Dinah Worman

A Quiet Watcher

David Kroll Vase and Nest, 2011 oil on linen 32" x 28" Artist David Kroll is known for his finely crafted paintings—precise still lives and exquisite landscapes that allude to bot...

25th Street, by Elise Zoller, 24 x 30 in. oil on panel. Elise Zoller has recently embarked on a series of plein air paintings of sites around Salt Lake City and in the smaller towns of Utah from Hurricane to Huntsville. She has enjoyed meeting people along the road and learning about the history of the state. “Plein air work can be physically demanding, but there is no substitute for working from life. Light and shadow dance in subtle ways a photograph cannot capture. Even the wind and the fragrances it carries inform the work. Scenes come alive when you stand in one place for a few hours. You’ve got to get to know a spot,” Elise says. “While I work, all manner of people come up and talk to me about their towns and their lives. I’ve met a downwinder from Enterprise, pie bakers in Veyo, pony cart...

A Fete For Spring, oil on linen, 22 x 28 inches (Framed size: 28 x 34 inches), $4,500 Simone Simonian studied under the enigmatic and formidable Alvin Gittins at the prime of his ca...

This replica of the last self-portrait of Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted in 1804, executed by his daughter Anna at her father's side and recently rediscovered, provides us with a poignant image of the great artist, represented with panache despite the disillusions of life. 1. Jean-Baptiste Greuze Jean-Baptiste Greuze was the sixth child of a roofer from Tournus and retained a certain rusticity in his behaviour from his provincial childhood, beyond his taste for describing picturesque scenes of the countryside. He initially started training with a little-known painter from Lyon, Charles Grandon, before his genius was recognised in Paris where he became a full-time student of the Académie (of Painting) in 1755. He exhibited his work for the first time at the Salon during the summer of 1755, before leaving on a trip to Italy in the company of Louis Gougenot, abbot of Chezal-Benoît. Upon his return to Paris, Greuze became a prolific painter, participating widely in the Salons held between 1759 and 1765, to which he sent no less than 63 paintings: numerous genre scenes (The Marriage Contract, The Beloved Mother), but also portraits of his family circle, of courtiers and art lovers, or of his colleagues. The Academy closed the doors of the Salons to him in 1767 for not having produced his reception piece within six months of his reception, as was the tradition. He worked actively on this painting (Emperor Severus rebukes Caracalla, his son, for trying to assassinate him ) until the summer of 1769, tackling historical and mythological subjects for the first time. Once this was completed, he was then fully admitted to the Academy, but as a genre painter, and not as an historical painter, which had been one of the greatest humiliations of his life. Greuze then refused any participation in events organised by the Academy or its successor, the Academy of Fine Arts until 1800. Abandoning history painting, he gave a new twist to genre scenes, bringing them closer to history painting, as in this pair of canvases which constitutes some of his masterpieces: The Paternal Curse: The Ungrateful Son and The Paternal Curse: The Punished Son . Married in 1759 to Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, the daughter of a Parisian bookseller, his marriage was unhappy and his wife probably frequently unfaithful. The institution of divorce enabled him to record their separation in 1793, keeping his two daughters Anna-Geneviève, born in April 1762, and Louise-Gabrielle, born in May 1764, with him. Little is known about his daughter Anna except that she was herself a painter and lived with her father until his death. It is likely that most of the paintings she produced up to that date were attributed to her father, whose technique she shared to a great extent, making it extremely difficult to establish an autonomous corpus of her paintings. Greuze died in his studio at the Louvre on March 21st 1805. The attention paid to the expressivity of his characters and the emotional charge they convey enabled Jean-Baptiste Greuze to enjoy immense popularity with the eighteenth-century public, and they still constitute Greuze's true modernity. As the artist said, "I dipped my brush in my heart". Greuze was also an exceptional draughtsman and a portraitist of immense talent and exceptional longevity who painted both the Dauphin (the son of Louis XV and father to Louis XVI) and the young Napoleon Bonaparte. 2. Greuze's self-portraits Greuze was very much influenced by Dutch paintings during all his life. While the source of his inspiration for genre scenes can be found in Gerard Dou...

Wind River- Wyoming by Eliot Clark (1883-1980) Oil on canvas, linen relined 14 x 20 inches unframed (35.56 x 50.8 cm) 18 ¼ x 24 inches framed (46.355 x 60.9...

Stuart Bigley is an artist based in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley. He has been making and showing his artwork for over 40 years. During this time he also co-founded and ran the ...