David Baird (b. 1986, USA) is an oil painter and draftsman focused primarily on figurative work.  The artist has attended classes throughout the US and Europe, including Ryder Studio School (NM, USA), the Art Students League (NYC, USA), Studio Escalier (FR), and the Jerusalem Studio School (Jerusalem, IL). He has traveled broadly, benefitting from extensive exposure to some of the world's greatest works of art.  In 2019, the artist was awarded the Avigdor Arikha Masterclass Scholarship to continue his studies in Italy.

He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the inaugural exhibition Memento Vivere in 2021, celebrating the reopening of the historic Lyme Academy in Lyme, CT. In 2022, he won first prize in the New York Figurative Show at the prestigious Salmagundi Club in New York, NY, and was subsequently invited to exhibit in the first ever Hartley Invitational at the same institution in both 2022 and 2023. 

The artist currently lives and works in Lyme, Connecticut. 

"A fundamental interest in my work is the translation of perceptual experience into pictorial representation. In this conversion of perception to painting, the portrayal of form and the sensuality of experience is in constant tension with the materiality of the paint and the flatness of the surface.  Any pretense of fidelity to the visual experience is inevitably betrayed by the artifice of painting.

Resolving this tension between the object of perception and the fiction of representation becomes the subject of every work.  Like an inverted excavation, the accumulating layers of pigment contrive to unveil that perceptual moment, delicately balanced between the familiar and the unfamiliar where a whole is made of separate parts."

William Barnes has been in exhibitions in NYC, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Rittenhouse Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In New York he was a member of Bowery Gallery where he had three solo exhibitions. Also in New York, for over two decades, he was a member of Zeuxis, an association of still life painters. He is a former Professor of Painting at the College of William & Mary. He is the recipient of many awards and grants, including an NEA and a residency at La Cité Internationale de Paris.

Robert Bricker is a figurative bronze sculptor who began stone carving the figure when he was 15 years old. He received his BFA in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art, and by the age of 25 established his own bronze foundry business in Charlottesville. A realist sculptor who has created many realist portraits and monuments, he is also deeply interested in personal expression with the figure. Imagination and composition are paramount priorities. He explains, “I am a spacial thinking artist, and my work is consistently an expression of form in space. I am dedicated to creating figurative imagery that is poetically ambiguous as to its meaning, with the full intention that the viewer’s interpretation of my work is as valid as why I made it in the first place.”

David Campbell graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2007. He has had a number of solo and two-person shows, including the Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia, the Exeter Gallery in Baltimore, and most recently the Gatewood Gallery at UNCG Greensboro. In 2019 he was in a group show at Thomas Deans Fine Art in Atlanta.

He has had extensive experience teaching painting at the College of William and Mary, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and has been a visiting lecturer at a number of colleges, including the University of Virginia. Since 2016, David has also taught painting classes through the Art New England summer program held at Bennington College, Vermont, in addition to being a member of the William and Mary faculty.

David was one of the founding members of the painting collective, Perceptual Painters, a group that exhibits and promotes specific concepts about painting. David explains, “Observation or being excited about what you are looking at is paramount. It must be there for me. I’m not quite sure where the boundaries lie between Perception and the Imagination of a painting . . . I do feel though that Imagination comes from what you see.”

Linda Carey received her MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Arizona. She has taught drawing at the Columbus College of Art & Design, the College of William & Mary, and at various art centers. She has exhibited both in solo and group shows on the east coast and mid-west, and in Ireland and France. She has been the recipient of four International Residency Fellowships in France and Ireland, and is a member of the Midwest Paint Group which exhibits throughout the midwest and east coast. She spends several months every year in Italy painting and making pilgrimages to see Italian art. Below she describes her current interests in the studio:

"I have been incorporating reproductions of Italian paintings from Antiquity and the Early Renaissance into still-life settings for several years. Though I admire the narrative genius of early Italian art, my primary interest is visual. Aside from the pleasure of spending many hours staring at these images, they create a stage set and a mood for my arrangements of objects. The attempt to harmonize two different worlds…past and present, flat and dimensional, landscape and still-life, imagined and real… is a problem of my own making that I feel compelled to solve."

Painting Perceptions Article

Jeffrey Carr is an artist and educator with a long career teaching at numerous art schools and universities. He was the Dean of the School of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. from 2003 to 2015, and was the Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

He has been the subject of one-person exhibitions in New York, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, St.Louis, San Diego, and Montecastello, Italy, and has been a visiting speaker or panel participant at over a dozen art schools and universities. He has published a number of interviews and articles on contemporary artists.

Since his retirement to San Diego, he has returned to an early love of painting the landscapes of Southern California and to smaller-scale figure painting. Originally from La Jolla, California, he graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz, attended the New York Studio School, and received his M.F.A. in painting from the Yale University School of Art.

Lucia Coates is an award-winning artist, originally from Norfolk, Virginia, now living in Lynchburg where she is a co-owner of Montana Plains Bakery. Lucia studied Studio Art at Randolph-Macon Women’s College and has work in the Randolph College Maier Museum permanent collection. Lucia’s exquisite and quiet paintings of still lifes, often featuring tables, dishes, and fruit, have won wide recognition in juried shows over the years. Her latest work takes its inspiration from gardens, and the bright palette and sensuous flowers have already begun to win awards, including the Royal County Arts Award at the 2019 Annual Lynchburg Art Festival.

Richard Lewis Crozier is a prolific landscape painter and a retired professor of art, having taught at the University of Virginia for thirty-seven years. Born in Hawaii, he received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, where he studied with contemporary American artists Wayne Thiebaud, William T. Wiley, and Roy de Forest. He was introduced to abstract painting but also began painting landscapes en plein air . He combined these two approaches by painting recognizable landscapes while thinking about the painting as an object-giving the paint, texture, and surface the same importance as the image itself. He is particularly interested in change, the landscape in flux: the change of seasons, change of light, as well as manmade alterations to the environment. Crozier’s work has been widely exhibited. He has had solo shows in California, Texas, New York, Washington, D.C., and throughout Virginia. In addition, his work is in a number of important public collections all across the country.

Kathy Cudlin is a fine arts photographer who lives in Lynchburg. She served as Art Director and agency photographer for Lovern Advertising for over twenty years. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Duke University and holds degrees in commercial art and photography from CVCC. She has been included in local, regional, and national shows over the years and has won many awards. She considers herself a street photographer and a formalist who enjoys venturing out into the large, visually chaotic world and selecting elements that cohere into a pleasing or compelling composition.

Recently, Covid isolation caused her to look inward for inspiration, and she begun to combine images—many of her own immediate surroundings—into diptychs, triptychs, and accordion albums, often with text.

Framed sizes

(Unframed sizes by request.)

Each photograph is limited to 15 prints and signed in verso.

Nancy Dahlstrom creates art that celebrates the vitality and spirit present in the natural world.  An avid gardener, she finds inspiration for her detailed and intricate art works from her travels as well as from the many gardens that surround her home and studio. 

Dahlstrom taught art at Hollins University from 1973 – 2013.  She has a B.F.A. from SUNY at Buffalo and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Ohio University. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. Dahlstrom has traveled to France, Norway, Scotland, Greece, Malaysia, and along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, journeys which exposed her to works of art and artists throughout these regions. She has studied with master printmakers in Oslo, Paris, and Ekaterinburg, Russia.

Dahlstrom’s dedication to creativity pervades the entire space in which she lives and works.  Of all the places she has visited and lived, she is delighted to be spending her retirement making art and tending to her gardens in Fincastle, Virginia. 

“THE ACT OF PAINTING IS IN ITSELF A PRAYER.”

~Fabiola Deodato

Fabiola Deodata was born in the city of Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 20, 1970. She studied at the Carlos Morel Municipal School of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina, graduating with a degree in Visual Arts Teaching with a specialization in engraving. She continued her artistic training in Eduardo Medici's workshop, later becoming assistant to the artist. Additionally, she worked and collaborated with celebrated Argentinian sculptor and painter Luis Wells. During the year 2002, she made a trip to Italy and Switzerland to take classes in the workshops of the renowned Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. This trip deeply marked her new artistic projects. She has attended various workshops, courses, and seminars in Argentina and abroad. She has also served as an art juror. She currently works as an artist, exhibiting in both Argentina and abroad. In addition, she teaches art at St. Georges College, Quilmes.

Instagram

Facebook

Elizabeth Geiger majored in painting at the University of Virginia and continued her studies at the New York Studio School and the Vermont Studio Center. She has won a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and shown regularly throughout the East Coast. Her work is in the collection of the Sheltering Arms Hospital Richmond as well as the Clay Center Museum of Fine Art in Charleston, WV.

Known for her dramatic still life paintings, she has recently also focused her painting practice on landscape. Along with her regular teaching at the Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton, VA, she has been a visiting artist at the College of William & Mary and the Kentucky College of Art & Design. In addition she has spoken at universities and leads workshops throughout the Eastern United States.

Geiger has said of her still-lifes, “My paintings begin with a feeling of excitement—a rightness with the light. A feeling of space, a group of forms, a chord of colors can all start the process. A good set up feels like a memory—one I would like to have.” 

Martin Geiger lives in Staunton, Virginia, and has studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2019. He has won numerous grants and awards over the past several years, including the Franklin C. Watkins Grant, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, the Jimmy Lueders Prize, the Charles Toppan Drawing Prize, the Earl T Donelson Painting Award 2018, the Gilbert M Cantor Scholarship, and most recently, the 2019 Lauffer Prize. He has exhibited his work in Virginia, Philadelphia, and Ohio.

Philip Geiger is a retired Professor of Art who taught at the University of Virginia for over thirty years. He earned his BFA from Washington University and received his MFA from Yale University. Geiger is a noted realist painter. His work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Art in America, ARTnews, and The New Criterion. He has exhibited at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City, and his work is in a number of prominent collections. His paintings have been described as having “lustrous light, loose brushwork and subtle color” which “tellingly captures the nuances of mood and feeling that make up the more peaceful moments of contemporary family life.”

Interview with Painting Perceptions

Ann Glover graduated from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, and has had many exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work has appeared in such varied galleries as the Museum of Illustration in New York City, the Deanna Izen Miller Gallery, Venice, California, the Roanoke Museum of Fine Art, and in a number of college and university galleries. Her public art pieces have included large-scaled primitive wooden sculptures whose surfaces are covered with stenciled type and graphics. The Taubman Museum of Art commissioned the large-scale sculpture Myth, which towered over 40 feet in the museum’s City of Roanoke Atrium.

Kathleen Hall is a Roanoke-based oil painter working from direct observation. She also works in gouache with illuminated manuscripts as her source imagery.

Born in Ohio to a family of artists, Kathleen went on to receive her BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She has been a resident at numerous artist colonies including Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program, the Cité Internationale des Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has taught painting and drawing at the College of William and Mary, UNC Asheville, Centre College, and Hollins University, among others. Her work has been exhibited both regionally and internationally.

Interview with Painting Perceptions

Frank Hobbs is a painter, printmaker and draftsman. Since 2007 he has been Professor of Art at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where he teaches painting and drawing. From 2006-2007 he was Visiting Artist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Hobbs was born in Lynchburg, VA. He studied art at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and later at American University in Washington, DC, where he earned his M.F.A in 1984. He lived and had a studio in Staunton, VA for 15 years, teaching at Washington and Lee University from 1987 until 2004, and for 11 years at the Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton, which he co-founded in 1992.

Hobbs is a recipient of fellowships and grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2015 he received an Individual Excellence in the Arts Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His work has been shown in the American Embassies of Ankara, Turkey, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Bermuda, and is included in numerous corporate and private collections in America and abroad.

Interview: Frank Hobbs Artist Statement

Ray Kass is an internationally recognized artist whose work is represented by ART ACCESS in NYC, the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and Steven Francis Fine Art in Lynchburg, VA. His paintings have been widely exhibited and have been represented in many solo exhibitions. He has received numerous grants and awards, including individual artists grants from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 he had two extended residences at MQ in Vienna, Austria. His paintings reside in many public and private collections.

Ray Kass is Professor Emeritus of Art at Virginia Tech, and founder and director of The Mountain Lake Workshop; an ongoing series of collaborative and inter-related workshops centered in the environmental, cultural, and community resources of the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. The workshops have resulted in many unique, collaborative works of art that have been widely exhibited.

His publications include numerous reviews, articles, and catalogues.

Ray Kass is the son of celebrated American Folk Artist Jacob Kass (1920-2000).

Artist Statement:

“I feel that my painting directly responds to the environments that I work in, however, I no longer paint the landscape with the objective of achieving representational or “realistic” images. My use of realism is not an afterthought - but information-gathering that refreshes and expands my sense of color and form. My particular development reverses the usual assumption that “abstraction” develops from the confirmed experience of the study of “realism.” Drawings provide source materials for my recent paintings; I develop them into fragmented patterns of cut-out shapes that I overlay in the process of applying layers of oil emulsion and dry pigment over similarly composite patterns of water media on paper.”

John Lee, Associate Professor of Painting at William & Mary, is a graduate of the certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, holds a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from the University of Indiana in Bloomington. John is an oil painter who works directly from life with an interest in color, light, space, and weight. He has worked in traditional genres such as still life and self-portraiture, but his primary subject matter is interior spaces. John has shown at various venues nationally, but primarily in the northeast region, including a 2019 solo show at First Street Gallery in New York. He is a past member of the Zeuxis Still Life Association and has shown with the Midwest Paint Group.

John Lee says of his work, “My paintings are an attempt to marry a sense of light and color with a feeling for gravity and weight. I want a down-to-earth Fauvism. There is no reliance on chiaroscuro. I work from direct observation in my studio. It is my hope to tame, but not destroy, the exhilaration of color that I find in neutral color areas, such as shadows, cardboard, walls, and metal filing cabinets. The subjects, the views that I paint, are primarily ‘discovered’ while spending time in the studio working. The space is mainly painted as I find it, with little to no editing or composing of the objects. I want a sense of ‘Thereness’ with the objects and planes that I paint; I want everything to sit in space. Each painting is a meditation on both the setup and the painting, and hopefully the feelings and excitement of various felt moments in each work will translate to a sympathetic viewer. Given the way that I make a painting, the final expression may be that of a personal anxiety.”

Steven Francis Coates studied photo communications at California State University, Fullerton, and did post-graduate work in fine art at James Madison University. His photographic art spans the globe, with images from New York City to Paris to Istanbul. Known originally for his black and white photos, he moved to color work with recent exhibitions of his work from India and Cuba. He refers to himself as a street-style photographer who often strives for rhythm in crowded street images, but also appreciates and captures harmony and tranquility. Steve has had numerous one-man exhibitions over the years, including the Academy Center of the Arts, the Chrysler Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. He has consistently won awards for his work. In addition, he has taught as an adjunct professor at Lynchburg College and has led study abroad trips. As co-owner of Montana Plains Bakery for many years and an avid art collector, Steve has now opened the Steven Francis Fine Art gallery in Wyndhurst.

SPRING 2021

INDIA

CUBA

FACEBOOK

INSTAGRAM

John D. Morgan holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Studio Art from The University of West Virginia. He is the recipient of two NEA grants and his work is held in various museum, corporate, and private collections. He had a one-man show at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has taught painting and drawing as well as collage and assemblage at Virginia Commonwealth University, Randolph-Macon College, Sweet Briar College, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He works full-time as an artist.

Jim Muehlemann, a 2019 Professor Emeritus at Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Woman's College) has pursued a long and successful career as a celebrated painter and educator. He earned a BFA from the University of Illinois, an MFA from Syracuse University, and spent time in the vibrant art world of NYC before coming to Virginia. He also lived in Italy for a few years and has been in many group exhibitions in the United States and in Italy. Muehlemann has had solo exhibitions in New York at Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, Penine Hart Gallery, Althea Viafora Gallery, as well as the Paul Cava Gallery in Philadelphia. In Virginia, he has had solo exhibitions at the Maier Museum of Art, the UVA Fayerweather Gallery, and Riverviews Craddock-Terry Gallery. He has been the recipient of many grants and awards, including Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grants and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Italy.

Scott Noel studied at Washington University in St. Louis and moved to Philadelphia in 1978 where he has continued to live, paint, and teach for the past forty-one years. He has mounted over forty major shows, including in Philadelphia, New York, and at university galleries around the country. His work is included in numerous private, public, and corporate collections including the Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy. Noel has received fellowships from the Cité Internationale des Art, Paris, the Independence Foundation, and the Bader Fund. He has taught in Philadelphia at The University of the Arts, Arcadia University, Community College of Philadelphia, and beginning in 1996, at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he taught drawing and painting in the undergraduate and graduate programs.

Lincoln Perry attended Columbia University and received his MFA from Queens College. Perry has taught at the University of Arkansas, Queens College, and the University of New Hampshire. Since 2001, he has been Distinguished Visiting Artist at the University of Virginia. In addition to his work as an easel painter, Perry’s large-scale mural works include commissions at Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia, the Met Life build- ing in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Federal Court House in Tallahassee, Florida. Perry’s work can also be seen in the PBS documentary, “The Murals of Lincoln Perry.” Perry lives with his wife, novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie, in Staunton, Virginia.

Link to Edmond Praybe Interview with Sarah-Faith Strait

Edmond Praybe received his B.F.A. from Maryland Institute, College of Art, and his M.F.A. from the New York Studio School. His work has been shown widely at venues across the U.S., including Manifest Gallery, Stephen F. Austin State University, The University of Mary Washington, Prince Street and Bowery Galleries, and the Mitchell Gallery. He is the recipient of the Hohenberg Travel Grant, and has received several Mercedes Matter Awards. Praybe was also a National Parks Artist-In-Residence, and is a member of Zeuxis: An Association of Still Life Painters. He teaches painting and drawing, and lectures about his work regularly at universities and art organizations throughout America. His work has been included in Painting Perceptions and Manifest Gallery publications.

Edmond Praybe works from direct observation. Praybe says, “The relationships I discover when working this way seem to be much more exciting and unpredictable than anything I could invent. My vocabulary of shape, color, tone, mark,and structure increases exponentially when I have something to look at and paint from. My personal, human connection to the subject is amplified as well – I can walk in the real space, touch the objects, talk to the people.” Contrary to these paintings, Praybe also makes invented and non-representational paintings. Each of his subjects, or genres of painting informs the others, helping Praybe to make decisions when working. Praybe says, “Above all, I’m trying to reconcile a seemingly impossible duality in my paintings – that they are tough, formally rigorous, calculated and restrained and at the same time genuinely human and full of life...”

Interview with Painting Perceptions

Ephraim Rubenstein was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1956. He received his B.A. in Art History from Columbia University and his M.F.A. in Painting from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. In addition, he attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where he studied with Francis Cunningham, the National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts, with Harvey Dinnerstein, and the Arts Students League, with Robert Beverly Hale.

Rubenstein has had eleven one-person exhibitions in NY; seven at Tibor de Nagy one at Tatistcheff & Co and three at George Billis Gallery. He has exhibited at the Butler Institute of American Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Maier Museum of Fine Art, and the National Academy of Design, where he won the Emil and Dines Carlsen Prize in painting. His work is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Exxon Corporation, and Deloitte & Touche.

His work has been featured in “American Artist” Magazine, “American Heritage” Magazine and “Architectural Digest,” among others. Several of his paintings have been on loan to the United States State Department as part of its Art in Embassies Program.

Rubenstein was Associate Professor of Art at the University of Richmond from 1987-1998, where he received the Distinguished Educator Award and The Commonwealth’s Outstanding Faculty Award. He taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art and the National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts. He also taught at Columbia University’s Department of Narrative Medicine, where he taught the Seminar in the Literature of Art to graduate students in Narrative Medicine, as well as Life Drawing to first year medical students at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is currently Instructor Emeritus of The Arts Students League of New York, where he taught Life Drawing and Artistic Anatomy, the Seminar in the Literature of Art and numerous workshops in various aspects of oil painting, drawing and materials.

Elise Schweitzer is an Associate Professor of Art at Hollins University. Her paintings depict large-scale figurative action, and intimate abstractions of light and form. Equestrians, skydivers, and party crashers populate her figurative canvases, while her abstractions, architectural units of windows and enclosures are shadowed and illuminated by imaginary lights. She paints from memory and observation. She studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, then participated in overseas study in Florence, Italy, and received her MFA from Indiana University.

Interview with Painting Perceptions

“Our Kids Play Together,” Exhibition Review on Painting Perceptions

Janet Stapelman attended Catholic University in D.C. and State University of New York in Oswego where she learned technical theater skills. After graduation, she designed sets in New York City and took classes at the Art Students’ League. She painted sets for over 250 Broadway productions. She also co-founded a vocational school for aspiring scenic artists. A diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis caused her to move to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, away from northern winters. Unable to paint as she used to, she began working with leftover threads from her needlepoint work. Soon she was amassing skeins of thread in all different colors, designing larger images, committing to the meditative process and making it her own.

Sarah-Faith Strait is from Mount Gilead, Ohio. She earned her B.F.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, with concentrations in painting, drawing, and printmaking. She later received her M.F.A. in Studio Art from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Strait has exhibited in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Maine, and Virginia, and her work is found in collections throughout America. The most notable collections are Ohio Wesleyan University, art critic and historian, Martica Sawin, Sara Vance Waddell, and The Woodberry Forest School. Strait is a recipient of the competitive Three Arts Scholarship Award. Strait currently resides in Ohio, where she continues her studio practice.

Artist Statement:

The image of the horse has been a long-standing obsession throughout my life and it has taken on many variations. In my current work, I engage with the form of the horse, exploring conditions of time and movement that challenge the “frozen image” that is inherent to the medium of painting. In my paintings, the horse and its surrounding environment are fragmented into parts and reassembled into a new whole that defies a static reality. In my work I use a myriad of material processes, where photography and digital collage are utilized to create stimulus for eventual paintings. The digital source material is later transformed by an intuitive painting process where the working of material becomes subject matter in its own right. While my initial motivations are centered around the horse in motion, the images that result from this process continually surprise me as they are unable to resist becoming more. Through dynamic arrangements of form, and through the actions of painting, the horses in my work transcend mere movement and dramatize fractured, emotionally charged gestures across the canvas surface, and present visual ambiguities that encourage a contemplative state in which new meanings for the horse can emerge. It is through the working of material that my paintings reveal a living being that possesses a nuanced complexity and vitality.

Rober Sulkin (b. 1948) is a photographer living in Roanoke, VA. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at Hollins University, where he taught from 1980-2019.

Sulkin’s photography has been exhibited in solo, group, and juried exhibitions regionally and nationally. In 2019, a retrospective of his work Robert Sulkin, Photographs, 1973-2019, was held at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Hollins University. His work was also the subject of the traveling exhibition Robert Sulkin, Photographs 1985-1995, sponsored by the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. In 2016, a feature story, “The Experimental Professor” appeared in Black and White Photography Magazine, Vol. 197.

In 2009, he was the recipient of a Professional Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, The Light Factory, the Chrysler Museum, college galleries throughout Virginia, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM., among others. In addition, he has received many awards in juried exhibitions throughout the country. Highlights include Best in Show in Photospiva, Joplin, MO 2008 and at the Academy of Fine Arts National Juried Photography Exhibition, Lynchburg, VA in 2013 and 2024; and on four occasions Sulkin has been one of five selected to receive the Qualex Award at the Photographic Image Biennial at the Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University.

Sulkin holds a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1970) and an MA and MFA from the State University of Iowa.

Of his photography, Sulkin states:

“I once titled an exhibition Fact, Fiction, Life, Death and a lecture on my work A Failed Attempt to Understand the Universe. In many ways, a combination of these titles provides a summary of my 50 plus year experience in photography, which I would describe as a continuous exploration of things of which I might be curious, but hold no special knowledge. Using recycled mateials-junk off the street, specimen and old photograph collections, even my own vacation photos, I attempt to construct not easily explained realities, referencing science, nature, biology, astronomy, and mortality, the results of which often suggest uncertainty or angst.'“

KENNETH’S WEBSITE

Kenneth Templeton is a graduate of the University of Virginia with a B.A. in History. A lifelong surfer and former resident of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, he became primarily a seascape painter. In 2015 he moved to Amherst County, and while he still paints seascapes, he also paints the small towns and countryside of Virginia. Around 2014, he became obsessed with working in miniature and his latest endeavor is capturing the essence of old family snapshots. He has won awards in Wyoming, North Carolina, Virginia, and has been in many exhibitions including a U.S. Department of State exhibition in Bulgaria and a juried exhibition in New York City.

Allen TenBusschen is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Lynchburg and holds a BFA from Brigham Young University and an MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He has had solo shows in New York City and Massachusetts and has won awards in many juried shows over the years. In 2018, he was selected as a semi-finalist for the prestigious BP portrait award at the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. Minot State University wrote of him, “With a focus on figurative work, TenBusschen’s practice is about the search for authenticity, in our perceptions of one another and in the spaces we inhabit.”

Bill White spent 39 years as a Professor of Painting at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. He has received grants from the Cabell, Mellon & Ford Foundations and in 2012 was honored with the Kendig Individual Artist award. Bill is a member of the Midwest Paint Group, and has been a guest artist with the Zeuxis Gallery. He has had residencies at the Cite International des Art, Paris, France, and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2017 Bill and his wife Linda moved to Caledonia, NY, to be near family and enjoy their retirement years by opening The Village Gallery.

Interview with Painting Perceptions

Rosalie White received her B.A. and M.Ed. from Lynchburg College. She later attended the Washington Studio School in Washington D.C., and undertook independent study in Paris, France, on three occasions.

Her work has been exhibited in Courtyard Gallery in Washington D.C., the Wichita Center for the Arts, The Chrysler Museum, Purdue University Galleries, and L’Ermitage in Rueil-Malmaison, France. Her art is included in collections in the United States, Germany, and France. She is one of the Founders of The Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton, Virginia. She was selected Virginia Governor’s School Outstanding Educator three times. Her teaching career has continued for over fifty-two years.

Wooten earned her undergraduate degree in Art and Architecture at the University of Virginia and continued on at UVA as an Aunspaugh Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in Studio Art before earning her MFA from American University. During graduate school, she attended a summer program in Perugia, Italy, at the Accademia de Belle Arti Pietro Vannucci, where the panoramic Mediterranean landscape took hold of her imagination. Wooten’s landscape paintings have been exhibited across the East Coast, including juried exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Delaware, the Bowery Gallery in New York City and the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Boston. Recent solo exhibitions in Charlottesville include “Spirit of Place: Landscapes Real & Imagined” at Chroma Projects in 2019 and “View from the Ridge” at Second Street Gallery in 2020/21.

My current work reflects my interest in painting the landscape of my daily experience: the fields and meadows of central Virginia, views to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains from my hilltop neighborhood, and the way trees mark the passing of time in my own backyard. My paintings explore the places they represent, as well as the inner landscape of my experience and how it might be shared. Color, shape, and mark fall in service to the perception of an emotional presence in the land that is both highly personal and universally human. The landscape painting becomes a mirror into our own histories, reveries, and associations. 

A native of Charleston, SC, Aggie Zed grew up in a large family on Sullivan’s Island riding ponies and donkeys on the beach. After graduating from The University of South Carolina with a degree in painting and sculpture, she moved to Virginia and supported her painting by designing and building ceramic chess sets. Her work in clay evolved to become a widely-collected series of human-animal hybrid figures with which she has made a living. She divides her working life between sculpture and drawing and painting. Among other honors, she has been awarded an NEA fellowship in sculpture and a VCA Professional Fellowship.