Archives for Still Life

A Sense of Joy

Terry Cooke Hall is a bit of an enigma in that she doesn’t check any of the traditional art boxes you might have in mind for a master artist. For instance, she chose to study art at Palomar College in San Marcos, California, rather than at the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. That decision had more to do with fear than fundamentals. “Not enough strength of character,” she says lightly. “If I think back to that time, it was fear of moving to the big city by myself.” Read the full article in the January/February 2022
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‘Color is Everything To Me’

In early August, Kathy Anderson was hard at work in the studio at her home in Redding, Connecticut. She had just returned from a 12-day reunion in Montana with members of the Rocky Mountain Plein Air Painters and was preparing to head to Vermont the following week to paint with the Putney Painters. Anderson was also working on a painting for a show in October and that afternoon was scheduled to give a video tour of her studio for the Scottsdale Artists School. Later that week she would be serving as an awards judge for a local art show. And,
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Silver Linings

“I always thought when you went blind, it was black. It wasn’t,” says watercolor artist Marlin Rotach, who noticed changes in his vision in the spring of 2018. “It was flesh-toned, and it was just like a curtain going across my eye until I had no sight at all.” After visiting a specialist, Rotach learned that he was suffering from a detached retina, a condition that required two surgeries and left him blind in his right eye for five months. Unable to paint, but still able to use a computer, Rotach decided to try writing biographical vignettes about historical artists
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Talent Knows No Age

In 2004, after 30 years in the car business, John Marzolf sold his three dealerships and retired. Two years later, however, he was bored and looking for something to do. “I loved art, and I collected art,” he says, “so I decided to buy and sell art.” While visiting the Biltmore Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona, Marzolf purchased a Frank Tenney Johnson painting for $275,000 and met the gallery’s owner, Steve Rose. “I liked Rose,” Marzolf says, adding that three times he asked Rose to sell the gallery to him. “The fourth time I said, ‘Why don’t you sell it to
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A Life Fully Lived

P.A. (Peter) Nisbet’s dramatic landscape compositions go beyond mere pictorial renderings to draw viewers in and challenge them to find meaning within their beauty. Each painting represents an individual journey of discovery made by the artist himself. The recording of these personal experiences has become the hallmark of every Nisbet painting; rarely has he depicted a location he has not visited in person. When he puts brush to canvas, what he is sharing is a visual record of his experiences, enriched by sensory perceptions such as the feel of the wind, the sound of a stream, or the fragrance of
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‘I Can’t Turn it Off’

For a long time, Bruce Cheever was best known as a landscape painter. His atmospheric, often nostalgic scenes had earned awards, recognition, and a solid following of collectors. Those landscapes are still his recognizable pieces—and landscapes are still his favorite subject to paint. During the past several years, however, he’s been steadfastly broadening his universe to include still lifes, figures, wildlife, and more. “My goal is to be able to sit down and paint any subject with equal confidence,” Cheever says. “I’ve tried to push my boundaries out further so that I feel comfortable tackling any subject. I wanted to
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‘I Found My Passion’

In September, Sheri Farabaugh hopes to board a plane headed to Russia, where she will join a group of artists who will spend two weeks painting with Eric Rhoads, a plein air painter and publisher of PleinAir magazine. They will visit galleries and art institutes in St. Petersburg, several villages where the Russian Masters painted, and Moscow. Farabaugh hopes that trip will help her to become more proficient at plein air painting. She is brutally honest about her capabilities in that area, saying, “I’m a horrible plein air painter; I’m trying to figure out why that is. Narrowing down my
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The Studio of Nancy Cawdrey

Many people are working from home these days, but few of them have a setup as enviable as that of Whitefish, Montana, painter Nancy Cawdrey. All she has to do is wake up, descend two flights of stairs, and she’s in a 1,000-square-foot studio where she can work on her latest oil or watercolor painting or on one of the vibrant silk paintings that have become something of a trademark during her two-decade career. “My studio is in my house,” Cawdrey says. “It’s a little bit like the European thing, where you work on the ground floor, live on the
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Young Talent, Old Soul

Brittany Weistling was thrilled when she was invited to be a guest artist at the 2012 Masters of the American West Fine Art Exhibition and Sale. That meant her paintings would be exhibited outside, rather than inside, the main gallery, but that was just fine with her. Weistling’s paintings sold, validating what the show’s officials already knew: Her talent deserved to be showcased during the event, which is conducted each year at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, and features works by some of the country’s top Western artists. What made the experience remarkable was
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Emotionally Engaged

Natasha Isenhour is having a great year, even if it’s not quite the year she had expected. “I’m doing awesome,” she says. “Suddenly, finally, all this work has begun to come to fruition, and 2020 was set up to be just this amazing year. I was invited to do Cowgirl Up!, and that was huge. My gallery in Santa Fe, Ventana Fine Art, is giving me my first solo show. Then I was asked to be the featured artist for the Mendocino Plein Air event. And there’s more.” In mid-April, with much of the country under lockdown because of COVID-19,
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