Richard Boyer: Richard Boyer, who began his artistic journey in high school and ​developed his skills under the mentorship of​ portrait and figurative painter Alvin Gittins at the University of Utah, will be showcasing new oil paintings at Cole Gallery in Edmonds, Washington. The exhibition will run from March 20 to April 29, 2025.​ Some of Boyer’s latest works capture intimate moments of humanity in ​familiar social settings such as hotel bars and sidewalk cafes.

To see more of Richard’s work, visit:
website
Cole Gallery 
Instagram-@richard_boyer370 

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.

View more fine art gallery exhibitions here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

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.

Marcia Holmes: Continuing an expressionist series of Iris paintings in oil is my current focus. Having a representational floral inspiration is the lead to let the gestures flow in an imaginative field of luscious color and free interpretation. Having painted the Iris from life in Monet’s gardens almost ten years ago, I’ve revisited that path, pulled from realism to paint my contemporary take on nature. Private Commission bookings are available.

To see more of Marcia’s work, visit:
Website 
Instagram
The Degas Gallery in New Orleans, LA 

How Do I Describe Success?
Nancee Jean Busse: What a beautiful, thorny, complex question! And man, has that ever changed with time! I was an illustrator and single mom, so success was about art in exchange for money; purely transactional. It had to do with the number of illustrations I could crank out and how much I was paid for them. I was keeping the roof over our heads after all. This transactional sensibility stalked me like a specter into my fine art. Sales, galleries, competitions, shows, recognition, bla-bla-bla… ugh. I unwittingly did everything I could to separate myself from ever really knowing who I was as an Artist. I never stopped trying to please the client. But at least, when I was illustrating, I knew who the client was.
Exhausted and totally willing to get over myself, I stopped. Stopped and stared at my easel for a year. Opened up paint tubes to see if they were drying out. Muttered. Eventually I picked up a brush and stepped up to a blank canvas. For me, that ballsy maneuver has been my greatest success. My art is now truly true to me. My (he)art sings in this sweet journey of self-discovery.

To see more of Nancee’s work, visit:
website

David Lussier: With poetic color harmonies and his inventive style of American Impressionism, David Lussier’s work evokes an energy and spirit-of-place that begs the viewer to look deeper. A lot of inspiration is found on Monhegan Island Maine and in the mountains of Vermont. Both areas are rooted in the history and tradition of painting outdoors. Featured here is the iconic lightkeepers house and quaint main street of Monhegan, as well as one of the most painted spots in Lamoille County.

To see more of David’ work, visit:
DavidLussierGallery.com
DavidLussierArt.Golf
Instagram.com/David.Lussier

Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin has announced two new exhibitions, featuring the work of celebrated landscape painter Rodger Bechtold and Paula Swaydan Grebel’s dreamy interior and still life paintings. The works are on view September 14 through October 12, 2024.

From the gallery:

Rodger Bechtold: In Response to Nature

Rodger Bechtold’s oil paintings are a spirited celebration of the Midwestern landscape, marked by their exuberant colors and expressive brushwork. Influenced by his studies at the American Academy of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his mentorship under renowned painter Wolf Kahn, Bechtold’s paintings balance realism and painterly interpretation.

The artist’s pieces evoke a sense of joy and vitality, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the beauty and tranquility of the Midwest. Through his expert use of color, light, and composition, Bechtold creates scenes that resonate with warmth and emotion, offering glimpses into the heart of the landscapes he portrays.

Paula Swaydan Grebel: Rooms

Flushed with color and finished with confident brushwork, Wisconsin artist Paula Swaydan Grebel’s work demonstrates quiet moments of the everyday. In her latest series of small oil paintings on canvas and panel, she transports us to light-drenched rooms and intimate views of thoughtful still-life arrangements. Each painting is a testament to Swaydan Grebel’s ability to capture the ephemeral, offering viewers a momentary glimpse into calm, domestic spaces.

What is the most interesting thing you have painted and why?
Debra Joy Groesser: The funniest/most interesting thing I’ve painted was at a retreat in the Kansas Flint Hills with a group of artists a few years ago. We were staying at a ranch together. I was one of the first to arrive and was intrigued by several old rusty farm implements and equipment arranged around the entrance to the ranch. One had a big blade on the back, so I thought it was some kind of plow. None of the other artists knew what it was. What caught my eye was the backlit scene – the almost neon glow of the grass underneath it, the negative spaces of the wheels, and the beautiful colors in the rust. It ended up being my favorite painting of the trip. When I got home, I showed it to my husband, who grew up on a farm. To my shock and surprise, his first words were, “Nice manure spreader, honey!” I had NO idea that was what it was. He went on to explain how it worked, all the parts and what they did. So the lesson learned, which I like to share with my students, is that anything can be beautiful if the light is right – even a manure spreader!

To see more of Debra’ work, visit:
website 

How do you find inspiration?
John Meister: The term ‘magical realism’ truly describes New Mexico. Living here, I appreciate the aesthetic of life in all its forms and gravitate toward intimate views of nature. Getting up close to the botanical life here, there are endless possibilities for amazing subjects. Life must do a little something extra to thrive here, and it can display great beauty in the process. I strive to capture that.

How did you develop your unique style?
John Meister: Recently, I have primarily been working on a new body of work that I call my “Vaudeville” series. These paintings feature a somewhat stylized botanical subject, such as a cactus or flower, in front of a simple, colorful, graphic backdrop. I imagine them as depicting a performer on stage. They are mostly produced in the studio but from many years of experience painting up close to my subjects outside, en plein air. The idea for the first one came as a dreamy flash image as I was waking up one morning. I painted it in two days and haven’t stopped working on the series. Prior to painting full-time, I was a graphic designer for 23 years, and these satisfy my “design itch”.

To see more of John’s work, visit:
website

Susan Hediger Matteson: I live in southwest Colorado on the Colorado Plateau. The land swells like the ocean in long waves before being fractured by the Rocky Mountains. The quietness of these rolling swells and the setting moon at dusk was the inspiration for “Moonset”. “Moonset” won an Award of Merit for December Nocturne in Plein Air Salon. It was juried into the American Women Artists National Exhibition – Expanding Horizons at the Loveland Museum in Loveland, Colorado, Sept. 13 – Nov. 10, 2024

To see more of Susan’s work, visit:
Website