Fine Art Connoisseur November/December 2022

The sun casts golden light on the mountains near Ghost Ranch as the day fades into the tranquility of night. Painted from a plein air sketch, the radiance is captured in thick, textural strokes of vibrating color. BRAD TEARE discovered his love for thick paint at a Van Gogh exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Fascinated by the impact of the paintings, Teare began exploring texture and now travels the west painting the landscape in glowing, textured color. PALACE AVE. GALLERY • 123 WEST PALACE AVENUE SANTA FE, NM 87501 • 505.986.0440 INFO@MANITOUGALLERIES.COM…

Why is it that an “artwork” designed by a well-known artist — fabricated by a studio of apprentices and untouched by the artist until he signs it — can be sold for millions of dollars? Is it the concept that makes these works valuable? The signature? The materials? The artist’s “brand”? And why is it that two artists of equal skill and experience can end up so far apart in pricing and collectability? I have asked around and found that no one can answer these questions definitively, though there are lots of opinions out there. At face value, a painting is worth only what its materials cost at the art supplies store — a canvas, a stretcher, and a few ounces of paint. In fact, that is all the Internal…

Most of the artworks illustrated in this issue have been owned, or will soon be owned, by a living, breathing collector. It is, first and foremost, collectors that Fine Art Connoisseur aims to serve and inspire, and for that reason we have been running lengthy Hidden Collection articles ever since this magazine was founded. In addition, since 2015 we have highlighted America’s leading collectors of contemporary realist art in a shorter format — two pages dedicated to an individual collector or a couple. So far, this unique initiative has covered 82 separate collections, and now we are busy planning our next crop, to appear in the March/April 2023 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. There are great collections — many still being formed — in every region of this country, and…

Henri Matisse’s scene of a window open to colorful boats bobbing in a Mediterranean harbor opened a window, of sorts, for Suzanne Tucker. The San Francisco-based Tucker, one of America’s leading and most prolific interior designers, recalls the first time she saw the work known as Open Window, Collioure, as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. She evokes the classic setting for an art history class, with a slide projector clicking away and flashing images on a big screen in a dimmed room, dust motes dancing in the vector of light. “I was taking notes in the dark, and when this image appeared, I was gobsmacked by Matisse’s use of color.” While she doesn’t exactly cite the painting as the impetus for changing her major to interior architecture and…

MARC ANDERSON (b. 1987) has called the Midwest home since he was a child, having been born and raised in the Rockwellian town of Wild Rose, Wisconsin. The young artist studied illustration at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and then went to work as a freelancer for several clients and publications. Eventually he decided, however, that fine art was more his speed and spent the next several years teaching himself how to paint through a lot of reading, workshops, and practice. When the artist discovered plein air painting, he found his true passion. Painting outdoors was a far cry from the commercial illustration life and a welcome reprieve from endless hours in the studio. Right in his native state of Wisconsin, Anderson finds all the inspiration he needs, whether he’s painting industrial…

Depicting the human figure convincingly is a challenge that confronts many realist artists on a regular basis. After all, the body is at the center of our very being, and we can all see when a hand doesn’t look “right” or a head seems out of proportion to the body. Artists who do it well deserve our admiration, and even more so when they complement the figure with a costume — a garment other than the usual “street clothes,” that is in some way performative or staged, that helps a “mere” person transform into someone else. The artist’s challenge here is not so much selection of the costume — for example, we all expect a clown to wear a red nose — but to ensure that the essential humanity of…