Peter Klashorst – Halima [1994]

Peter Klashorst (Peter van de Klashorst) (born Santpoort, February 11, 1957) is a Dutch painter, sculptor, and photographer. Klashorst specialises in painting and photographing young women, particularly from the Netherlands and several African countries. He also has a wife and children in Africa.

In 2000, in primarily Muslim Senegal, his art caused him to end up in custody of the police for some weeks. He was suspected of taking advantage of prostitution, inciting debauchery, and the production of obscene pictures, because he had painted local women in the nude. By bribing officials, he managed to buy his freedom, and he sneaked into the Gambia to flee the country. On another visit in 2003 he was also deported from Gambia for pornographic paintings.

[Oil on canvas, 150 x 105 cm]

John Koch – My Studio [c.1952]

John Koch (Toledo, Ohio, 1909 – New York City, 1979) was one of the key American Realists of the 20th Century. When the world seemed to turn its back on the realist tradition, Koch persisted and presented intimate views of his personal world. His paintings are populated with models, musicians, views of his studio, and his New York Apartment. Through it all, Koch was a quiet and understated voice who kept the heartbeat of the realist movement alive and respected.

Koch’s compositions were elegant. His warm tones and colours invited you into his world where, as you investigate the contents, you discover treasures amongst his beautifully observed objects. The objects themselves are chosen with care and a sense of knowledgeable appreciation. In all his work, the intricacies of light permeate and penetrate to create airy spaces into which the viewer enters. John Koch was a well trained artist who delighted in his profession and created an impressive amount of work.

[Oil on canvas, 61.0 x 102.1 cm]

Henry Gasser – Highway Diner

Painter, lecturer, teacher, illustrator and author, Henry Gasser was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 31, 1909. He lived, studied and worked in New Jersey for his entire life. His work demonstrated a sense of place and feeling that most could identify with. He often exhausted a subject which becomes evident when viewing the body of his work for many of his paintings are just slight variations of previously completed compositions. He felt that design was very important and meant the difference between a mediocre work and a truly professional one. It is here where Gasser excelled, his work demonstrates a sense of composition that gained wide spread appreciation for his work. He died in Orange, New Jersey in 1981.

[Oil on canvas, 76.4 x 91.2 cm]

Stefan Fiedorowicz – The Human Spirit Craves Mastery Over Its Carnal Shell

Stefan Fiedorowicz, a Canadian now residing in Vienna, has amassed a most impressive resume with shows spreading out from Canada, United States and Europe. Fiedorowicz’s work has often been compared to the great modernists of the past following the notable style of lyrical abstraction, a term meaning an opening to personal expression. While perhaps a compliment, this also seems a disservice to his striking talent.

Fiedorowicz possesses something more than a painter following in the footsteps of others before. There is a supreme depth to his work that captures a newer sense of Modernism, something that is sadly missing from the current art scene. His shapes and lines infuse his paintings with a richly exotic symbolism of style. There is purpose and psychology to his work, conveying a sense of confidence from a broad spectrum of experience. Fiedorowicz’s distinction as a modern painter is in his grace and amplitude in creating works that are engaging and powerful: they make more than a mark – they make a statement generating alluring and fascinating canvases.

Michael Bouger (freelance arts writer)

[Oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm]

John Sloan – Chinese Restaurant [1909]

Around 1900 the growing middle class, the new employment opportunities for women, and the influx of immigrants led to the proliferation of ethnic eateries, which extended New York’s dining culture beyond private homes, clubs, and exclusive establishments. Sloan (American, 1871–1951) noted in his diary in February 1909: “Felt restless so went to the Chinese restaurant and was glad I did for I saw a strikingly gotten up girl with dashing red feathers in her hat playing with the restaurant’s fat cat. It would be a good thing to paint.” Sloan’s canvas, on which he worked from memory, may portray a woman of easy virtue, as her flamboyant attire and heavy makeup suggest. Yet, instead of any hint of reproach, Sloan conveys a light-hearted acceptance of her droll little performance as she feeds the cat while her slovenly companion feeds himself and two men look on with amusement.

[Oil on canvas, 66 x 81.9 cm]

Paul Cummings – Spice Cottage [2009]

Paul Cummings graduated from Cheltenham University in 1999 with a BA Honours under the tutelage of Anita Taylor, Bob Davison and Paul Rosenbloom. He has been working for the last decade within the creative industries as a digital art director within marketing and advertising for some of the largest global agencies producing work for international brand names. His current location is London and particularly the East End where lives and has a studio. Paul has been painting and producing print works that have been gaining popularity from the outset. His professional knowledge of the digital environment progressively impacts on his traditional fine art practice that he is currently engaged in.

“This is the latest landscape I have been working on and this scene depicts the East End of London representing the lowest end of the social income scale and is a locality of which the majority is surviving off welfare or otherwise on a very low income. An ad hoc vista is assimilated from the remorseless post war redevelopment that surrounds the subject matter. With an office butted tightly up against the shop with tower blocks rising ominously further behind. A flyover intrudes from above to cut up the city and communities with its inappropriate town planning. This picture clearly shows the rapid demise of the last expansion and social housing plans in the 50’s and 60’s.”

See: http://www.paulcummingsart.com/blog/

[Computer graphics, 100 x 100 cm]

William Hogarth – The Lady’s Last Stake [1759]

William Hogarth (Bartholomew Close, London, November 10, 1697 – October 26, 1764) was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from excellent realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”. Much of his work, though at times vicious, poked fun at contemporary politics and customs.

Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became increasingly commercialised and viewed in shop windows, taverns and public buildings and sold in print shops. Old hierarchies broke down, and new forms began to flourish: the ballad opera, the bourgeois tragedy, and especially, a new form of fiction called the novel with which authors such as Henry Fielding had great success. He drew from the highly moralising Protestant tradition of Dutch genre painting, and the very vigorous satirical traditions of the English broadsheet and other types of popular print. In England the fine arts had little comedy in them before Hogarth. His prints were expensive, and remained so until early nineteenth-century reprints brought them to a wider audience.

Hogarth died in London and was buried at St. Nicholas’s Churchyard, Chiswick Mall in Chiswick. His friend the actor David Garrick wrote the inscription on his tombstone.

[Oil on canvas, 36 x 41.5 inches]

Henry Alexander – An Exact Weight [c.1886]

Henry Alexander (San Francisco, 1860 – New York City, May 15, 1894) was an American painter from California. After early exhibiting a talent for drawing and painting, he went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where his teachers were Ludwig von Loeffts and the history painter Wilhelm Lindenschmidt. The New York Herald described Henry Alexander as one of the creators of the modern school of art. Aside from a few trompe-l’oeil paintings, his paintings generally depict individuals within highly detailed interiors. He also painted Chinese and Japanese subjects.

He left San Francisco for New York City on April 15, 1887, in order to be at the centre of the art world, but he suffered from money troubles and alcoholism. He had a studio at 51 West Tenth Street. The other artists in the building avoided him, because he was always trying to borrow money. On May 15, 1894, his money troubles led him to commit suicide by swallowing oxalic acid in the Oriental Hotel at Broadway and Thirty-Ninth Street.

[Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 69.2 cm]

Louise Beckinsale – The Promise [2009]

Louise Beckinsale was born in Ascot, Great Britain in 1972. She has been living in Italy for over 20 years. After working as a fashion designer, in 1999 she started to dedicate herself only to painting and art. In 2007 she became certified as a Kundalini Yoga teacher. She currently lives and works in Tortona, Italy.

See: http://www.louisebeckinsale.co.uk/

[Oil on canvas, 170 x 108 cm]

Priscilla Roberts – Life Mask (Abraham Lincoln) [1961-62]

Obituary published on August 16, 2001 in The Wilton (Connecticut) Bulletin:

Priscilla Warren Roberts, a world-renowned realist artist, long-time Wiltonian and animal lover who was outspoken about the rights of renters to own pets, died Sunday at her home in Georgetown. She was 85 and previously lived in Wilton for 35 years. Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, on June 13, 1916, she was a daughter of the late Charles Asaph and Mary Beth Roberts.

[Oil on board, 48.3 x 39.4 cm]