The Flagler Museum is presenting “The Ethereal Worlds of Maxfield Parrish,” an exhibition of 25 works demonstrating the genius of the Philadelphia-born master (1870–1966) whose paintings evoke a dreamlike world that hovers between reality and reverie. Parrish was a leading figure in the Golden Age of American Illustration, whose approximately 900 commissions for advertisements, magazines, books, stage sets, murals, stationery, and children’s books made him world-famous. By 1925, one out of every four households in America possessed reproductions of his art in some form.

On view this season are artworks featuring his highly saturated colors (especially the distinctive “Parrish Blue”) and lustrous glazing techniques. The compositions often depict figures in lush landscapes that are both romantic and fantastical, often with a neoclassical flourish.

Originally named “Whitehall,” the Flagler Museum was built by the real estate developer Henry Flagler at the heart of his most prestigious creation, Palm Beach, Florida. It is a highly appropriate venue for this exhibition as its heyday overlapped with Parrish’s. When it was completed in 1902, the house was hailed by the New York Herald as “more wonderful than any palace in Europe, grander and more magnificent than any other private dwelling in the world.” Parrish often depicted such grand, idealized buildings, too.

Details at a Glance:
“The Ethereal Worlds of Maxfield Parrish”
Flagler Museum, Palm Beach, Florida
flaglermuseum.us
Through April 20, 2025

The Asheville Art Museum is presenting “Asheville Strong: Celebrating Art and Community After Hurricane Helene,” a poignant and inspiring exhibition on view February 13–May 5, 2025, in the Appleby Foundation Exhibition Hall. This non-juried exhibition showcases the works of artists from the Helene-affected Appalachia region, celebrating their resilience, creativity, and strength while highlighting the power of art to inspire and bring communities together.

The Museum issued an open call for artist submissions, collaborating with local and regional arts networks to reach artists from the Southern Appalachian community impacted by Hurricane Helene. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with over 150 submissions showcasing a diverse range of works.

“Hurricane Helene was devastating for everyone, and as a public-serving arts institution, we really wanted to recognize the impact the storm had on artists,” said Jessica Orzulak, Associate Curator and Manager of Curatorial Affairs. “Artists are an integral to the bedrock of our communities in WNC. Our goal has been to create space for impacted artists to showcase their work to a broad public, opportunities for artists to connect with each other and collectors, and a means for us all to join together in a collective act of resilience.”

Asheville Strong features a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, and photography. Each work is accompanied by the artist’s information, allowing viewers to connect and learn more about the creators. For more information, please visit www.ashevilleart.org.

The current Swann Galleries auction is dedicated to the Artists of the WPA. Works in photography, cartography, printmaking, posters, and painting are all represented in this reflection on how the early twentieth century changed American culture.⁠

More from the organizers:

The economic hardships of the 1930s, as well as the drought across the North American prairie, were of great concern to lawmakers in Washington, DC. The agencies that formed as part of the New Deal, an “alphabet soup” that included the Works Progress Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and the Federal Art Project, put artists to work. These artists expressed empathy for the American farmer, as seen in Thomas Hart Benton’s romanticized vision of farm life in Missouri Farmyard, and Dorothea Lange’s tender documentation of the plight of families experiencing the Dust Bowl era.

The sale is a timed online auction that will begin closing on Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 12 PM EST. Bidding is available on the Swann Galleries App and on live.swanngalleries.com. Exhibition hours are 12 pm to 5 pm on Saturday, January 25, and Monday, January 27 through Wednesday, January 29.

Paintings and original works are represented by Philip Howard Evergood’s oil-on-panel Great Neck Landscape, circa 1935 ($1,200-1,800); August Mosca’s Portrait of Joseph Stella, oil on canvas, 1944 ($1,000-1,500); Cecil Crosley Bell’s Horse Auction, New York, gouache on paper, 1937 ($1,500-2,500); Doris Emrick Lee’s Early Spring Landscape, oil on canvas ($3,000-5,000); and Paul Raphael Meltsner’s R.F.D. 36, oil on canvas ($4,000-6,000).

Prints featured in the sale include Thomas Hart Benton’s Missouri Farmyard, lithograph, 1936 ($2,000-3,000); Louis Schanker’s Jai-Alai, color woodcut, 1939 ($1,000-1,500); Peggy Brook Bacon’s The Artist, (Alexander Brook), charcoal, circa 1925 ($1,000-1,500); and Katherine Milhous’s Visit Pennsylvania / Pre-Revolutionary Costumes, lithograph poster, circa 1936 ($1,000-1,500).

Attention Art Collectors!
May 20-22, 2025: Visit the Plein Air Convention & Expo’s robust pop-up art gallery at the Nugget Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, where hundreds of artists, including our master faculty, will have studio and plein air works on display and ready to purchase. Register for the full event at PleinAirConvention.com now.

Discover the rich Tryon NC artist colony history at the Earl Scruggs Center’s ‘Masters in the Mountains’ exhibition.

For a half-century before the Second World War, the small town of Tryon, North Carolina was a haven for a community of visual artists. From its founding in the late 1870s its population was cosmopolitan, a “country colony” for Northern intellectuals and creative people, especially for those from Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

January 21 through February 1, 2025, the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, NC, is hosting “Masters in the Mountains: Early Work from the Tryon Artist Colony.”

More from the organizers:

When Amelia Watson from Connecticut arrived in Tryon in 1892, at the invitation of renowned actor William Gillette, the small town near Asheville, NC had already established a reputation as a welcoming environment for intellectuals looking for inspiration in nature. Watson would become the first in a long line of many serious artists that continued their craft when moving to the Western North Carolina mountains.

The community of Tryon was host to an eclectic community of artists, writers, locals, and even celebrities who were famous in the early half of the 20th century and still relevant today. F. Scott Fitzgerald would stay in Tryon when visiting his wife Zelda in the Asheville Sanitorium, leaving his daughter Scottie with famed actor and longtime Tryon resident “Lefty” Flynn. Nina Simone (born Eunice Waymon) studied classical piano for many years with Muriel Mazzanovich, wife of Impressionist painter Lawrence Mazzanovich. British actor David Niven playing a round of golf at the Tryon Country Club where Lady Nancy Astor was also known around the greens.

Zachary Dressel, Curator at the Earl Scruggs Center has developed this unique show from private and public collections with the assistance of Michael McCue and Cynthia Davis. Some of the artists included are George Aid, John Sylvan Brown, Stella Sassoon, Gabrielle Clements, Elliott Daingerfield, Alfred C Hockings, Lawrence Mazzanovich, and Amelia Watson.

For more information, please visit earlscruggscenter.org.

Attention Art Collectors!
May 20-22, 2025: Visit the Plein Air Convention & Expo’s robust pop-up art gallery at the Nugget Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, where hundreds of artists, including our master faculty, will have studio and plein air works on display and ready to purchase. Register for the full event at PleinAirConvention.com now.

View more fine art gallery exhibitions here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

Childs Gallery is pleased to present “Bricks of Boston: Watercolors by Adam Van Doren.” The exhibition marks the artist and author’s fourth solo show with Childs, and the first dedicated solely to paintings of Boston, ‘The City on the Hill.’

More from the art gallery:

Van Doren (American, b.1962) has traversed Boston and beyond capturing images of the area’s storied architecture: historic churches, government buildings, libraries, bridges, and more. A trained architect himself, Van Doren handles his subject matter with a master’s eye, but also that of an artist, sensitively capturing the spirit of some of Boston’s most hallowed grounds.

Though based in New York, Van Doren travels frequently to paint – his finished works often serving as illustrations for books such as In the Founder’s Footsteps: Landmarks of the American Revolution, The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents, and The Stones of Yale. Always attuned towards eye catching architecture, Van Doren has this time turned his brush specifically to Boston.

The exhibition travels through the city and its surrounding areas – including images of Harvard University and Martha’s Vineyard – to capture the unique character of quintessential New England architecture. As one of the United States’ oldest cities, Boston’s architecture encompasses several different periods, styles, and movements; Van Doren deftly paints many superb examples of these with his trademark expressionist flourish.

“Bricks of Boston: Watercolors by Adam Van Doren” is on view in the Childs upstairs gallery through February 9, 2025. For more details, please visit childsgallery.com.

View more fine art gallery exhibitions here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

A Western Art Collection Profile >

The artist Billy Schenck lives near Santa Fe with his wife (and business partner), Rebecca Carter, in a handsome adobe house built by the renowned landscape architect John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996) and then completely renovated by the couple. Here at the Double Standard Ranch they have created their own Shangri-La for making and displaying art, and also for playing the equestrian sport of ranch sorting, at which Billy excels.

Born in Ohio, Billy “began drawing before I can remember.” In 1965, during his freshman year at the Columbus College of Art & Design, he spent $125 (a substantial sum then) on a painting created by a sophomore friend named Peter Kambitsis. Soon he transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute and began collecting art by his peers there, too. Billy still owns all of those works, including six paintings by classmate Stanley Whitney that are the only figurative works Whitney made before famously turning to abstraction.

A key component of Billy and Rebecca’s collection is contemporary Western art. They follow only 20 or so artists, but in depth, much the same way that Dr. Albert C. Barnes did a century ago when he focused on such contemporaries as Renoir, Cezanne, and Matisse in order to create what became Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. The artists represented are James Butler, Russell Case, Kang Cho, Anne Coe, Frank Croft, Glenn Dean, Josh Elliott, John Fincher, Logan Hagege, Brett Allen Johnson, Jerry Jordan, T. Allen Lawson, Ed Mell, John Moyers, Erin O’Connor, Roseta Santiago, Tim Solliday, Tracy Stuckey, Kim Wiggins, Kathy Wipfler, and Dennis Ziemienski. (Robert Daughters is also here, though he passed away in 2013.)

Billy notes that all of these artists are “technical virtuosos who tend to have an immediately recognizable signature style”; he and Rebecca plan to publish a book on this group, something they have already done for their stellar holding of historical Western art, which encompasses such stars as Maynard Dixon, J.H. Sharp, and Frank Tenney Johnson. When it was exhibited at what is now the New Mexico Museum of Art, that trove drew record-breaking crowds and is still the only private collection presented at the museum since it was founded in 1915. (The show went on to visit six other venues nationwide.)

Also in the collection are key examples of handcrafted ranch furniture made by Thomas Molesworth between 1932 and 1950; this was his best period, after he had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright and brought his Arts & Crafts techniques to Cody, Wyoming. In addition, the Schencks are admired for their prehistoric Southwest ceramics.

Billy says the contemporary Western art has been purchased in a variety of settings — from the West’s many exhibition-sales benefiting museums, from galleries and auctions, and from other collectors and artists. He explains, “I know the living artists we collect because I have exhibited alongside all of them. People always assume that because I’m an artist, we acquire just by trading with other artists. But that is not true. We are extremely specific about the pieces we want, and those we get are usually exceptional and would never be available through a trade. We buy from the dealers and galleries that represent our colleagues and from the museum shows where their work is available.”

Some artists can be disorganized, but not Billy. Every artwork — regardless of value or rarity — is fully documented, including provenance, condition, the price paid, and the current market value. Billy and Rebecca keep this data digitally and also printed out in binders, and they have built a 1,000-square-foot climate-controlled storage unit that houses approximately 350 paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs.

In their home and office, nothing gets direct sunlight, and most photographs are kept in flatbed drawers to protect them from light and heat. Not surprisingly, the collection also includes the only complete set of Billy’s own serigraphs, lithographs, and etchings, along with color trial proofs and the original drawings used to cut the silkscreens. The serigraph collection has been exhibited at five museums and can be requested for loan in the future.

When asked about treasures that got away, Billy laughs and recalls: “There are a number of cases where I missed a painting and got it only after it went through two or three more sets of hands. One of them took 17 years before I acquired it. For the prehistoric Southwest ceramics, my all-time record was waiting 46 years to get one piece. In many cases, I did not have the financial wherewithal to acquire them right away. Moreover, I outlived all of the owners and bought the pieces from their estate sales. There are several instances where I had owned pieces and sold them in moments of financial weakness, then was able to buy them back as long as 40 years later.” He concludes, “Obviously the key is patience and living long enough.”

Billy is too modest to note one other key asset: his superb eye that discerns which artwork to pursue. Without that, patience and longevity will get a collector only so far.

View more artist and fine art collection profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

Subscribe to Fine Art Connoisseur magazine here for expert art collection advice, gallery exhibition news, and more.

Lisa Gleim & Michael Griffin Customs House Museum & Cultural Center
Clarksville, Tennessee
customshousemuseum.org
through early January, 2025

This season the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center is bringing the great outdoors inside with two solo exhibitions:

Up first is “Lisa Gleim: Keeper of the Animals” (through January 1), which highlights this Georgia artist who works in oils and pastels. The show stems from her having previously won the People’s Choice Award during an American Women Artists exhibition at the Customs House, and now she is presenting 18 wildlife scenes. All relate to Native American lore and involve her application of paint to the surfaces of maps and boards, which are fascinating in their own right.

Also on view is “Michael Griffin: A Wandering Palette” (through January 5), which focuses on this native and resident of Nashville best known for landscape oil paintings. At 16, Griffin spent seven weeks backpacking through the American West alone, and later he studied with such masters as Scott Christensen, Ralph Oberg, and Matt Smith. Over the years he has traveled widely, painting scenes in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Wyoming, Canada, Europe, Barbados, and Costa Rica.

At Realism Live recently, Eric Rhoads and Peter Trippi awarded artist Dawn Whitelaw with the Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award. Enjoy the following presentation that honors her journey:

Early Influences and Education

Dawn Whitelaw was born in 1945 to a mother who painted and wrote poetry, and a father who was a surgeon with a strong artistic side. Even her younger brothers are creative to this day.

While painting didn’t come into Dawn’s life until later, she was a ‘maker’ from very early on. Eventually, her father offered to pay for her college education in the arts, but with the agreement that Dawn would also pursue training as a teacher, which she says was “out-of-the-box thinking for a girl in the 60’s.”

She went on to earn a BA at Nashville’s Christian-focused Lipscomb University, LU, in 1967. There, she met Clay Whitelaw, with whom she later married and had their daughter, Benja.

And despite the fact that she swore she’d never teach, it turned out to be something she truly has a passion for to this day.

First Steps Into the Art World

Dawn augmented her LU training by taking printmaking and sculpture classes at George Peabody College, which is now part of Vanderbilt University. Having trained primarily in graphic design, she duly landed a job creating pen-and-ink illustrations for the Yellow Pages.

Next came employment in a small advertising firm, then a stint as interim art director for a Nashville magazine. In 1987 she decided to “up her own game” by attending workshops all over the country. She was an enthusiastic and quick learner. On the side, Dawn taught as an adjunct at LU through 1999.

Mentorship and Artistic Growth

In the following years, Dawn took workshops with Raymond Everett Kinstler, whom today she describes as her mentor. She says, “I can’t even tell you how he shaped my path as a painter. I asked him, ‘How can I be a better portrait painter?’ And he replied, ‘Get out and paint the landscape.’ And that led me down another wonderful path.”

A visit to Dawn’s studio will reveal that she paints not only landscapes and portraits but also interiors, architectural paintings, still life, and even abstracts and experimental works.

Today most of the paintings she sells via galleries are landscapes — some created entirely en plein air. Dawn is unapologetically devoted to a late-19th-century aesthetic that highlights the way light and colors capture our eye.

Connecting with Portrait Subjects

When it comes to portraiture, Dawn says that along with sketchpads, paints, and brushes, one needs to bring sensitivity. Kinstler taught her the importance of aspects such as the way subjects tend to hold their head or posture, or what topic makes their eyes light up. Whenever possible, Dawn travels to meet her sitters, sketching them on site, taking reference photographs, talking with them about their interests, and seeing the clothes and backgrounds they prefer.

She brings the same attentiveness to detail to her landscapes. She says, “You might see a pretty scene, but what was it that made you want to paint it? The more you can connect personally and emotionally with the subject, the more it carries over to the canvas.”

Continuous Learning and Inspiration

Although Dawn continues teaching, she still attends workshops offered by others and is inspired by her peers and students alike. She says, “I learn more than just what the teacher is teaching, but also how students react to different approaches. This experience fine-tunes my own teaching.”

Dawn’s approach reminds us that learning never ends — there is always more growth ahead, no matter how talented one already is.

Dawn Whitelaw is a member of the Plein Air Painters of the Southeast, the Chestnut Group, Portrait Society of America, Oil Painters of America, and the Artist’s Fellowship. She has been featured as faculty for Plein Air South and the Plein Air Convention and Expo. In 2016, the American Impressionist Society elected her to Master status and she has a painting in the permanent collection of the Rahr-West Art Museum.

From Fine Art Connoisseur

It is our pleasure to present Dawn Whitelaw with the Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award.

See more from the artist at www.dawnwhitelaw.com.

View more artist and collector profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.

The Asheville Art Museum has announced the opening of “American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection,” which was initially scheduled for October 17 but briefly delayed due to Tropical Storm Helene. “American Made” is on view now through February 10, 2025.

From the museum:

With more than 80 paintings and sculptures, American Made traces the evolution of American art from the colonial era to the early 20th century, bringing together masterpieces from the renowned DeMell Jacobsen Collection.

Highlights of American Made include:

• Striking portraits by artists such as Benjamin West, Thomas Sully, and Sarah Miriam Peale.
• Majestic landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Jasper Francis Cropsey.
• Still lifes by Severin Roesen, Charles Ethan Porter, and Adelaide Coburn Palmer.

Additionally, visitors will encounter captivating genre scenes and works by artists who traveled to Europe, including Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Childe Hassam. This remarkable exhibition unites some of the best of American art history in a single collection, that have been on view at institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

For more information, please visit www.ashevilleart.org.

***

View more art museum announcements here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.