“Monument Valley Sunrise”

by Kirk Randle

36 x 65 in., oil

A native of Utah, Kirk’s works depict a sense of place. He is known for painting sweeping landscapes and vivid skies, showcasing the intense beauty and reflective light of the West. His artistic career spans decades, including 28 years as a participant in the Celebration of Fine Art. Come watch him and 100 other artists create at the Celebration of Fine Art, where art lovers and artists connect, in Scottsdale, Arizona,  January 13-March 25, 2018. Contact us at 480.443.7695 or info@celebrateart.com.

View more of Kirk’s work at http://celebrateart.com/artsy_gallery/kirk-randle/

In this ongoing series for Fine Art Today, we take a longer look at the history and features of a soon-to-be-available artwork of note. This week we highlight a magnetic painting of Saint John the Baptist that leads Sotheby’s January 31 Otto Naumann Sale.

On January 31, Sotheby’s New York will be delighted to offer property from the collection of Otto Naumann, who, in addition to being a world-renowned art dealer, is an art historian and voracious collector. The sale features European paintings from the 16th to the 19th centuries that exemplify Otto’s impressive eye for timeless pictures of the highest quality.

Highlighting the sale is a brilliant painting of Saint John the Baptist, painted circa 1610 by Giovanni Baglione (1566-c.1643). Baglione is perhaps best known for his scathing criticisms of a contemporary, painter Michelangelo Caravaggio. Baglione’s detailed biography of the troubled Caravaggio has proved invaluable to history — but scholars often look at his information with a bit of caution, citing his obvious bias and vitriol toward his fellow artist.

The canvas available during the January 31 sale in New York is a fantastic example of early baroque theatricality and tenebrist light. According to the auction house, “the painting was rediscovered in a private collection where it had remained since 1970, bearing a later inscription in the lower right corner, reading CARRACCI. Despite the inscription, the hand was recognized as that of Giovanni Baglione and the painting was sold with the correct attribution at Sotheby’s London in 2012 with a tentative dating to 1603. A later cleaning of the painting under the ownership of Naumann revealed Baglione’s actual signature and a significant amount of detail.

“With its starkly lit figure and pronounced tenebrism effect, it is tempting to compare this Saint John the Baptist to Caravaggio’s treatment of the subject in the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City. Baglione, in fact, painted the saint on numerous occasions in the course of his career, though the present work is by far the largest and most accomplished. A preparatory drawing was sold at Sotheby’s London in 1977 and is typically rapid in execution, as was Baglione’s style as a draughtsman. It maps out the composition very clearly and shows that from an early stage in the creative process Baglione was keen to include both the foreground plants and the background landscape, elements which are more often merely alluded to in his work. This notably disciplined approach runs counter to Caravaggio’s preparatory methods.”

Auction estimates anticipate the painting will sell for $400,000-$600,000. To learn more, visit Sotheby’s.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Renowned today as a seducer and an adventurer, Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was known to his contemporaries as a charming and witty conversationalist, an expert on many topics, and an international man of letters.

“He was also a gambler, a spy, and one of history’s greatest travelers,” The Legion of Honor, San Francisco, writes of Casanova. From February 10 through May 28, the museum will be presenting approximately 90 incredible artworks during “Casanova: The Section of Europe.” Including paintings by Canaletto, Pietro Longhi, William Hogarth, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and François Boucher; sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon; works on paper by Giovanni Battista Piranesi; period furnishing, delicate porcelains, silver, and period costumes, the exhibition seeks to bring the world of Casanova to life.

“Of special note are three tableaux, illustrating, respectively, a visit to a convent in Venice, a morning toilette in Paris, and a dissipated night of cards in London — scenes composed of mannequins in 18th-century costumes amid period furniture,” the museum continues. “Thematic threads running through the exhibition include travel; courtship and seduction; theater and identity; and the pleasures of dining.”

To learn more, visit the Legion of Honor.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

As one of the major New American Tonalist painters, this artist’s use of color, texture, and light creates a harmonious balance between realistic and abstract interpretations of the landscape. This painter is following in the footsteps of the great George Inness, and viewers will surely want to see this solo exhibition.

Opening with a reception on January 6 will be a must-see exhibition of new works by master painter Michael Workman. It’s on view through January 27 at Gallery 1261 in Denver, and viewers will be treated to 13 of the artist’s recent pictures with landscape subjects that include mountains, deserts, barns, and urban sprawl. A few of the paintings even drift into the portraiture category, offering sensitive and individualistic renderings of cattle.

“To view artist Michael Workman’s paintings is to spend a quiet moment in a serene locale, where life’s rough edges are somehow absorbed,” writes David Ericson Fine Art. “Workman’s rural landscapes are subtle yet powerful, evoking strong emotions in those who experience their silent wonder. Whether it is a silvery evening slipping soundlessly into the dusk or a bashful sun, tentatively extending its rays across a vast green pasture awake but still yawning, Workman’s tonal paintings create a mood that is both mysterious and compelling, yet never disquieting. His color, texture, and light are soft and harmonious, creating a dreamy effect.”

To learn more, visit Gallery 1261.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Scottish artist Renny Tait is internationally recognized for his painted depictions of idealized architectural landscapes, exploring the underlying geometric order of the built environment in pursuit of pure, simple form. His newest oils head to the walls of this established gallery next week.

Flowers Gallery in London is overjoyed to soon be presenting the latest artworks to emerge from the studio of Scottish artist Renny Tait. “Thresholds to Brighter Worlds” opens on January 11 and continues through February 17. Empty of human life and arranged in harmonious formal groupings, Tait’s landscapes have often been likened to still life and are “guided by principles of abstraction rather than naturalism,” the gallery writes. Of his process, the artist points to “moving elements of sky or background as a still life painter like Morandi might move his bottles.”

“Many of the buildings represented in Tait’s current exhibition are familiar London landmarks, such as Battersea Power Station, and subject to which he has returned over many years,” the gallery continues. “Referring to the power station as a ‘cathedral of industry,’ he draws comparisons between its grand chimneys and Greek columns or the spires of Gothic churches. In ‘Battersea, Reflection White Stripe,’ a black void replaces the sky, heightening the structure’s mysterious, metaphysical properties, while the solid reflection underpinning the composition on the glass-like surface of the river below evokes a sense of the building’s towering strength.

“Architectural details are simplified to highlight their classical form (for example, the domed structure of ‘St Paul’s Cathedral, Blue Sky, Clouds, from the Thames’). Here, Tait explores ideas of memory associated with architectural form, considering the imprint of iconic buildings on the imagination and how this affects the way that we view the world around us. In ‘Hayward Blue Sky,’ Tait has reconfigured the Brutalist architecture of the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank to include a dominant central tower. The darkened lookouts and pointed apexes of its design recall Tait’s theme of Scottish castles, which he has described as symbols of refuge and hope in a hostile environment. The lighthouse is another long-running motif, which can also be considered a haven or outpost, set against a backdrop of the seemingly infinite and untamable ocean. In ‘Bell Rock Lighthouse,’ Tait captures the structure as it might have looked when it was first built, displaying an appreciation for the pleasing, and yet entirely functional, bell-like tapering design. The archetypal bright blue sky, present in many of the paintings in the exhibition, offers an opening or threshold, according to Tait, ‘to brighter worlds.’

“While his urban and industrial landscapes recall the factory paintings of American artist Charles Sheeler, Tait’s precise lines and hard-edged shapes reflect an attentiveness to the picture’s surface more closely aligned with the concerns of modernist abstraction. According to the late author and journalist Robert Heller, Tait’s paintings “with their virtuoso technique, bridge the worlds of classicism and abstraction. The later influences — Mondrian, Morandi, Barnett Newman — blend comfortably with the very different worlds of Bellini and Wren to form Tait’s own mysteriously depopulated universe of color harmonies and glowing light.’”

To learn more, visit Flowers Gallery.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

The first comprehensive traveling exhibition devoted to Norman Rockwell’s iconic depictions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” — Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear — launches in 2018. When and where?

Over the next two years, several institutions will proudly host a touring exhibition of Norman Rockwell’s iconic “Four Freedoms.” According to the Rockwell Museum, “It illuminates both the historic context in which FDR articulated the Four Freedoms and the role of Rockwell’s paintings in bringing them to life for millions of people, rallying the public behind the war effort and changing the tenor of the times. In telling the story of how Rockwell’s works were transformed from a series of paintings into a national movement, the exhibition also demonstrates the power of illustration to communicate ideas and inspire change.

“In addition to his celebrated paintings of the Four Freedoms, the exhibition brings together numerous other examples of painting, illustration, and more, by both Rockwell and a broad range of his contemporaries — from J.C. Leyendecker and Mead Schaeffer, to Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, among others — as well as historical documents, photographs, videos, and artifacts; interactive digital displays; and immersive settings. While exploring the response of an earlier generation to the plea for defense of universal freedoms, the exhibition also resonates with our own time.”

The exhibition begins this summer, in June 2018 at the New York Historical Society, where it will remain on view through August 2018. From there, the exhibition travels to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, from October through December 2018. Although a venue has not been chosen, the exhibition will then travel to Washington, D.C., where it will hang from February through April 2019. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, will host the exhibition from June-August 2019 before travelling to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia from October-December 2019. In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, will hang the show form February-April before wrapping up the tour at the Mémorial de Caen in Normandy, France, from June-October.

To learn more, visit the Norman Rockwell Museum.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Nineteen-eighteen was a tough year for the Viennese Secession as both Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt passed. To mark the centenary of their deaths, this renowned East Coast institution is mounting an important exhibition of the artists’ figurative works.

“Klimt and Schiele: Drawn” is a significant exhibition on view soon at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that examines both the divergences and compelling parallels between Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918) — particularly in their provocative depictions of the human body. Opening on February 25, the exhibition will highlight how Klimt and Schiele shared a mutual respect and admiration for each other’s talent.

“Yet,” as the MFA observes, “their work is decidedly different in appearance and effect: Klimt’s drawings are often delicate, while Schiele’s are frequently bold. Klimt often used these sheets as preparatory designs for paintings, while Schiele considered his drawings to be independent pictures and routinely sold them. Both deployed frank naturalism, unsettling emotional resonances, and disorienting omissions to challenge conventions and expectations in portraits, nudes, and allegories.

“Organized thematically, this selection of 60 drawings begins with the artists’ academic origins and then investigates how each shifted away from traditional training to more incisive and unconventional explorations of humanity.” The exhibition will continue through May 28. To learn more, visit the MFA, Boston.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York City is poised to open a significant exhibition surrounding the extensive travels of one of America’s preeminent landscape painters of the 19th century.

Although he was born in northern England at the start of the industrial revolution in 1801, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) eventually immigrated to the United States in his youth, becoming one of America’s most preeminent landscape painters. During his short life, the artist would travel extensively throughout England and Italy as a young artist, returning to American to create some of his most ambitious works and inspire a new generation of American painters.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will soon be showcasing an important selection of Cole’s masterpieces during “Atlantic Crossings,” which opens on January 30 and continues through May 13. The show has been mounted in recognition of the 200th anniversary of Cole’s first Atlantic crossing, when he emigrated from England to the United States in 1818, “and examines in-depth Cole’s return journey to England in 1829-31 and his travels in Italy in 1831-32, revealing the development of his artistic processes,” the museum writes. “Seminal works created by the artist in the years immediately after his return to New York, between 1832 and 1837 — notably ‘The Oxbow’ and ‘The Course of Empire’ — are presented as a culminating creative response to his complex experiences of British art and society and of Italian history and landscape. In addition, Cole’s abiding passion for the American wilderness resulted in his fervent visual warning in these paintings to his fellow American citizens of the harsh ecological cost of unchecked development of the land.”

“This exhibition brings to prominence the dialogue between American and European artists in the mid-19th century by hanging Cole’s work in direct juxtaposition with works he studied on his formative journey, including paintings by J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, among others. It concludes with an examination of Cole’s extraordinary legacy in the work of the next generation of American landscape painters whom he personally mentored, notably Asher B. Durand and Frederic E. Church.”

To learn more, visit the Met.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

As a fine art connoisseur, it’s always fun juxtaposing artworks with the same subject. A comparison of the works can reveal so much about each artist’s distinctive handling of their mediums and unique interpretations of the whole experience. A case in point is on view here.

On view January 15 through February 16, the Mountain Artist Guild in Prescott, Arizona, will present “Different Viewpoints,” an exhibition of works by five prominent artists, each using the same models to showcase their distinct styles.

Featured in the show include works by Richard Johnston, Sam Thiewes, Eric Slayton, Dorothy Ray, and David Harlan, “five professional artists from the Prescott area who gather each week to discuss their trade and share ideas,” as the press release reads. “They’ve gone a step further this time, sharing photographs of about a dozen models to see how each would interpret essentially the same images. What began as a friendly challenge among contemporaries became a platform for each artist to express his or her unique approach to painting.”

“At its core, art is an interpretive process, and it’s fascinating to see, in very real terms, how the same images are viewed from a different lens,” said Thiewes. A reception for the show will be hosted at the guild on January 26. To learn more, visit the Mountain Artist Guild.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Gallery 30 South in Pasadena, California, is certainly caught up in the Star Wars phenomenon that has captivated millions for decades. This exhibition features a rare collection of 17th- and 18th-century paintings remixed by Italian artist Riccardo Mayr. We’ll let you be the judge…

On view now through January 2018 at Gallery 30 South in Pasadena, California, “Religious Paintings of the Expanded Galaxy” is a fascinating exhibition of reimagined 17th- and 18th-century paintings by artist Riccardo Mayr. In each of the reproductions, Mayr has superimposed Star Wars characters or effects directly onto the canvas. “The Star Wars iconography added to the antique oil paintings are part of the exclusive exhibition and the only one of its kind scheduled to take place in the U.S.,” reads the gallery’s press release. “It is a look into a family’s incredible history and a new modern day pop culture phenomenon. Star Wars and fine art collectors around the globe will have the opportunity to experience that bigger-than-life presentation where all art pieces are for sale.

“One may have never known what existed within the vast collection of family art in Italy until the artist, Riccardo Mayr, inventoried that family collection upon the death of his mother. At that time, Riccardo came across a collection of some very damaged paintings in their ancestral villa in Ferrara, Italy. A conservator informed Mayr that the paintings were worth less than what it would cost to restore. Mayr then upcycled each painting, combining religious art of the past with pop culture mythology of today. The paintings which Mayr has used include works by Franz Kaisermann and painters in the School of Ferrara. Although his method stands to be controversial, the paintings were actually saved using his technique.

“Although widely controversial due to the nature of 17th- and 18th-century paintings being old and important, each painting has been given a new life and opportunity for collectors with the transformation featuring the Star Wars saga. The collection is a tribute to Star Wars and an exceptional opportunity for collectors to own rare and unique one-of-a-kind art pieces.

“Examples of the collection include the painting titled ‘The Long Lost Hologram Message’ painted over a 17th century Ferrarese School painting titled ‘St. Francis of Paolo’ or ‘The Escape from Glies 832c,’ after Guido Reni painted on a 17th-century painting titled ‘The Escape to Egypt.’

“Much like the movie in the theaters, collectors are mesmerized by the paintings, which give new credibility to the value of collecting both art and movie memorabilia. It’s a new take or ‘mash up’ as some call it, of art breathing an unexpected life into a movie or theme.”

To learn more, visit Gallery 30 South.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.