Grace Diehl

In Harms Way, Painting, Oil on Canvas

2021

I've done a still life with gala apples and a few of my pewter pieces from my collection. This original is painted in oils on stretched linen. I enjoy painting pewter because of its ...

I have been an artist for most of my life. Throughout my creative journey, I have had the pleasure of studying with many established artists. My current studies are under private mentorship of Lucas Bononi in NYC. I've honed in my drawing skills for two years at the Woodstock School of Art with Vince Natale. I also have taken classes/workshops with Todd Casey, Andrew Lattimore and Paul McCormack. I have exhibited at the Mark Gruber Gallery in New Paltz, NY. My artwork resides in hundreds of private collections worldwide and on a major Cruise Ship I currently live and work in the Hudson Valley region of New York. About the Painting: I have always liked the game of chess and play it frequently. I used my chess table to set up this theme and placed some oversized chess...

I have been an artist for most of my life. Throughout my creative journey, I have had the pleasure of studying with many established artists. My current studies are under private men...

A real fun one in the making. I enjoyed all the nuances of the subjects materials. The phone has a gold and white porcelain that picks up ambient light. I also enjoy narrative artwor...

Photorealist oil painting by Manon Cleary (1942-2011). Painting is signed on reverse "Cleary". Painting is stretched on aluminum stretcher and dates to the 1990s. 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 Cleary-Cooper, is an artist in Helena, Mont. She was a 1964 graduate of Washington University in her home town and, for the rest of her life, was proud of having been a member of the Pi Phi...

David Cheifetz's "Ego is an oil painting featuring a dark skull contrasted with a light background. About the artist: David is an internationally acclaimed and collected artist wh...

Another in a series of visually arresting still life paintings from Australian artist Louise Feneley. Exquisitely painted elements of the natural world ...

Kelly Birkenruth's oil painting "Everyone's Favorite Game" depicts a rock, paper, and scissors. About the artist: Kelly Birkenruth’s captivating paintings are in the style of contemporary realism while staying firmly grounded in the tradition of the Old Masters. She is able to pull the viewer into her paintings by interweaving emotion with a humanistic quality through her supreme handling of light. Through her portraits and still lifes she is able to evoke sensitivity and empathy, which in turn allows her to create images which transcend mere representation to capture the true essence of her subject. Kelly’s arresting compositions, draftsmanship, use of color and observation of detail allow her to create paintings with a timeless quality. After earning her degree from Pennsylvania State University, Kelly moved to southern California where she began a career as a fashion model. Her agency soon sent her abroad to Paris and Tokyo, where she spent the next several years modeling. When she wasn’t walking the runway, she spent endless hours in the great museums of the world, closely observing and studying the works of the Old Masters. “My time abroad, particularly in Paris, opened my eyes to the vast beauty and power of a great painting. After that I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to the pursuit of Fine Art” said Birkenruth. After returning to the States, Kelly studied at Otis College of Art in Los Angeles, CA. She then continued her studies through workshops and private study with renowned artists such as Daniel Sprick, Steven Assael and Jesus Emmanuel Villarreal. In the spring of 2019 Kelly...