2024 Spotlight Artists
Lucy Cookson
Lucy Cookson, a graduate of Duke, is a master natural watercolorist, and also produces hand embellished digital prints, mixed Media, and needlework. She is known for her “liquid language,” ethereal underwater images, waves, fish, octopuses, seahorses, mermaids, as well as flowers, dragonflies and cacti. Lucy’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including MM Fine Art in Southampton, and Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta. Her work resides in many personal art collections throughout the US. As a trustee of Guild Hall, Lucy sits on the artist-in-residence committee. She also serves on the Board of Visitors at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)
Amaranth Ehrenhalt (1928-2021)
Amaranth Ehrenhalt was in the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, working first in New York in the early 1950s, and then in Paris for much of the rest of her career. Never afraid to experiment, Ehrenhalt’s work may best be described as bold, even aggressive, in execution, composition and even color. She worked across media, including oils, works on paper, prints and etchings, tapestry, design and sculpture.
Ehrenhalt moved to Paris early in her career and settled there as an expatriate artist for the next forty-odd years. Le Select Cafe was the place where artists and cognoscenti met. There Ehrenhalt met Beauford Delaney and Yves Klein. Sonia Delaunay bought her painting materials when she had no money. There she befriended Giacometti. And there she exhibited with, among others, Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe and Norman Bluhm, most recently in 2017 at the Mona Bismarck Foundation in Paris as part of its “American Artists in Paris” exhibition. She was included in the Denver Art Museum’s exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism” the year after. Like Carmen Herrera, she seemed to catch a wind late in life. She was included in five exhibitions in her 90s. She exhibited in numerous galleries in France and California, and in NYC over the years with Anita Shapolsky Gallery.
Robert Freeman
Robert Freeman has been showing nationally for over 40 years and has been included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the National Center for Afro-American Artists, Boston Public Library, Brown University, Rollins Museum of Art, Smith College, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and DeCordova Museum, among other institutions.
In addition to an impressive 28 solo artist gallery shows, as well as being included in scores of other Group gallery shows, his paintings have been featured in 4 museums shows – with exhibitions at DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Museum of Art Boston and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA. Additionally, his work is currently featured in the Academy Award winning film “American Fiction.”
Known for his vivid and powerful figurative paintings, Robert Freeman has traditionally focused on the interactions between people in his work. In couples and crowds, the characters in his paintings betray their emotions with expressive faces and body language. Skillful, brave use of color and gesture are the trademark of Freeman’s work and make his figures nearly abstract.
Olivier Messas
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Olivier Messas grew up in France. After studying fashion design and working successfully for many years as the artistic director of a fashion label in Paris, he has dedicated himself exclusively to painting and sculpture since 2012.
For Olivier, his artistic work is both an escape from the world and an expression of his cultural heritage. A recurring theme in his work is freedom of expression. His style, which he uses in a variety of ways in the development of different series, ranges from figurative to abstract. It is characterised by optimistic and harmonious compositions and clear, warm colours. The fusion of the most diverse materials creates new creative inspirations that are orientated towards uniqueness.
Olivier Messas lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, and is represented internationally with his works at numerous renowned art fairs and exhibitions.
Eric Haze
Born and bred in New York City, Eric Haze has contributed to the worlds of graffiti, contemporary art and graphic design for over four decades. HAZE’s formative years were spent as a founding member of the influential New York City graffiti collective The Soul Artists, with whom he first exhibited work in 1974. Haze went on to exhibit paintings and drawings alongside close friends such as Keith Haring and Jean Michael Basquiat in the early 1980’s.
HAZE has since made a career out of pushing creative boundaries in a wide variety of mediums.
After shifting his focus from galleries to the applied arts in the mid 80’s, Haze soon emerged as the premier graphic designer of the exploding hip-hop movement, creating iconic logos and album covers for some of the most influential and historical names in the genre.
The new millennium has also seen HAZE recommit himself seriously to painting and drawing again, with solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Paris. His current work lends itself to an array of important movements in art history, at times revealing elements of constructivisim, geometric abstraction and conceptualism, balancing unique icons, abstract shapes and intersecting lines to achieve a language that is both universal yet deeply personal at the same time.
HAZE currently lives and works out of Brooklyn, NY, where he lives with his wife, actor Rosie Perez.
Gerald Laing (1936-2011)
As one of the original wave of Pop artists Gerald Laing produced some of the most significant works of the British Pop movement, and today continues to hold his rightful place as one of the most important artists of his generation.
Famed for painting media images of starlets and astronauts using his signature newsprint technique and large scale and shaped canvases, Laing was one of the few who crossed the Atlantic playing an important role in both the UK and US movements. ‘BB’, his iconic portrayal of Brigitte Bardot, was his most famous painting of the period and his work is in important international collections including the Tate, Whitney, and MOMA.
After a near 40-year painting hiatus during which he focused on exquisite public and private bronze sculpture, Laing made a triumphant return to painting in 2007 and was drawn to Amy Winehouse and what he called her ‘episodic life in the media’ as his key muse. These portraits were hailed by critics as his new Bardot for a new era, and true to his Pop roots Laing turned down several opportunities to meet Amy so that his work could stay focused on the media interpretation that so fascinated him.
Laing passed away in 2011, leaving an incredibly important artistic legacy for generations to come.
Ben Miller
Ben Miller’s paintings are visually beautiful, contemporary, and unusual. And he paints with a cause –to bring attention and corrective action to improving endangered waterways throughout America. They look and feel like a 21st century extension of Jackson Pollock’s drips, Morris Louis’s pours, and Joan Mitchell’s use of abstract expressionist brushwork to paint landscape.
Without witnessing Ben Miller paint a painting, (but you will as he will be dramatically painting, July 11-13, outside, in front of the de Kooning Pavilion) it is almost impossible to understand how they are made. Miller starts by setting up a homemade easel on the banks of a river, upon which he places a sheet of transparent polycarbonate. Using traditional fly fishing rods, Miller substitutes handmade “fly-brushes” for conventional hooked flies, saturates them in acrylic paint, and casts from over twenty feet onto polycarbonate, most often either 3 x 4 or 4 x 8 feet. Over the course of about five hours, Miller casts over one thousand times, the mark of each cast eventually making up a finished painting of a chosen river.
Miller often starts with wispy threads to create flickers of reflection, and later larger tied together pompoms to create the feeling of the rocks on the river bottom. For larger fly-brushes, Miller uses a two-handed spey rod, which is capable of delivering marks at over 80 miles per hour.
As if the process wasn’t amazing enough, one comes to realize that Miller, in a sense, paints backwards – the actual finished painting is the reverse of the paint covered transparent polycarbonate. Turned around, the first strikes of the day are “on top” of the painting and the last form the backdrop. Further, removed from the easel, transparent and translucent areas allow light to emerge from behind the painting, akin to a stained glass painting.
Miller’s choice to present the slick “back” of the transparent polycarbonate as the front allows the viewer to see the river through an apparent sheen of water, and serves to make the painting even more “representational”.
Miller brings together two disparate cultures – fly fishing culture from Montana and high art culture in NYC – each with much to learn from the other. Perhaps most importantly, Ben Miller celebrates, and intimately paints, rivers – the lifeblood of our land – and invites us to experience the joy of being “outside.” His paintings present the natural world as a place of pilgrimage, discovery, inspiration, beauty and worship.
Milly Ristvedt
Milly Ristvedt MA, RCA is a Canadian abstract artist and master colorist. She began her career in Toronto in 1964 after studies with Takao Tanabe and Roy Kiyooka at the Vancouver School of Art. Ristvedt credits Tanabe with helping her refine her ability to see in first year composition, and Roy Kiyooka as her most important educational influence. Kiyooka introduced Ristvedt to the paintings of contemporary artists such as Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, and Morris Louis, all who were working in series. This altered Ristvedt’s approach to production in the early years. However, while Ristvedt admires the discipline of seriality she prefers to set her parameters after the fact, thus allowing exciting and unexpected changes to reveal themselves while painting.
At 24, her work was included in the Centennial Exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and featured at the National Gallery of Canada. She was chosen for prestigious exhibitions in Winnipeg, Paris and Lausanne. By 1969, Ristvedt was painting large canvases, sharing a studio with Jack Bush and showing with the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. That same year, Barry Lord observed in Art in America that Ristvedt’s paintings were “…more insistent than Bush, more consciously structured than Molinari.”
Ristvedt has an enduring belief in color as a language that can speak to mind, body, and soul, and has spent decades exploring its expressive possibilities. Over her long career, Ristvedt has had over 50 solo exhibitions, including a travelling 10-year survey exhibition organized by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. She completed an MA in Art History at Queen’s University in 2011. An advocate for artist’s rights, Ristvedt was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.
Ristvedt’s abstract, acrylic canvases are held in private, corporate, and public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Harvard University, and most recently The National Gallery of Canada.
Ristvedt is represented exclusively by Oeno Gallery and is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
Veronica Ruiz Velasco
Veronica Ruiz Velasco is one of Mexico’s finest living female artists. In her earliest days as an aspiring artist in Mexico, Veronica’s talent caught the eye of the art world. Gilberto Aceves Navarro and Rufino Tamayo were all enamored with the raw and inherent talent they were experiencing. Each took Veronica in to offer private tutelage so they could foster, nurture and propel the talent they saw in her at such a young age. Veronica began to study under the world renowned master, Rufino Tamayo. She also received private tutelage under Gilberto Aceves Navarro at the Antigua Academia de San Carlos (Old San Carlos Academy).
As such, Veronica became a trailblazing artist in Mexico where was she was the youngest female artist at that time to have a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno (National Museum of Modern Art) in Mexico City. This exhibition is considered the springboard for her career as the event was attended by the top artists of the Mexico City art scene. Even as such a very young artist, she was acknowledged by Mexico’s Museo de Arte Moderno to be among Mexico’s leading artists in their 25-year anniversary events and publications. Her exhibitions were sellouts, and she was invited to other major events – including exhibitions at the Gallery of the Loteria Nacional of Mexico and the Gallery of the Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City as well as a solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico that brought her into the company of the Mexican masters such as Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. She was also commissioned to paint a mural in the American British Cowdray Medical Center in Mexico. The mural, which took a year to complete, was unveiled to an international audience that included the U.S. Ambassador in Mexico, Charles Pilliod and Prince Charles of Wales.
After relocating to Texas, she became popular in the Dallas art scene by storm with private exhibitions, mural work and commissioned art. Some notable exhibitions and artistry include 1996 – Portrait of President Bill Clinton, solo exhibition at the Anasazi Gallery in Dallas, exhibitions in corporate office galleries of Lucent Technology, AT&T and exhibition in Nordstrom of the Gallería in Dallas.
Additionally in 1997, Veronica was commissioned to create a mural at the Southwest Medical Center in Dallas and held exhibitions at the Florence Art Gallery in Dallas, and was featured in an auction held at the Dallas.
