an artist, my aim is to go beyond merely reporting and describing the details of the flowers to transcending my subject – creating a feeling, capturing a moment of beauty.

You can see more of Pat’s art at patfiorello.com or follow her on Instagram @patfiorello. Pat’s instructional video, “Vibrant Flowers” is available at PaintTubeTV.com in DVD or digital format.

View more artist and collector profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

On the Easel: For art collectors, a behind-the-scenes look at how one contemporary artist creates a painting helps us appreciate even more the vision and skill it takes to do this, and makes us even more informed about why we buy art to enjoy at home.

On the Easel: A Timely Painting of a Poinsettia

Paint it Red!

By Pat Fiorello

One aspect of painting flowers that I enjoy is finding the different types available only for a season. This time of year, at least in North America, poinsettias are a holiday favorite available in abundance. Each year I try to paint some while I have access to the live plants.

I spied the beautiful light on this plant on an indoor porch but was not interested in painting it as the scene was, so I simplified the background in a neutral tone in Photoshop and thought it might be fun to try a square format.

I started the painting very loosely with an underpainting using only transparent oil paints. For the reds, I used mainly alizarin permanent plus touches of magenta, ultramarine blue, and even transparent oxide brown here and there just to vary it up.

Knowing I wanted a neutral background, I put in a warm underpainting for the background with the intent of coming in with a cooler grey tone on top of it later. At this point, with the underpainting blocked in, the edges of the underpainting are very soft and it’s easy to feel a bit lost, so I found key shapes, especially in the lights, by scraping out with a Kemper wipe-out tool. Adding in the background also helped to negatively paint around the petal shapes.

Finally, I reinforced the dark petals in shadow with more of the alizarin dark mixture initially laid down. For the petal shapes in light, I used cadmium red light. One tip I often give my students is to avoid adding white to red unless you want pink. White will make the reds cooler, less vibrant, and even chalky. I’d prefer to lighten the red with another color, like orange or yellow if needed.

In many cases, the value and temperature relationship between cad red light and the alizarin (with some of the other dark transparent colors mentioned above) will be enough to read light and shadow without having to add any white at all. I added a few small details in the center of the main poinsettia and some leaves in light and shadow and called it a day.

Happy Holidays!

Related > Pat’s “Vibrant Flowers” painting video is available at painttubetv.com.

View more artist and collector profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

“Still Life with a Bowl of Strawberries, Basket of Cherries, and Branch of Gooseberries” by French artist Louise Moillon is on public view for the first time in its history.

The Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas) has announced the acquisition of “Still Life with a Bowl of Strawberries, Basket of Cherries, and Branch of Gooseberries,” signed and dated 1631 by French artist Louise Moillon (1609/10–1696).

More from the museum:

“The Kimbell Art Museum is delighted to add to its renowned collection what is unquestionably a masterpiece by Louise Moillon,” said Eric Lee, director of the Kimbell. “The painting is an exceptionally well-preserved composition, a mysterious image of simple fruits painted in jewel tones on a wooden panel. It came to light for the first time just this year and is a prime example of Moillon’s keen observational skills and poetic approach to still life.”

The painting, which had long been in a family’s collection in central France, was unknown to scholars until its appearance at auction in March. The Kimbell purchased the painting from an American collector through the New York dealer Adam Williams. It joins another striking and innovative still life by a woman, “Still Life with Mackerel” (1787) by Anne Vallayer-Coster, acquired by the Kimbell in 2019.

Louise Moillon, who has been called the “unexpected genius of the period,” was among the greatest French still-life painters of the 17th century. Moillon’s paintings are remarkable for their elegance and restraint, the equilibrium of their compositions, and a delicate technique that reveals the qualities of fresh, ripe fruits and vegetables, provoking a sense of serenity.

Although the work of many painters of the period — especially female artists — remains unattributed, Louise Moillon signed and dated many of her pictures, enabling about 60 still lifes to be assigned to her hand. (She signed the Kimbell canvas with the archaic spelling of her name, Louyse.) Much remains unknown about her career, but archival documents show that Moillon earned renown in her own time. Five of her paintings of fruits are listed in the inventory of King Charles I of England (1600–1649).

Meticulously painted on oak panel, the Kimbell still life shows Moillon’s characteristic restraint, highlighting the appeal of the delectable fruit at its prime — ripe, firm, and succulent. The fruit containers are placed on a closely framed wooden tabletop that tilts slightly forward and whose edge is brought near the foreground. A strong light from the upper left illuminates the glistening red objects against a dark, shadowy background.

The wild strawberries — fraises des bois — in a blue and white Wanli bowl range in shape, size, and color, from deep garnet to white. Their soft, seeded texture suggests the delicacy of this fruit, whose spiky green calyxes remain intact to preserve their freshness, sweetness, and aroma. Bright, glossy cherries — perhaps the prized tart cherries from Montmorency, north of Paris — are heaped in a rustic wicker basket under a protective shield of deep green chestnut leaves; their sawtooth edges, outlined in a lighter tone, discourage the temptation to pluck one of the polished spheres by its rugged stem.

The little branch of gooseberries placed in the lower right foreground balances the basket and bowl; two of the gooseberries, jade-green globes, are strategically placed at the very edge of the table to create a tactile spatial illusion. Just above, a single ruby cherry invites admiration. Throughout the composition, Moillon creates a simple yet sophisticated balance of color and tone.

Moillon’s sincere approach to still life — excluding anecdote and symbolism — reflects 17th-century French agricultural reforms and the keen market in Paris for fresh fruit and vegetables. The nobility and bourgeoisie took pride in the fresh produce cultivated in their country estates and gardens. In the fields and orchards that abounded in the countryside outside the capital, women and children would pick the fruit late in the day so that it could be transported to the city by morning and sold at market.

The peaches, plums, apricots, grapes, cherries, and wild strawberries, along with vegetables such as artichokes and asparagus, that we see in Louise Moillon’s still lifes and market scenes represent the produce that would have been scrupulously selected for freshness and flavor by ladies, their cooks, and their maidservants and proudly served at the table.

The Moillon painting is the most recent of several acquisitions by the Kimbell, timed to the 50th anniversary of the museum’s founding, including a bronze vessel from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1050 BC); a larger-than-life-sized sculpture, “The Mountain (La Montagne),” designed by Aristide Maillol in 1937 and posthumously cast; a 16th-century alabaster statue of the Virgin and Child, from the Atelier of Saint-Léger in Troyes, France; “Dog Guarding a Basket of Grapes” (1836), an impressive still life by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller; and three pastels by Kimbell architect Louis I. Kahn.

ABOUT LOUISE MOILLON

Louise Moillon was born in Paris in 1609 or 1610 to Nicolas Moillon (c. 1580–1619), a Protestant painter and picture dealer, and Marie Gilbert (d. 1630), the daughter of a wealthy goldsmith. Nicolas Moillon was among the earliest French artists to prosper as an art merchant; he leased a house on the Pont Notre-Dame and purchased several stalls near Saint-Germain-des-Prés abbey, the site of an important fair near which a community of northerners and Protestant artists had settled.

After Louise’s father died in 1619, her mother married François Garnier (c. 1600–1658), likewise a Protestant master painter and art dealer. An inventory taken after her mother’s death in 1630 — when Louise was 20 — listed 13 paintings and testifies to her precocity and productivity. As a young artist in the heart of the Parisian art trade, Louise was ideally situated to study exuberant still-life paintings by Flemish and Dutch artists and paintings in a more sober and less decorative manner by their contemporary French counterparts. The superior quality and elegant yet unpretentious style of Louise Moillon’s work speak clearly: at an early age, she had forged an original and singular idea of still life, distinctly French in character.

In 1640, when she was 30 years old, Louise married a prosperous Protestant lumber merchant, Étienne Girardot de Chancourt. The inventory following her husband’s death in 1680 details their material wealth — a sizable residence with luxury furnishings, a large library, and costly jewelry, as well as paintings, including a few still lifes of fruits that may have been painted by Louise — but nothing to give evidence to her continued activity as an artist. Moillon’s last known signed painting dates to 1641; she apparently stopped painting soon after her marriage in 1640 at age 30. This ending is so far unexplained. Perhaps the wealth and social status of her husband and her extensive family circle discouraged her from continuing her profession.

With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the French Protestant population was forced to convert publicly to Catholicism. Members of Louise Mollion’s extended family suffered persecution or imprisonment and some relocated outside France. Moillon herself remained in Paris, where she died in 1696. Her will indicates that she had no children (or if so, they predeceased her) and details generous bequests to her numerous relatives and heirs.

“The Art of Soon Y. Warren” opens at Art Gallery Prudencia in San Antonio, Texas runs through October 22, 2022.

Featured in the show are the paintings “Baby’s Breath Fantasy” (shown at top), “Joy of Sunflowers,” “Daisy in a Tiffany,” and more.

Soon Y. Warren is a full-time artist, teacher, and workshop instructor nationally and internationally. She was born in South Korea and currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Her favorite subjects are those found in nature, which inspire us in everyday life. “I’m inspired by the beauty and complexity of nature and our surroundings,” she says. “I try to paint the essence of my subjects using my sincere feelings for nature.”

Soon has an Associate Degree in Commercial Art. Since Soon began painting full time in 1998, she has had many exhibitions and has won numerous awards She is a signature member of the National Watercolor Society (NWS), American Watercolor Society (AWS), Southern Watercolor Artist (SW), Texas Watercolor Society, Purple Sage Brush (TWS), Transparent Watercolor Society (TWSA), and American Woman Artists (AWA).

Soon Warren’s paintings are in the permanent collections of private, corporate and educational institutions, both in the United States and abroad.

She also has a variety of art video workshops available through PaintTube.tv.

Learn more about the exhibition at prudenciagallery.com.

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Landscapes and Still Life Paintings on View > From April 1 through April 29, 2022, the F.A.N. Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) will present a one-person exhibition of works by painter Nancy Bea Miller. The first solo exhibition in several years of Miller’s still life and landscape paintings in oil, “Nancy Bea Miller: New Paintings” showcases the artist’s thoughtful and affirming representational work, at a time when we all need a little lift.

More than forty oil paintings comprise the exhibition in sizes ranging from a few inches to a few feet. The majority of the paintings were created during the recent pandemic and are described by Miller as “the expression of ideas and feelings that have been forming in my mind for many years. Having a long period of enforced downtime meant that I finally had the time to focus more intensively on what I have been wanting to express.”

The paintings merge techniques of alla prima (all in one go) painting, bravura brushstrokes and expressionistic knife work, with the delicacy of layered glazes and close attention to detail. The artist’s decades of exploration of the medium of oil paint show through in the confident fresh handling of paint texture and colors.

“This is Nancy’s first solo show with the gallery, and she joins a long history of extraordinary Philadelphia artists that F.A.N. Gallery has championed over the decades. This exhibition will reveal the technique and spirit that is integral to Nancy’s artistry,” said Fred Al-Nakib, F.A.N.’s Director. “I am extremely pleased to share what will be an unforgettable and enjoyable exhibition of contemporary representational painting. Viewers will never look at a block of butter from their refrigerator the same way again!”

Miller graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied English Literature and Art History. She went on to attend Tyler School of Art, and then received her 4-year certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). She worked as an art conservator’s assistant for over ten years ultimately leaving to concentrate on developing her growing painting career, raising her family and teaching. (Miller is married to furniture designer Paul Downs, and they have three sons.) She earned her MFA from PAFA in 2014 and now teaches at various colleges and art centers in Philadelphia and its suburbs.

Miller’s deeply felt still-life work is representational and painterly in style. Critics have said, “A suburban Chardin: she brings subtle technique and a wry peacefulness of spirit to bear on her canvases.” (Gerritt Henry, The Village Voice), “…warm, appealing paintings” (Victoria Donohoe, The Philadelphia Inquirer), “The works are lovely and imbued with a kind of restraint.” (Roberta Fallon, ARTblog).

Miller says, “I paint the world around me that I know and feel, with all its infinite richness and possibility. The artist and poet William Blake wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

It’s my belief that a whole world can also be seen by looking closely into the heart of a block of butter, or a gleaming red onion.”

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Impressionism Art On View > “One Each: Still Lifes by Cézanne, Pissarro and Friends” focuses on still life paintings by five French painters, all created in the mid-1860s, the formative years of Impressionism. This single-gallery special exhibition, organized in partnership with the Toledo Museum of Art, will be on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum through May 8, 2022.

Cincinnati Art Museum’s “Still Life with Bread and Eggs,” a masterpiece by Paul Cézanne, and Toledo Museum of Art’s equally significant “Still Life” by Camille Pissarro—cornerstones of two of Ohio’s great public art collections—form the basis of the exhibition. They are on view with a starkly confrontational still life of freshly caught fish and crustaceans from the hand of Édouard Manet, regarded as the father of modern painting, and another by the underappreciated artist Frédéric Bazille, paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Detroit Institute of Arts, respectively. A rare early still life by Claude Monet from the National Gallery of Art rounds out the grouping.

“The paintings in this exhibition, one each by five members of the Impressionist avant-garde, display their artists’ mastery of technique and upending of artistic convention at a precise moment in the mid-1860s. These innovations would have long-reaching effects on the conception and practice of art, making the paintings textbook examples and their makers household names,” says Dr. Peter Jonathan Bell, Cincinnati Art Museum’s Curator of European Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings. Bell organized the exhibition along with Lawrence W. Nichols, Toledo Museum of Art’s William Hutton Senior Curator, European and American Painting and Sculpture before 1900.

Two works from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s permanent collection add historical context to the Impressionist paintings: a work by Pieter Claesz, a seventeenth-century Dutch painter renowned for his realistic still lifes, and a Cubist work by French painter Georges Braque, which reflects the Impressionists resounding influence in the twentieth century.

“The exhibition’s core works from the 1860s are thematically tight: arrangements of food and tableware. These extraordinary works reflect their artist’s obsession with the instantaneous quality of observing the world around us—light, movement—and translating that into paint on canvas. They achieve this in astounding and unprecedented ways,” said Bell.

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There is a lot of superb contemporary realism being made these days; this article by Allison Malafronte shines light on a gifted individual.

LUCAS BONONI (b. 1991) has worked persistently to reach the position in which he now finds himself: an emerging realist earning the admiration of a wide range of collectors, fellow painters, and art professionals. The Los Angeles-born and New York City-based artist has been creating art full-time since 2014, a pursuit that entailed several sacrifices to make his dream a reality. To that end, Bononi believes in mastering the business side of his profession and spends as much time educating himself about marketing and selling his art as he does creating it.

He is, in that sense, a quintessential millennial: entrepreneurial, resourceful, and eager to achieve what matters most to him.

Bononi’s early dedication to building a business carried with it the realization that his finances (and life) might initially be in the red before he would see the fruits of his labor. The artist was willing to take that gamble.

In 2012, Bononi decided to quit his day job and live in a small subsidized studio while relying on a food bank for groceries so he could officially launch his art business and complete his degree.

In 2016 he earned a B.F.A from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, and the following year — eager to uncover yet another layer of the mysterious art of masterful painting — he moved to New York City in order to attend the Grand Central Atelier.

Today, in his last semester there and with business picking up, Bononi has settled into a disciplined studio practice, where he creates stylistically multi-dimensional paintings like the striking “Dried Roses,” pictured above.

This still life was created in April 2020, relatively early in the COVID-19 lockdown, and captures the tense and wild mix of emotions the world was facing then.

“Roses have been the subject of many beautiful paintings in history,” the artist says. “In ‘Dried Roses’ I wanted to capture these flowers after they had wilted and dried up in an attempt to bring them back to life through color and brushwork.”

Connect with the artist at lucasbononi.com.

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