Jessica Fields. Fabulous paintings – great texture with a palette knife. Each is so interesting to me. I love the layers of color! Be sure to peruse the links below. Many on Jessica’s website are sold – don’t miss Instagram! Fabulous! You can definitely tell that painting puts her in her happy place!
Jessica Leitko Fields (that’s me) is a working painter, collage gluer and general maker living in Greenville, SC.
I’m originally from, lets say, Houston, because who remembers anything from before they were five anyway. And there I garnered a love for all things flat and stripey. Add a dose of a Louisiana farm on my mother’s side and all those fields start to make sense. Then I married a Fields! Like a joke. I liked them so much I married them.
I went to school at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design where I learned to love paint and color and texture and to really really hate snow.
I’m typically a teacher by trade with a special fondness for art history and history in general which will crop up in my titles from time to time.
The Coast by Nick Runge 24″ x 36″ Oil | Available at Abend Gallery
Nick Runge. This man creates such interesting, thought provoking paintings. He can clearly paint a portrait, but it’s the abstract qualities in the painting that shift it from a normal painting to a WOW painting. Love these blues – this is brilliant and captures your attention! Abstracted realism indeed!
Born in 1985, artist Nick Runge grew up in Colorado. Coming from a creative family of professional artists, he was always interested in drawing and imagining ideas visually. Starting in 2004, he began thinking about art as a career and got the chance to begin small jobs in and out of the comic book industry. After 2006, he worked as an illustrator for various comic companies such as IDW, Dark Horse, and many others. While primarily making a living as a cover artist, he began painting more seriously and started exploring the world of film art and traditionally painted projects, doing various official and private commissions. These days he has stepped away from commercial properties, focusing exclusively on fine art and personal work using oils and watercolor.
As a portrait/figurative painter, Nick works from life as well as photography, describing his art as something close to “abstracted realism”, with an objective of expressing as much of the realistic human element of life as possible through a limited and often simplified approach to his rendering or brushwork, giving an illusion of realism while, at the same time, breaking shapes and form down enough to have a close balance with abstraction.
Azalea and Van Gogh by Sarkis Antikajian 25×30 Oil
What wonderful paintings! I looked through them forever before selecting one for today’s feature. You must go check for yourself. I could have easily picked any one of Sarkis’s paintings – they are different – they are so wonderfully loose and expressive with gorgeous color and brush strokes. Wow!
Sarkis was born in 1933 in the Middle East to Armenian parents and immigrated to the United States in 1958.
After a 35-year career as a pharmacist, he attained his childhood dream of becoming a professional painter and is now a nationally recognized and award-winning artist.
Whether working in his Cheshire, Oregon studio or on location, Sarkis paints and draws in oils, watercolors, pastels and inks. His varied subject matter includes figurative, landscape, still life and abstract. He also enjoys sculpting in clay. Continue reading HERE…
Mark Mehaffey. Mark’s paintings are something special. I love those bits of underpainting showing through – it gives the painting pizazz (as if it really needs it!) – great shadows – the trees are magnificent!
I’ve been drawing and painting my whole life. I started painting with watercolor at the age of 10 and never stopped. My parents and my early teachers encouraged me to paint, I suspect to keep me out of trouble. It worked….more or less.
Some of my earliest memories include trying to match the colors I saw while using a child’s set of watercolors. Hours were spent in this endeavor. After 55 years of painting I’m now more inclined to paint the colors I feel than the colors I see. Paintings always take on a life of their own. Sometimes a work requires a studied design approach, making a plan and following that plan, at other times a more intuitive visceral approach is called for. I let the idea and content of my work dictate the materials and techniques used….not the other way around. Other ideas dictate an exploration of surface and textures, relying on the initial concept and intuition to bring the work to a conclusion.
Above all I value creativity and honesty. And although I follow many paths and speak with more than one voice, I am on my own journey. I have two wishes…one is to live a few more hundred years, for I shall never have enough time to paint all the ideas in my head. Probably won’t see that wish granted. That second wish? That somewhere along my journey I will communicate with fellow travelers who will see something of what I see and feel something of what I feel…
Mary Sauer. Wow. I love her perspective on people and the different settings she paints – so creative! But don’t just take my word for it… I am loving her paintings! This painting has so much detail and you can look at it for hours yet it still has a painterly quality that makes it so interesting. Not easy!
Painter Mary Sauer was born in Greenville, Kentucky in 1986. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States including over a dozen shows in New York City alone. Mary is a 2014 recipient of The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for traditional figure painting and winner of the 2014 Director’s Award at the Springville Museum of Art’s annual Spring Salon. Mary’s art is influenced by nineteenth century painting including John Singer Sargent, the Pre-Raphealites, and the French Academics as well as contemporary realist academic painting and fashion photography. Her philosophy is to combine the nineteenth century techniques of painting with more modern conceptual ideas, especially regarding how we present ourselves to the world psychologically.
Her work has been featured on the cover of American Art Collector Magazine, in the annual, “21 Under 31,” feature in Southwest Art Magazine, and in feature articles in both International Artist Magazine and the April 2014 issue of The Artists Magazine. Her painting, ‘Anna’ was awarded Best in Show at the 2012 Portrait Society of America International Portrait Competition, for which she was again a finalist in 2013. Her education includes a BFA in Illustration from Brigham Young University in 2009, further studies at The Art Student’s League of New York and The Grand Central Academy of Art, and an MFA from The University of Utah. For two years she apprenticed in the studio of master painter William Whitaker. She has served as an adjunct faculty member at Brigham Young University teaching advanced life drawing, at the University of Utah teaching painting and drawing, and currently at Utah Valley University where she teaches the Painting the Human Head(portrait painting) class. Her work is in a number of permanent collections including those of the Springville Museum of Art and the LDS Church History Museum. She maintains an active portrait career and is represented by Sloane Merrill Gallery in Boston, Anthony’s Fine Art in Salt Lake City, and Meyer Gallery in Park City, UT. She currently resides near Salt Lake City, Utah with her husband David, an operatic tenor, and their daughter Scarlett.
Schoodic Point II by Jennifer Van Cor 30×40″ Acrylic
Jennifer Van Cor, a wonderful artist from New Hampshire. Her paintings are striking – full of color and very unique brush strokes. She can paint those “Maine trees” that I love so much – each has their own personality.
The landscape has always tantalized my senses. The smell and feel of wet grass, the sound of leaves in the wind, the shape of a shadow through a broken limb. And with it all the ever changing color; a universe of color. Each stroke and dip of the brush pushes my senses onto the surface and if I am listening closely and truly, the life of a landscape fills the painting. As my landscapes progress, they become more about the flow of energy, the experience of a lifetime of color, shape and feeling. Poetry has been another way to touch the landscape. Words mix color and senses through imagery that is very much like painting. When the two are combined, I feel I have painted a poem.
Can you believe this painting? The green in the wave where light is coming through is spot on. How?! This is a brilliant painting – absolutely stunning!
Jeanne Rosier Smith grew up painting, but first discovered pastel when a box of Nupastels arrived in the mail from an uncle in Massachusetts, 20 years ago. “You might enjoy these,” he said. He had no idea. She studied art at Georgetown University and later at the DuCret School of Art in New Jersey. After earning a Ph.D. in English and teaching college English for ten years, she made the switch to full time professional art in 2000. She now maintains a Pastel Studio school, teaches around the country, and is represented by several East Coast galleries. Her subjects are diverse: landscape, portrait, food, and the sea.
Smith is a signature member of the Pastel Society of America, the American Society of Marine Artists, the Connecticut Pastel Society and the Pastel Painters Society of Cape Cod, an IAPS Masters Circle member, and a juried artist member of the Copley Society, the Salmagundi Club, and Academic Artists of America. She has exhibited at the Massachusetts State House, the Guild of Boston Artists, and nationally at the Pastel Society of America, the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Arts Club and American Artist Professional League shows. Her work has garnered top awards, including the Prix de Pastel (Best in Show) from IAPS, The International Association of Pastel Societies, a Grand Prize in International Artist Magazine Seascape Competition, and an Art Spirit Foundation Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Pastel at the American Artists Professional League. She has placed in the Pastel Journal’s Pastel 100 for the past five years, including first place in 2017. Her work has appeared in International Artist Magazine, American Art Collector, and The Pastel Journal, and she is a regular contributor to the Pastel Journal. Her paintings are in collections on five continents. She is represented by Cecil Byrne Gallery of Charleston SC, Gallery 31 of Orleans MA, Francesca Anderson Fine Art of Lexington MA, Old Spouter Gallery on Nantucket, and Powers Gallery of Acton MA. Continue reading HERE…
