WELCOME TO ARTISTS, COLLECTORS, AND ANYONE WHO LOVES ART!
Artist Spotlight focuses on interesting artists, upcoming exhibitions, and articles about art and those who love it or create it.
Discover new ways to stretch your imagination, be introduced to new artists, their exhibits, and books to read about them. Expect to excite your mind. Comments are very welcome! -- Rosemary Carstens
In the mid-19th century impressionists such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Degas, took their paints and easels outdoors to better capture the effects of light and air. Thus was the technique of plein air painting born and artists worldwide have been doing it ever since. One contemporary group of plein air painters in the Western United States are particularly drawn outdoors by the Rocky Mountains. Since the founding of the Rocky Mountain Plein Air Painters (RMPAP) in 2001, it has maintained an active schedule of demonstrations and paint-outs (painting events with a show/sale). One of its biggest and most enjoyable events took place in Winter Park between July 26th and August 3rd this year and involved 40 invited artists and over 250 newly created paintings done in the incredibly beautiful Frasier Valley/Winter Park area.
MORNING TREASURE, shown here and painted by Jake Gaedtke, was awarded Best of Show and is but one example of the fine work produced during the event. More of Gaedtke’s remarkable ability to bring to life the Rocky Mountain landscape, his consistently lively brushwork and eye for detail and color, can be viewed at http://www.landscape-art.com/.
June 15–August 31, 2008
Born in Cuba in 1902, dying in Paris in 1982, Afro-Chinese Cuban artist WILFREDO LAM is well known throughout Latin America for his innovative work. A master among the mid-20th-century modern artists, he drew from both Picasso’s cubism and Andre Breton’s surrealism, yet gave these styles a unique twist of his own. As it says on the MOLAA website, “His visual language is a synthesis of Cubism, Surrealism, primitivism, . . . Afro-Cuban history and ethnicity, and the religious practice of Santería.” It is as striking today as it was in his lifetime. Sixty-five of his most important paintings, gouaches, and drawings from a traveling exhibition curated by Curtis Carter will be on view.
During the same period, an exhibit featuring the work of CARLOS LUNA is at MOLAA. Another Cuban artist, he is known for his iterations of Manichean duality. He was born in 1961 in Cuba and became a part of the 1980s artistic rebellion. He relocated to Puebla, Mexico, in 1991, and his years there added a Mexican muralism narrative to his Cuban-Havana School heritage.
Luna's exhibition in MOLAA’s Focus Gallery presents a selection of seventeen paintings recently created by the artist. The central masterpiece is Luna’s work titled, El Gran Mambo. Essayist Enrique Garcia Gutierrez states, “his ‘gran mambo,’ his grand theater, could not exist without the tragedy and pain of the political exile, which is the blood that gives life to this masterpiece.”
The work of these two fine Cuban artists should not be missed. It will crack open your mind and introduce you to dynamic new ways of thinking about color, juxtaposition, cultural expression, and the use of rhythm in visual art.
— Rosemary Carstens
In the mid-19th century impressionists such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Degas, took their paints and easels outdoors to better capture the effects of light and air. Thus was the technique of plein air painting born and artists worldwide have been doing it ever since. One contemporary group of plein air painters in the Western United States are particularly drawn outdoors by the Rocky Mountains. Since the founding of the Rocky Mountain Plein Air Painters (RMPAP) in 2001, it has maintained an active schedule of demonstrations and paint-outs (painting events with a show/sale). One of its biggest and most enjoyable events took place in Winter Park between July 26th and August 3rd this year and involved 40 invited artists and over 250 newly created paintings done in the incredibly beautiful Frasier Valley/Winter Park area.
MORNING TREASURE, shown here and painted by Jake Gaedtke, was awarded Best of Show and is but one example of the fine work produced during the event. More of Gaedtke’s remarkable ability to bring to life the Rocky Mountain landscape, his consistently lively brushwork and eye for detail and color, can be viewed at http://www.landscape-art.com/.
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