Claudia Griesbach-Martucci

"Timeless Dreamer" Whimsical Oil Painting of Mouse

2022

Marina Dieul's "Petite Souris 700", 2024" is an exquisite handmade original oil on panel artwork, measuring 4 x 4 x 1 inches, that comes directly from the artist's studio. This piece is a primary market offering that showcases Dieul's impeccable talent and her mastery of the trompe l'oeil technique. The painting features the captivating face of an adorable mouse with a an orange knitted cap and mittens peering from a green shuttered...

Marina Dieul's "Souris 35, 2023" is a primary market, handmade original oil on panel artwork, notable for its trompe l'oeil technique that seamlessly blends the painting with the act...

Claudia Griesbach- Martucci's "Madame X" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts a fox in a blue gown in a fairy tale setting with pumpkins, bats and moths along a lakesid...

Claudia Griesbach-Martucci's "Daylight Dreamer" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts a lamb in a peaceful trance surrounded by flowers, a butterfly and a bee. This pain...

This exceptional artwork is currently on display and available for sale at Signet Contemporary Art Gallery and online. Mouse Seeking Butterflies is a striking example of Lucinda Holl...

Photorealist oil painting by Manon Cleary (1942-2011). Painting is signed on reverse Manon Cleary and titled Unicorn #3. Manon Cleary had a remarkable ability to draw and paint with photographic fidelity, but she was also known as a charismatic teacher at the University of the District of Columbia and as a free spirit whose exuberant life may have been her most enduring work of art. Since the 1970s, Ms. Cleary had been at the center of a group of artists in Adams Morgan. She exhibited her meticulous artwork throughout the city and around the world, but she also became known for her striking presence, her colorful love life and the rats she kept as pets. As an artist, Ms. Cleary borrowed classical techniques from her deep study of Renaissance masters to create paintings and drawings memorable for their frank realism and sometimes disturbing themes. In addition to her many nude self-portraits, Ms. Cleary made erotically charged paintings of flowers. She took inspiration from a painful personal history in a series of works depicting the terror of rape and, in later years, of not being able to breathe without mechanical assistance. Critics considered her a leading figurative artist of the photo-realist school, in which painters render their subjects with camera-like precision. In fact, Ms. Cleary occasionally won awards for photography when adjudicators didn’t realize her works were free-hand creations. She was “widely acknowledged to be among the best, if not the best, of the city’s figurative painters,” Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan wrote in 2006. “There is a tension between the cool, clinical detachment of photography and painting’s warm idealization of form.” Ms. Cleary exhibited her art in galleries and museums from Moscow to Paris to Hickory, N.C., but Washington was her home for the past 42 years. In 1974, she settled in the decrepit Beverly Court apartments on Columbia Road NW, where a coterie of artists soon grew up around her. She painted her walls purple, and her fourth-floor apartment — even with the pet rats — became something of a bohemian salon. “She was a star,” painter Judy Jashinsky told the Washington City Paper in 2004. “She was stunning, beautiful; long, brownish–black hair; real thin; wore . . . little sundresses and sandals. She was just very cool, and there was always a crowd around her.” Ms. Cleary had a long list of male admirers, including several whose confrontational attempts at “performance art” led to their arrests. She had a brief marriage in 1981 to a Danish artist known as Tommy — “just Tommy,” Ms. Cleary said — whom she divorced in less than a year. As a kind of graphic homage to her various lovers, Ms. Cleary made a series of intimately revealing portraits that were featured years later on the HBO program “Real Sex.” She met her second husband after a gallery opening in Baltimore. By way of introduction, Kijek, a dancer, stripped naked at a crowded party, walked up to Ms. Cleary and said, “Wouldn’t you like me to pose for you?” They were married in 2001. In spite of her unconventional life, Ms. Cleary was more than a mere provocateur. After a day of teaching at UDC, she would return to her studio, with its windows painted over to block out sunlight, and work late into the night, with a bottle of Dr Pepper at her side. She took nude photographs of herself from every angle, then painstakingly created lifelike images that seemed alive with the warmth of human flesh. After studying in Rome in her youth, she developed what she called “an obsession” with Caravaggio, an iconoclastic painter who lived from 1573 to 1610. She often copied paintings at the National Gallery of Art and, in her own work, blended Renaissance styles with a distinctly modern sensibility. Manon Catherine Cleary was born Nov. 14, 1942, in St. Louis. Her father was a doctor, and her identical twin sister, Shirley...

Aleksandra Bujnowska shows landscape sections of medium format. Dark forests or a surface of water are here a picturesque event, suggesting a variety of sensory impressions to the ey...