ARTISTS
Artists To Watch
Our picks for 10 promising talents to keep an eye on this year By Devon Jackson Carolyn Hesse-Low Often, when you spend so much of your time doing
Devon Jackson / Southwest Art
01 Jan, 2008
Our picks for 10 promising talents to keep an eye on this year By Devon Jackson
Carolyn Hesse-Low
Often, when you spend so much of your time doing what other people want you to do, you end up not doing what`s most meaningful to you. Even when what you`re doing falls within your chosen field, such as art. That was the case for Carolyn Hesse-Low, who for quite some time worked as a graphic designer and illustrator, drew cartoons, and illustrated medical textbooks. All of which was related to art, which Hesse-Low had wanted to do since her father came home to Los Angeles from a Washington, DC, business trip with a 12-volume set of art books from the National Gallery of Art. "That hooked me, that sparked the passion," recalls Hesse-Low, who now resides in La Jolla, CA. "I wanted to paint with those brush strokes of the masters."
It wasn`t till well after she`d earned her bachelor`s and master`s degrees (from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, respectively) that Hesse-Low started painting those brush strokes full-time. She`s now renowned for her plein-air oils and her evocative landscapes. FOOTBALL ON THE BEACH, her wistful scene of boys playing near a deserted lifeguard station, reminded her, as she painted it, of Winslow Homer`s BOYS IN A PASTURE and also rekindled her interest in the figurative.
"I respond to what`s going on around me and process it and express it and people connect to itwhether it`s the loneliness of an abandoned boat, the texture of the sunlight, or boys playing on a beach," says Hesse-Low. "What attracts me to a scene is the emotional connection. More than the light or the composition is what I feel inside when I`m painting it-and that`s what I want people to feel when they see my work." Hesse-Low is represented by Mountain Trails Gallery, Sedona, AZ.
Jono Tew
In the Old Welsh language, "Tew" means "hill." How apropos. Jono Tew`s oil paintings of northern New Mexico`s San Miguel County, where the 39-year-old artist now lives, depict that landscape`s many hills and valleys. Liquid-y and free-flowing in the vein of Regionalist champions Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Tew`s newfound style grew out of the land he moved to only three years ago.
Born in Virginia Beach, VA, but raised in Concord, MA, Tew long considered himself a diehard New Englander (despite earning a degree in graphic design from New Orleans` Tulane University and spending several years in Savannah, GA, and Atlanta). After foregoing a career illustrating DVD and CD covers to paint full-time in 1994, he also tended stylistically toward the abstract, breaking up his canvases into cubist squares.
"Moving out here really clicked for me," says Tew, who followed his sister and parents to New Mexico in 2005. "I was craving to loosen up the canvas." Indeed, he switched from acrylic to oil, his colors got brighter, and he connected to the land. "I want to convey the energy of the land as a living, moving thing," says Tew. "My work`s more about form and line and the movement of the picture. It`s about connecting to something I`m a part of. It`s really brought me into the world I`m in now." Tew is represented by Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.
Josh Elliott
"You have to live in a place a long time to know what`s really mundane about it." So claims longtime Montanan Josh Elliott, whose paintings seem to confirm that theory, in the sense that once you`ve lived somewhere long enough, you can also therefore know what is truly spectacular, beautiful, inspiring, and unique about that place.
Elliott was born in Great Falls, MT. His doctor father became a full-time painter himself at age 45, and in 1995 Elliott apprenticed with his dad and then briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a film director while studying fine art at Montana State University. When his wife later took a teaching a job in Oregon, the two relocated, only to move back six years later with their two kids. "There were too many people for both of us," admits Elliott, 33, whose wife also hails from Great Falls. "It was too fast-paced."
Once back on his home turf, Elliott discovered a renewed sense of purpose and a newfound confidence. He also developed his own style, one separate not only from his father`s but also from that of other painters who`d always inspired him-Victor Higgins, Rockwell Kent, and the Canadian landscape artists known as the Group of Seven.
"I could paint here the rest of my life and still not get it right," offers Elliott, who calls himself an impressionistic realist painter. "But the more time I spend here, the more time I put into painting, the easier it gets to tell a story on the canvas. Which is what I`m trying to do, to relate a story to people. Many stories. That`s the biggest thing that sets me apart: the variety of what I paint. Which comes from being in this place and really getting to know it." Elliott is represented by Chaparral Fine Art, Bozeman, MT; Claggett/Rey Gallery, Vail, CO; Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Ponderosa Art Gallery, Hamilton, MT; Simpson Gallagher Gallery, Cody, WY; and Two Medicine Gallery, Whitefish, MT.
Michael Knud Ross
"The pattern of my life has been one of changing gears," concedes Michael Knud Ross, a 30-year-old painter and sculptor who has split his time among his birth land of Norway, his childhood stomping grounds of Finland, and some equally formative years in Washington, DC. "But I`ve always felt that all these interests of mine, they`ll converge." Converge they have. Ross has parlayed his cross-cultural personal life and his artistically and academically cross-pollinated interests into an already intense body of work.
The son of a World Bank executive, Ross spent five of his first 10 years freely roaming the streets of Helsinki. When he and his parents and brother and sister left Finland for suburban Maryland, Finland never left Ross. "The landscapes that I draw and paint are all Finland," says the artist, who now lives in San Francisco. "I can`t paint California landscapes-the pine tress and the rocks I relate to all come from Finland."
After two discouraging years studying painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ross transferred to the University of Maryland and switched majors, earning an anthropology degree in 2000. He then got into sculpture and even received a commission from the city to construct nine historically based pieces for the city`s abandoned emergency call boxes. Very small, very detailed, and very time-consuming, the sculptures reinvigorated his desire for narrative, which he embraced in 2005 during an apprenticeship with renowned Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. "You can have space miles deep if you want in painting, but not in sculpture," says Ross. "And I missed that."
Hence his return to painting, especially epic painting, exemplified by the 11 -foot-long LOST AT SEA, his dramatic rendering of 11 people caught in a storm in a rowboat. "That painting was my answer to painters like Winslow Homer and Theodore Gericault," says Ross, whose dreams often revolve around water. "I`m drawn to those watershed moments." Lately, though, Ross has turned his eye and his brush toward the beauty of fog, trees, rocks, and sky. "It`s better to uplift the world than to bring it down," he maintains. Ross is represented by Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA, and Geras Tousignant Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
Gerald Cournoyer
What Jasper Johns did with flags and targets, Gerald Cournoyer has done with butterflies and ravens and crosses. And just as Johns moved on to other subject matter and styles, so too has Cournoyer, whose works are rooted in a sense of spirituality and place that both belies and defies the 41-year-old`s peripatetic life.
The youngest of 14 children, Cournoyer is a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe; he grew up on South Dakota`s Indian reservations and attended its Indian boarding schools before joining the U.S. Marine Corps after high school. Sure of his artistic talent as early as second grade, he didn`t start drawing again till the military sent him to Guam. Once back in the States, Cournoyer eventually found his way into the two-year program at Santa Fe`s Institute of American Indian Arts (where he`s currently an adjunct professor) before going on to earn a bachelor`s degree at the University of South Dakota. He later earned a master`s at Oklahoma University.
Despite, or because of, all these trials and travels, Cournoyer has only pushed himself and his art deeper-into his heritage, into various cosmologies and mythologies. "My paintings incorporate the beadwork and quillwork and parfleche designs of my culture," says Cournoyer, whose images serve as conduits between this world and the world of his ancestors and the supernatural. "I like to incorporate the parfleche and other designs and blow them up on the canvas. Also, I don`t just look at my paintings, I touch them. It`s a continual process of being in the moment and being in constant communication with the painting. Spirituality really carries my work." Cournoyer is represented by Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Ben Pickard Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK; Sweet Liberty Gallery, Liberty Hill, TX; M.A. Doran Gallery, Tulsa, OK; Menaio Garganico, San Menaio, Italy; and Emhaus Art, Taos, NM.
Carrie Marill
Whimsical, stark, spare, disarming, sneakily and subversively weighty, Carrie Marill`s works in gouache and acrylic combine the silliness of Dr. Seuss witli the sober precision of John James Audubon. Born in San Francisco in 1976 to a dentist father and a phlebotomist mother, Marill and her brother (now a musician) benefited from a rather typically unrestricted Bay Area childhood. After earning her bachelor`s degree in 2002 from San Francisco State University, Marill left the familiarity of California for a master`s program and some hoped-for structure at upstate New York`s Cornell University. "I wanted a rigorous critique," recalls Marill. "Instead, they let us do whatever we wanted. We were left alone a lot, which was actually good. Later on, I appreciated it." The school also emphasized a more intellectual approach, which Marill eventually warmed to as well. "I was very visceral going in, and very conceptual when I came out," says Marill, who spends lots of time in libraries and online poring through Google`s Images. "I`ve now melded those two together in my work."
Now based in Goodyear, AZ, right outside Phoenix, and living with her farmer husband Matthew Moore, Marill has applied her collagist touch to everything from birds and plants to trucks and imaginary buildings. "I like people to get a reaction to the beauty and fragility of life," says Marill. She is represented by Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX; sixspace, Culver City, CA; and www.carriemarill.com.
David Yorke
According to David Yorke, he is not exactly a realist painter but rather an impressionistic realist who tries to be both historically accurate and entertaining in depicting Native Americans of the 1800s. He especially hopes his paintings capture how it was they lived, how they must have felt, and how they expressed themselves. Impossible as that may seem for a New Jersey native like Yorke-a boy who was raised in South Florida on a steady diet of Hollywood westerns-his exquisitely rendered portraits prove otherwise.
"There`s so much in the back of my mind that`s stereotypical and romanticized about Native Americans," admits the former illustrator, toymaker, and Disney employee whose great-great-grandfather painted the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and many of the Vanderbilts. "And I`m trying not to do any of that."
Faced with a dearth of information about how Native peoples behaved back then, and strapped, too, for Native models of western origin, Yorke relies on his imagination and on frequent trips to the West to events like the Artists` Ride (where models and actors pose for artists). Ironically, Yorke gained most of his confidence as a painter in his nine years working as a background animator on such Disney fare as Mulan, Tarzan, and Brother Bear. When Disney folded its Orlando-based animation studio in 2004, Yorke decided to devote all his time to his western paintings.
His painting INDEPENDENT AND FREE, a portrait of two Sioux warriors in buffalo-skin hides, exemplifies his style. "The men have proud, dignified expressions," says Yorke, who even started making his own costumes for his Native models. "I like to portray the expression or feeling or attitude. Like shooting a candid photograph of somebody." Yorke is represented by The Plainsmen Gallery, Clearwater, FL, and Trailside Galleries, Jackson, WY, and Scottsdale, AZ.
Stacy Barter
Light. The flow of light, the sense of it, the utter appreciation of light and its dynamism. This is what takes precedence in the still lifes of Stacy Barter, especially in her lemons, vases, roses, and peonies. "Flowers are so challenging and so complex," says Barter, an ardent fan of the Impressionists and Rembrandt. "Most flower paintings are stiff and feel artificial. Mine have a very spontaneous and fluid look. A lot of that is in the brush stroke, which is so critical for flower paintings. But it`s also because I never paint from photographs. I only use real flowers. I love that immediacy and the pressure of having to paint it quickly. It keeps you sharp and focused."
A native of Southern California who has made Orlando, FL, her home since 1987, just after earning a journalism degree from the University of Central Florida, Barter rediscovered her artistic gifts only after stumbling into one of renowned instructor Gregg Kreutz`s oil-painting classes in 1991. "It changed everything for me," says Barter, who at the time felt stuck in a dreary public relations job with a local hospital. "I refocused my whole life."
Since abandoning the pen and going full-time with her brush in 1996, Barter has learned how to go right at what`s most essential in a painting, while at the same time leaving a little bit of mystery in there as well. "I try very hard to find mysterious areas that aren`t over-described," says Barter. "I want the viewer to contribute something to the painting. It`s more interesting to look at a painting where the artist was brave enough to leave some things undescribed." Barter is represented by Sherwood`s Gallery, Houston, TX; Eisenhauer Gallery, Martha`s Vineyard, MA; The Villa, Winter Park, FL; The Art Vue Galerie, Cocoa Village, FL; and www.stacybarter.com.
Linda Lucas Hardy
"We really are a strange section of the art world, us colored-pencil people," admits Linda Lucas Hardy with a laugh. "And it is tedious, but we love it." Hovering somewhere between photorealism and the old masters, Hardy`s colored-pencil paintings have all the drama, complexity, and sophistication of anything done in oil. Basically self-taught-although she took every art class she could near her hometown of Texarkana, TX, between 1984 and 1994, when the last of her seven kids started school-the 60-year-old Hardy found her belovedly tedious calling in a colored-pencil class back in 1990.
During a trip to Italy with her husband in 2000, she had an epiphany: If she wanted to achieve something artistically, she`d better do it right quick. Already known for her masterful still lifes, especially of fruit ("Fruit`s easy," quips Hardy, "it doesn`t argue back or look at you weird"), Hardy wowed her ardent admirers when she happened upon fruit in a plastic bag. "They were kind of a fluke, and that first one was a nightmare to do," confesses Hardy about these particular paintings. "But I got so much attention for it."
Epiphany realized, Hardy continues to push at the envelopes of her plastic bags-and at the tips of her pencils. "I`m very conscious of value and what is dramatic and what will grab your attention," says the artist, who may soon venture back into oils. "The colored-pencil work is very complex and very, very hard to do. But I do love it. I really do." Hardy is represented by Southwest Gallery, Dallas, TX, and www.lindahardy.com.
Craig Kosak
About three years ago, Craig Kosak had the realization that he didn`t want to be lying on his deathbed regretting all the things he never did. Figuring he had to give more to his art and less to the Seattle graphic design firm he`d been with for the past 25 years, Kosak, now 50, decided he`d quit his job and just paint. Before making such a bold move, however, he consulted an astrologer, who told him, "Yes, you`re in a time of transition. Do it." He remembers leaving the astrologer`s and thinking to himself, "Boy, am I in trouble now."
Intent on becoming a landscape painter, Kosak lit out for Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. But when he got back to his Seattle studio, it wasn`t mountains and skies that kept popping into his head, it was buffalo and ravens. Realizing these animals had something to tell him, Kosak listened. They became central to some of his most dramatic paintings. Also, instead of chucking his design skills, he embraced them. "That`s my strength," says the artist, whose influences include N.C. Wyeth, Russell Chatham, and Maxfield Parrish. "And these animals-the ravens, the buffalo, the horses-have helped me figure out who I am, as a person and as a painter."
And maybe even as a society. While his raven and buffalo represent, respectively, the yin and the yang, the outer and the inner, his horse series reflects sensitivity and the way people deal with conflict. "The way they handle conflict is to run away," explains Kosak. "It`s fight or flight. And right now, maybe our culture needs a little more flight." Kosak is represented by Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Howard/Mandville Gallery, Kirkland, WA; and Gallery Fraga, Bainbridge Island, WA.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
Devon Jackson has also written for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside.
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Carolyn Hesse-Low
Often, when you spend so much of your time doing what other people want you to do, you end up not doing what`s most meaningful to you. Even when what you`re doing falls within your chosen field, such as art. That was the case for Carolyn Hesse-Low, who for quite some time worked as a graphic designer and illustrator, drew cartoons, and illustrated medical textbooks. All of which was related to art, which Hesse-Low had wanted to do since her father came home to Los Angeles from a Washington, DC, business trip with a 12-volume set of art books from the National Gallery of Art. "That hooked me, that sparked the passion," recalls Hesse-Low, who now resides in La Jolla, CA. "I wanted to paint with those brush strokes of the masters."
It wasn`t till well after she`d earned her bachelor`s and master`s degrees (from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, respectively) that Hesse-Low started painting those brush strokes full-time. She`s now renowned for her plein-air oils and her evocative landscapes. FOOTBALL ON THE BEACH, her wistful scene of boys playing near a deserted lifeguard station, reminded her, as she painted it, of Winslow Homer`s BOYS IN A PASTURE and also rekindled her interest in the figurative.
"I respond to what`s going on around me and process it and express it and people connect to itwhether it`s the loneliness of an abandoned boat, the texture of the sunlight, or boys playing on a beach," says Hesse-Low. "What attracts me to a scene is the emotional connection. More than the light or the composition is what I feel inside when I`m painting it-and that`s what I want people to feel when they see my work." Hesse-Low is represented by Mountain Trails Gallery, Sedona, AZ.
Jono Tew
In the Old Welsh language, "Tew" means "hill." How apropos. Jono Tew`s oil paintings of northern New Mexico`s San Miguel County, where the 39-year-old artist now lives, depict that landscape`s many hills and valleys. Liquid-y and free-flowing in the vein of Regionalist champions Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Tew`s newfound style grew out of the land he moved to only three years ago.
Born in Virginia Beach, VA, but raised in Concord, MA, Tew long considered himself a diehard New Englander (despite earning a degree in graphic design from New Orleans` Tulane University and spending several years in Savannah, GA, and Atlanta). After foregoing a career illustrating DVD and CD covers to paint full-time in 1994, he also tended stylistically toward the abstract, breaking up his canvases into cubist squares.
"Moving out here really clicked for me," says Tew, who followed his sister and parents to New Mexico in 2005. "I was craving to loosen up the canvas." Indeed, he switched from acrylic to oil, his colors got brighter, and he connected to the land. "I want to convey the energy of the land as a living, moving thing," says Tew. "My work`s more about form and line and the movement of the picture. It`s about connecting to something I`m a part of. It`s really brought me into the world I`m in now." Tew is represented by Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.
Josh Elliott
"You have to live in a place a long time to know what`s really mundane about it." So claims longtime Montanan Josh Elliott, whose paintings seem to confirm that theory, in the sense that once you`ve lived somewhere long enough, you can also therefore know what is truly spectacular, beautiful, inspiring, and unique about that place.
Elliott was born in Great Falls, MT. His doctor father became a full-time painter himself at age 45, and in 1995 Elliott apprenticed with his dad and then briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a film director while studying fine art at Montana State University. When his wife later took a teaching a job in Oregon, the two relocated, only to move back six years later with their two kids. "There were too many people for both of us," admits Elliott, 33, whose wife also hails from Great Falls. "It was too fast-paced."
Once back on his home turf, Elliott discovered a renewed sense of purpose and a newfound confidence. He also developed his own style, one separate not only from his father`s but also from that of other painters who`d always inspired him-Victor Higgins, Rockwell Kent, and the Canadian landscape artists known as the Group of Seven.
"I could paint here the rest of my life and still not get it right," offers Elliott, who calls himself an impressionistic realist painter. "But the more time I spend here, the more time I put into painting, the easier it gets to tell a story on the canvas. Which is what I`m trying to do, to relate a story to people. Many stories. That`s the biggest thing that sets me apart: the variety of what I paint. Which comes from being in this place and really getting to know it." Elliott is represented by Chaparral Fine Art, Bozeman, MT; Claggett/Rey Gallery, Vail, CO; Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Ponderosa Art Gallery, Hamilton, MT; Simpson Gallagher Gallery, Cody, WY; and Two Medicine Gallery, Whitefish, MT.
Michael Knud Ross
"The pattern of my life has been one of changing gears," concedes Michael Knud Ross, a 30-year-old painter and sculptor who has split his time among his birth land of Norway, his childhood stomping grounds of Finland, and some equally formative years in Washington, DC. "But I`ve always felt that all these interests of mine, they`ll converge." Converge they have. Ross has parlayed his cross-cultural personal life and his artistically and academically cross-pollinated interests into an already intense body of work.
The son of a World Bank executive, Ross spent five of his first 10 years freely roaming the streets of Helsinki. When he and his parents and brother and sister left Finland for suburban Maryland, Finland never left Ross. "The landscapes that I draw and paint are all Finland," says the artist, who now lives in San Francisco. "I can`t paint California landscapes-the pine tress and the rocks I relate to all come from Finland."
After two discouraging years studying painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ross transferred to the University of Maryland and switched majors, earning an anthropology degree in 2000. He then got into sculpture and even received a commission from the city to construct nine historically based pieces for the city`s abandoned emergency call boxes. Very small, very detailed, and very time-consuming, the sculptures reinvigorated his desire for narrative, which he embraced in 2005 during an apprenticeship with renowned Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. "You can have space miles deep if you want in painting, but not in sculpture," says Ross. "And I missed that."
Hence his return to painting, especially epic painting, exemplified by the 11 -foot-long LOST AT SEA, his dramatic rendering of 11 people caught in a storm in a rowboat. "That painting was my answer to painters like Winslow Homer and Theodore Gericault," says Ross, whose dreams often revolve around water. "I`m drawn to those watershed moments." Lately, though, Ross has turned his eye and his brush toward the beauty of fog, trees, rocks, and sky. "It`s better to uplift the world than to bring it down," he maintains. Ross is represented by Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA, and Geras Tousignant Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
Gerald Cournoyer
What Jasper Johns did with flags and targets, Gerald Cournoyer has done with butterflies and ravens and crosses. And just as Johns moved on to other subject matter and styles, so too has Cournoyer, whose works are rooted in a sense of spirituality and place that both belies and defies the 41-year-old`s peripatetic life.
The youngest of 14 children, Cournoyer is a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe; he grew up on South Dakota`s Indian reservations and attended its Indian boarding schools before joining the U.S. Marine Corps after high school. Sure of his artistic talent as early as second grade, he didn`t start drawing again till the military sent him to Guam. Once back in the States, Cournoyer eventually found his way into the two-year program at Santa Fe`s Institute of American Indian Arts (where he`s currently an adjunct professor) before going on to earn a bachelor`s degree at the University of South Dakota. He later earned a master`s at Oklahoma University.
Despite, or because of, all these trials and travels, Cournoyer has only pushed himself and his art deeper-into his heritage, into various cosmologies and mythologies. "My paintings incorporate the beadwork and quillwork and parfleche designs of my culture," says Cournoyer, whose images serve as conduits between this world and the world of his ancestors and the supernatural. "I like to incorporate the parfleche and other designs and blow them up on the canvas. Also, I don`t just look at my paintings, I touch them. It`s a continual process of being in the moment and being in constant communication with the painting. Spirituality really carries my work." Cournoyer is represented by Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Ben Pickard Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK; Sweet Liberty Gallery, Liberty Hill, TX; M.A. Doran Gallery, Tulsa, OK; Menaio Garganico, San Menaio, Italy; and Emhaus Art, Taos, NM.
Carrie Marill
Whimsical, stark, spare, disarming, sneakily and subversively weighty, Carrie Marill`s works in gouache and acrylic combine the silliness of Dr. Seuss witli the sober precision of John James Audubon. Born in San Francisco in 1976 to a dentist father and a phlebotomist mother, Marill and her brother (now a musician) benefited from a rather typically unrestricted Bay Area childhood. After earning her bachelor`s degree in 2002 from San Francisco State University, Marill left the familiarity of California for a master`s program and some hoped-for structure at upstate New York`s Cornell University. "I wanted a rigorous critique," recalls Marill. "Instead, they let us do whatever we wanted. We were left alone a lot, which was actually good. Later on, I appreciated it." The school also emphasized a more intellectual approach, which Marill eventually warmed to as well. "I was very visceral going in, and very conceptual when I came out," says Marill, who spends lots of time in libraries and online poring through Google`s Images. "I`ve now melded those two together in my work."
Now based in Goodyear, AZ, right outside Phoenix, and living with her farmer husband Matthew Moore, Marill has applied her collagist touch to everything from birds and plants to trucks and imaginary buildings. "I like people to get a reaction to the beauty and fragility of life," says Marill. She is represented by Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX; sixspace, Culver City, CA; and www.carriemarill.com.
David Yorke
According to David Yorke, he is not exactly a realist painter but rather an impressionistic realist who tries to be both historically accurate and entertaining in depicting Native Americans of the 1800s. He especially hopes his paintings capture how it was they lived, how they must have felt, and how they expressed themselves. Impossible as that may seem for a New Jersey native like Yorke-a boy who was raised in South Florida on a steady diet of Hollywood westerns-his exquisitely rendered portraits prove otherwise.
"There`s so much in the back of my mind that`s stereotypical and romanticized about Native Americans," admits the former illustrator, toymaker, and Disney employee whose great-great-grandfather painted the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and many of the Vanderbilts. "And I`m trying not to do any of that."
Faced with a dearth of information about how Native peoples behaved back then, and strapped, too, for Native models of western origin, Yorke relies on his imagination and on frequent trips to the West to events like the Artists` Ride (where models and actors pose for artists). Ironically, Yorke gained most of his confidence as a painter in his nine years working as a background animator on such Disney fare as Mulan, Tarzan, and Brother Bear. When Disney folded its Orlando-based animation studio in 2004, Yorke decided to devote all his time to his western paintings.
His painting INDEPENDENT AND FREE, a portrait of two Sioux warriors in buffalo-skin hides, exemplifies his style. "The men have proud, dignified expressions," says Yorke, who even started making his own costumes for his Native models. "I like to portray the expression or feeling or attitude. Like shooting a candid photograph of somebody." Yorke is represented by The Plainsmen Gallery, Clearwater, FL, and Trailside Galleries, Jackson, WY, and Scottsdale, AZ.
Stacy Barter
Light. The flow of light, the sense of it, the utter appreciation of light and its dynamism. This is what takes precedence in the still lifes of Stacy Barter, especially in her lemons, vases, roses, and peonies. "Flowers are so challenging and so complex," says Barter, an ardent fan of the Impressionists and Rembrandt. "Most flower paintings are stiff and feel artificial. Mine have a very spontaneous and fluid look. A lot of that is in the brush stroke, which is so critical for flower paintings. But it`s also because I never paint from photographs. I only use real flowers. I love that immediacy and the pressure of having to paint it quickly. It keeps you sharp and focused."
A native of Southern California who has made Orlando, FL, her home since 1987, just after earning a journalism degree from the University of Central Florida, Barter rediscovered her artistic gifts only after stumbling into one of renowned instructor Gregg Kreutz`s oil-painting classes in 1991. "It changed everything for me," says Barter, who at the time felt stuck in a dreary public relations job with a local hospital. "I refocused my whole life."
Since abandoning the pen and going full-time with her brush in 1996, Barter has learned how to go right at what`s most essential in a painting, while at the same time leaving a little bit of mystery in there as well. "I try very hard to find mysterious areas that aren`t over-described," says Barter. "I want the viewer to contribute something to the painting. It`s more interesting to look at a painting where the artist was brave enough to leave some things undescribed." Barter is represented by Sherwood`s Gallery, Houston, TX; Eisenhauer Gallery, Martha`s Vineyard, MA; The Villa, Winter Park, FL; The Art Vue Galerie, Cocoa Village, FL; and www.stacybarter.com.
Linda Lucas Hardy
"We really are a strange section of the art world, us colored-pencil people," admits Linda Lucas Hardy with a laugh. "And it is tedious, but we love it." Hovering somewhere between photorealism and the old masters, Hardy`s colored-pencil paintings have all the drama, complexity, and sophistication of anything done in oil. Basically self-taught-although she took every art class she could near her hometown of Texarkana, TX, between 1984 and 1994, when the last of her seven kids started school-the 60-year-old Hardy found her belovedly tedious calling in a colored-pencil class back in 1990.
During a trip to Italy with her husband in 2000, she had an epiphany: If she wanted to achieve something artistically, she`d better do it right quick. Already known for her masterful still lifes, especially of fruit ("Fruit`s easy," quips Hardy, "it doesn`t argue back or look at you weird"), Hardy wowed her ardent admirers when she happened upon fruit in a plastic bag. "They were kind of a fluke, and that first one was a nightmare to do," confesses Hardy about these particular paintings. "But I got so much attention for it."
Epiphany realized, Hardy continues to push at the envelopes of her plastic bags-and at the tips of her pencils. "I`m very conscious of value and what is dramatic and what will grab your attention," says the artist, who may soon venture back into oils. "The colored-pencil work is very complex and very, very hard to do. But I do love it. I really do." Hardy is represented by Southwest Gallery, Dallas, TX, and www.lindahardy.com.
Craig Kosak
About three years ago, Craig Kosak had the realization that he didn`t want to be lying on his deathbed regretting all the things he never did. Figuring he had to give more to his art and less to the Seattle graphic design firm he`d been with for the past 25 years, Kosak, now 50, decided he`d quit his job and just paint. Before making such a bold move, however, he consulted an astrologer, who told him, "Yes, you`re in a time of transition. Do it." He remembers leaving the astrologer`s and thinking to himself, "Boy, am I in trouble now."
Intent on becoming a landscape painter, Kosak lit out for Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. But when he got back to his Seattle studio, it wasn`t mountains and skies that kept popping into his head, it was buffalo and ravens. Realizing these animals had something to tell him, Kosak listened. They became central to some of his most dramatic paintings. Also, instead of chucking his design skills, he embraced them. "That`s my strength," says the artist, whose influences include N.C. Wyeth, Russell Chatham, and Maxfield Parrish. "And these animals-the ravens, the buffalo, the horses-have helped me figure out who I am, as a person and as a painter."
And maybe even as a society. While his raven and buffalo represent, respectively, the yin and the yang, the outer and the inner, his horse series reflects sensitivity and the way people deal with conflict. "The way they handle conflict is to run away," explains Kosak. "It`s fight or flight. And right now, maybe our culture needs a little more flight." Kosak is represented by Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Howard/Mandville Gallery, Kirkland, WA; and Gallery Fraga, Bainbridge Island, WA.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
Devon Jackson has also written for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside.
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