Lowell Nesbitt

Rose Iris

1982

Exceptional pair of paintings by Manon Cleary (1942-1911). Paintings are oil on canvas. Dated 1980 and signed in the front lower right corner and on reverse. Manon Cleary's work is ...

Acrylic on canvas painting by Joe Shannon (b.1933). Titled "Skull with green bottle." Signed and dated 1979. Acquired from a prominent Washington D.C. coll...

Painting titled "Window into Studio" and dated 2023 by Jeanne Cosimano. The painting is gouache on paper, frame is included. This work was recently included in a solo exhibition at Gallery 2112...

Painting by French artist Christian Zeimert (b.1934 – 2020). Signed in lower right corner and titled on reverse "Gentilly". Zeimert's painted slow and meticulously. It took him se...

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...

Oil on canvas painting by Heinrich Richter (German/Polish, 1920-2007). Painting is titled #50, signed and dated 1969. Heinrich Richter has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in ...

"She Hulk" Oil painting 59" x 31" inch by Alina Shimova 2020

"Dark Phoenix" Oil painting 59" x 31" inch by Alina Shimova 2020

Randy Browning’s paintings sparkle with the breath of life. His delightful contemporary paintings offer his viewers a unique way of regarding contemporary still life, combined with old-world attention to detail. Browning feels that to truly observe an object, one must be absorbed by it. The large scale of the paintings helps people focus on the incredible variety and subtlety of apparently common objects. In the triptych, Randy is playing with a red and white striped dinnerware set placed upon a blue and off-white background. The teapot draws you into the middle panel and makes your eyes happily jump to the outside panels to view the whole optical illusion. Randy Browning’s paintings sparkle with the breath of life. His delightful fruit and vegetable paintings...

Randy Browning’s paintings sparkle with the breath of life. His delightful contemporary paintings offer his viewers a unique way of regarding contemporary still life, combined with old-world attention to detail. Browning feels that to truly observe an object, one must be absorbed by it. The large scale of the paintings helps people focus on the incredible variety and subtlety of apparently common objects. In this black and white painting, you are looking down from a birds-eye view of a retro teapot...

Randy Browning’s paintings sparkle with the breath of life. His delightful contemporary paintings offer his viewers a unique way of regarding contemporary still life, combined with old-world attention to detail. Browning feels that to truly observe an object, one must be absorbed by it. The large scale of the paintings helps people focus on the incredible variety and subtlety of apparently common objects. In this painting, a retro red teapot...

Randy Browning’s paintings sparkle with the breath of life. His delightful contemporary paintings offer his viewers a unique way of regarding contemporary still life, combined with old-world attention to detail. Browning feels that to truly observe an object, one must be absorbed by it. The large scale of the paintings helps people focus on the incredible variety and subtlety of apparently common objects. In this painting, a retro blue teapot sits behind a red coffee mug that gives high contrast. The pair sits on a yellow and white striped background creating pop art and giving a unique modern twist. Randy Browning’s paintings sparkle with the breath of life. His delightful fruit and vegetable paintings...