Fine Art Connoisseur May/June 2022

It is hard to believe six months have passed since we concluded the second edition of Realism Live — a virtual art convention that teaches realist techniques for painting and drawing portraits, figures, landscapes, flowers, other still lifes, and more. Like the inaugural edition in 2020, last year’s was a huge success, and now the team from Fine Art Connoisseur and RealismToday.com are busy planning Realism Live 3.0. As ever, this event has been designed for artists and enthusiasts at all levels of experience, from the highly accomplished to those just starting out. Beginner’s Day will occur on Wednesday, November 9, and the main program will follow on November 10, 11, and 12. By press time we were thrilled to have secured for our faculty some of the most outstanding artists…

What a joy it has been assembling this issue! From our front cover image by Megan J. Seiter right through to the back cover adorned by Kathryn Mapes Turner — not to mention the impressive gatefold cover created by our friends at The Bennett Prize — this is an issue that takes Fine Art Connoisseur’s longtime championing of women artists to a new level. Our team has enjoyed reconnecting with colleagues at various organizations devoted to women in art, and we thank them for bringing us up to date on their exciting activities. See, for example, our editorial coverage of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club (page 74), the National Association of Women Artists (page 110), and the important exhibitions of female artistry on view this season at museums in Fort…

Even though Barbara Ascher loves to sail, her favorite moments on the water are when all is still. “I think one of the reasons I love Thomas Eakins’s painting The Champion Single Sculls is that it’s very reminiscent of that moment when you’re rowing and you’ve raised the oar blades and you’re just still in the water,” she says. “There’s something so entrancing about that sound, when all you hear is the silent dripping of the water off the oars. You’ll be sitting in the water and you might hear a bird or, off in the distance, some man yelling at his wife to ‘Take care of the anchor!’” Ascher has written some of the most engaging, poignant, and resonant memoirs of our time, including the recently published Ghosting: A Widow’s…

Throughout this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur, we celebrate the quality and diversity of artworks being made by women nationwide today. We also applaud the growing number of organizations and institutions that are training, encouraging, exhibiting, and documenting women artists. This current vitality is especially heartening given that, until the 1960s, society expected most women who were trained professionally in the visual arts to teach, rather than to exhibit actively. If they did choose to compete in the professional arena, it was hoped they would not try too hard. Even today, the system remains skewed: an impressive 51 percent of American visual artists are women, yet only 11 percent of the artworks on view in this country’s museums were made by women. How can this be? The (several) answers to this question are…

DIEGO GLAZER (b. 1992) describes his style of painting as indirect and his artistic position as interpretive, meaning that his imagination and personal experience are as much a part of the process as reality. “I work in several layers of oil paint,” the Denver-based artist explains. “This approach makes the painting itself a physical object with great variety and complexity. There are thick and thin areas, as well as passages of transparency interacting with opacity. When working from life, I take suggestions from the beauty of nature and reality, but I distill them through my own aesthetic and emotional lens.” Painting figures, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes with equal dexterity, Glazer is an artist who purposefully availed himself of a wide range of techniques throughout his education. He earned a degree…

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have scrambled most people’s sense of what happened when, so now it’s especially helpful to recall and anticipate our milestones whenever possible. Hard to believe, it was exactly three years ago — in May 2019 — that the winner of the first Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters was announced. This unique honor was presented to the Tampa-based artist Aneka Ingold — specifically $50,000 payable over two years — constituting what is still the largest award offered solely to women figurative painters. Endowed through a $3 million fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation by the San Antonio-based art collectors Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, this biennial prize is designed to propel the careers of full-time female painters who have not yet reached “full…