Fine Art Connoisseur March - April 2016

…the place which Van Dyck, all things considered, so justly holds as the first of the portrait-painters.— Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1774…

Change often starts in the gut of an individual who envisions how the world could be different. Especially if it’s good, that idea is usually met with resistance, ridicule, and naysayers specifying why it will fail. I learned this early in my career, when a product I wanted to launch met with complete resistance. Though I could see this would be a game-changer, it was so “out there” that the market researchers found absolutely no interest in it. Against the wishes of my financial advisers and senior colleagues, I launched it anyway, because I believed that once it existed, people would buy it. If I was wrong, I would be bankrupted. Fortunately, it became a huge success and the basis of a multi-million-dollar enterprise. Following your gut often stirs internal…

Digital technology advances every day, which is terrific in some ways, worrisome in others. Full disclosure: one of my mottos is “just because we can doesn’t mean we should,” so now I ask you to ponder a fresh digital innovation. This winter, Verus Art, a division of Larson-Juhl, the world’s largest frame manufacturer, unveiled a product line. Verus has signed a deal with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (NGC) to “re-create” three of the museum’s beloved masterworks: Vincent van Gogh’s Iris and Bowl of Zinnias and Other Flowers, and Claude Monet’s A Stormy Sea. Verus has 3D-scanned these paintings and printed new ones utilizing technology it developed with its partners, Arius Technology (a laser-based optical scanning firm) and Océ (a digital imaging firm). Each painting has been “re-created”…

Much of the Old West remains the present-day West. Cowboys — and cowgirls — on horseback still lead cattle from mountainous terrain to grazing grounds. Ranchers continue to round up livestock and wild horses while tending vast parcels of land abutting the Rockies or seemingly infinite expanses of wilderness. Rodeos and steer-wrestling matches are popular forms of entertainment. The artist C. Michael Dudash (b. 1952) captures such scenes, and one of his most ambitious works, Cowboy Heroics and a Chuckwagon Chase, completed last December, will be among the paintings featured this March during The Russell, the annual gala weekend benefitting the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. “The history, culture, and artistic heritage of the great American West presented me a natural subject to explore at length through my…

Catfish Row is not in Manhattan, yet visitors to Michael Feinstein’s Manhattan home come upon it there. This locale from George Gershwin’s 1935 jazz-inspired opera, Porgy and Bess, may be mythical, yet it is very real for Feinstein, the cabaret singer, pianist, archivist, and impresario. One of the opera’s best known songs is It Ain’t Necessarily So, the sheet music of which depicts this African-American neighborhood (based on Charleston’s real-life Cabbage Row): here we see a group of ramshackle wooden houses, a towering palm tree, a handsome couple in profile, and a disabled figure with a crutch and cart. Behind them looms the dream-like skyline of faraway Manhattan. “In our home, my husband, Terrence, and I have a long hall, what we call the Gershwin Gallery, in which everything is…

KRISTA EUBANKS (b. 1960) is fascinated with nature, especially with animals. Though she paints in oils, the bulk of her work is made with watercolors and pen and ink on paper. Her sheets are generally large, enriched with scattered writings that are her personal expressions and daily reflections. Most viewers find it hard, however, to take their eyes off the extraordinarily palpable creatures she conjures in sepia tones, each with his or her own personality. Be they goats, hares, sheep, cows, birds, deer, horses, bees, or caterpillars, these are beings as sentient as we are, never cute or sentimental. Most are presented up close or tightly cropped, eschewing scientific descriptiveness in order to bring us nearer the individual’s psyche. Though most suggest no particular narrative, a few have been…