Gareth Edwards

Artist Q&A with Gareth Edwards

Gareth Edwards is a contemporary landscape painter. He is a graduate of Goldsmiths College, an elected RWA Academician, and is a long time resident of St Ives’ historic Porthmeor Studios, previously occupied by luminaries of British painting such as Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson.He is a sessional tutor at the Newlyn School of Art and a prominent member of the Newlyn Society of Artists.

“The Great Lakes”, oil on paper, 16 x 17 in | 42 x 44 cm, 2020

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Cy Twombly and JWM Turner have both been hugely influential to my work, from decades ago to the present day. They are the lode stones of my practice and will continue to be so for the immediate future. I try to get to as many shows of their work as possible, to accompany my large but still growing book collection on both artists.

How did you become a professional artist?

On the day I graduated from my Art History degree, I set up an easel in my rented bedsit and bought the materials to start painting. I have never stopped painting. Fourteen years later the Hart Gallery, London, put my work into the London Art Fair and a really well-known fashion designer bought two pieces. I went on to have ten one-person shows with Hart Gallery over the next fourteen years, until the owners retired.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

They are inspired by ‘Emotional Weather’ – the paintings are poetical and mysteriously evanescent. They are abstracted landscapes with a cool and subtle palette built to seduce the viewer into a half-remembered space of subtlety engineered light, the light of hope. Each painting is a poem in paint, a poem of light, space, landscape and mystery. My studio … Click here to read more

Howard Shapiro

Art Review City speaks with New York dealer Howard Shapiro about opening his gallery, some of his success stories, and his unique approach to the business of art.

“My dream was always to open an art gallery. No other business would allow me to be surrounded by beauty and help artists get the recognition that they deserve.”

– Howard Shapiro, owner of Lawrence Fine Arts in East Hampton, NY

Howard Shapiro spent over two decades as a consumer finance expert on Wall Street at firms including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, so his friends and family were surprised when he decided in 2009 to pivot his career by opening an art gallery. But it turned out to be a winning combination: he brought with him an acute understanding of business and finance, and quickly evolved from art startup to standout.

Howard Shapiro in front of Harriette Joffe, “Untitled”, 40 x 50 in | 102 x 127 cm, c. 1980. Photo courtesy of Lawrence Fine Art.

Art was always his passion, but he took a circuitous route to get there. After earning his bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Art History at Yale in 1983, Shapiro was accepted into Yale’s PhD program in Art History, but his parents insisted that he choose a “real” career instead. Art was something nice to look at—and buy when he could afford it—but it wouldn’t support a family. Looking back, he acknowledges that his parents had a point. The art world would have to wait.

The Wall Street life was hectic, so when Shapiro and his wife Esther could afford to start buying for themselves, they originally sought artwork that was calm and soothing and began collecting American Impressionist works. The first work they purchased—and still own today—from a small outdoor craft fair was a … Click here to read more

Robin Antar

Artist Q&A with Robin Antar

American sculptor Robin Antar was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1957. All of Antar’s current work is rooted in observation. “Whatever is going on, I express it in stone,” Antar says. “It could come out as realism, as an abstract form, or as a combination of both. The style I use is one that best reflects the inspiration behind each piece.”

“Ballpark Frank”, limestone, travertine, mixed media, and steel, 12 x 39 x 16 in | 31 x 100 x 41 cm, 2017

How did you become a professional artist?

Ever since I took chisel to stone over forty years ago, sculpting has been my “language” for communication. I’ve sculpted through teenage angst, marriage, divorce, having children and losing one of them to addiction.

In my early years, aesthetic beauty and superficial thought were not a concern as I focused instead on fundamental feelings and basic sensations, creating abstracted sculptures with an uncommon perspective, jarring color and anomalous form. I set up a working studio in Brooklyn after receiving my BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and continued carving in a loose, intuitive style rooted in my emotions and personal experiences. I created a series of carved stone knots as an exploration of the formal possibilities of intertwinements. While the imagery of knotting is deeply embedded in our consciousness as a metaphor for unresolvable or transformative conflicts, my choice of marble for this series has connections to nature and high culture in art history. My most powerful work, “David’s Knot in Flames”, reflects this perfectly. Carved in Turkish marble, I created the sculpture in memory of my youngest son who passed away at the age of 26. The knot represents his pain as a … Click here to read more

Michael Netter

Artist Q&A with Michael Netter

For more than 40 years, Michael Netter has been religiously creating video art, paintings and assemblages. A self-taught artist, he became a protégé of Andy Warhol, fully immersed in the dynamic art world of New York in the early 1970s. He is represented by ACA Galleries in New York.

“Three Wise Men”, mixed media on canvas, 62 x 66 in | 157 x 168 cm, 1995

How did you become a professional artist?

I was always an artist in a sense; always loved art and saw it as a calling. I guess that’s kind of a standard answer, but I’m mostly self-taught. As I reflect more on the question, I would say it was to put my creative self to work. That I want to manifest my ideas in a lasting form of communication in a more conceptual and less literal manner than through words.

When is a piece finished for you?

It’s magical – a piece feels unfinished until, with that one stroke, it’s all of a sudden finished. That can take 2 days or 10 years. I feel all work has the possibility of being good, you just must keep working at it. In fact, sometimes I have felt like gessoing over a painting that I can’t see any potential in only to finally discover a path that works much later on. This might happen in the last 5% of effort on a work.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

I try to resist being influenced by other artists although I might see some dimension of their art that gives me an idea. Some art influences/inspirations are – early Italian Renaissance painters like Cimabue, Fra Angelico, etc. because they are about icons and are relatively primitive; Paul Klee because much of … Click here to read more

Valerie Goodman

New York dealer Valerie Goodman speaks with Art Review City about her new gallery, and forging her path to freedom.

Goodman opened her eponymous gallery after a long and prosperous career in the music business. She began on this new path to the art world selling French decorative art mostly from the 1930s and 40s. Today, she works closely with a high-profile roster of artists who have been featured in publications from World of Interiors to Architectural Digest, and in shows from New York to Taiwan including at the Queens Museum and the Aqua Miami fair.

“Art is the way to freedom,” declares Valerie Goodman, a veteran dealer with over a decade of experience selling art and design in the Upper East Side of New York.

Valerie Goodman, photo by Karen Kolberg.

While studying for a master’s degree in literature at The Sorbonne in Paris, she became interested in the music world and quickly became engrained in that community. It was then that she first found her passion for interacting with creators and started to work with them to bring to life their ideas and goals. Scouting talent in her city of Paris, Goodman helped young artists get record deals. She was managing a group of artists, promoting shows, and this new career would bring her to the United States. Seeking to expand her reach in the world of art, Goodman sought out opportunities that were of interest: from bringing talent to the New York trendy music convention, the New Music Seminar to managing musicians, to distributing a French film by Claire Denis, and to developing opportunities for the Sam and Larry Shaw photographic collection.

In 2003, Goodman met a gallerist who specialized in French decorative art. She started working with him and discovered the treasures of 20^th century decorative art. For … Click here to read more

Peter Falk

Q&A with American Art Expert Peter Falk

Peter has been a leader in art reference publishing during the past 40 years. He is best known as the author of the biographical dictionary, Who Was Who in American Art. He is currently the Chief Curator and Editor of Discoveries in American Art, which is the only art publication largely focusing on bringing greater recognition to the lives and works of artists that were marginalized or slipped through the cracks of art history.

How did you get started in the art world?

It’s in the genes. My mother was an artist and went to RISD. At Brown, I was split between art studio and art history. I did my graduate work at RISD. Then I had no money. Zero. I liked poking around the antique shops in Providence and would pick up Old Master prints, becoming self-taught. I kept turning $20 purchases into $500 by selling them to galleries in New York and Boston, realizing I was becoming a “picker” a.k.a a “runner.” But I also knew that it was too tough to continue that route as a sustainable business. Fortunately, one day I found some drawings in a shop that looked an awful lot like those of Winslow Homer. I did research and tracked down the artist’s estate collection. Turned out the artist was a good friend of Homer but he wound up becoming completely forgotten. He was historically significant, having produced a huge series of on-the-spot drawings documenting the Civil War battles, post-war reconstruction, and the nation’s Westward expansion. This huge collection had been stored away in trunks in a log cabin on the edge of the Vermont State Forest. I was stunned. The family was willing to sell, and in full bravado I convinced … Click here to read more

Lenora Rosenfield

Artist Q&A with Lenora Rosenfield

Lenora was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil and in the last 20 years she is painting in a new fresco procedure, she created made of synthetic materials for building constructions, one of her researches.

“DNA”, synthetic fresco on non woven fabric, 38 x 57 in | 98 x 146 cm, 2020

How did you become a professional artist?

I think art chose me, because I never thought of something else seriously. Everything I thought since I was a little child was related to art.

When is a piece finished for you?

There is something in my body that tells me to stop. I have a feeling of being full, like after I had a big and great meal.

What are the influences and inspirations in your work?

As a teenager I was first influence by Hieronymus Bosch, after by the expressionist like Goya that I conceder one of the first expressionist, and later Van Gogh. In Brazil I was very influenced by Ibere Camargo, by his brush strokes freedom to paint). American artists I was very inspired by Eva Hesse, the way she thought about art, and Robert Morris’ wool felt. Since I started to work with maps, I realized how I was also inspired by my travels and my grandparents that came from four different countries: Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Turkey. I met them all and the first one died when I was 20 years old. I was always very curious about them, how they got to Brazil and how was their lives before. I am very influence by that. I love to know my own and the human being origins, about the cave man and all the layers, what came first, and that research never ends. It is difficult to tell about my inspirations … Click here to read more

Lynn Stern

Artist Q&A with Lynn Stern

Lynn Stern was born and raised in New York, where she continues to live. Stern works with black and white film and indirect, natural light; since 1985 she has been doing studio work, using a scrim of translucent white or black fabric. The Lynn Stern Archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.

“Quickening #19-40a”, Archival Inkjet Pigment Print, 38 x 43 in | 97 x 109 cm, 2019

Why did you become an artist?

I never considered it as a child. My father had a collection of abstract expressionist work that he began collecting in the late 40s through the early 60s, so I grew up with a lot of amazing work on the walls, and, though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I found it intimidating: it never occurred to me that I could become an artist – especially since I can’t draw! Then, in my early thirties I helped set up shots for architectural interiors – my first exposure to photography – and found that I loved composing through the lens. So, I started studying at ICP (the International Center of Photography) and quickly became hooked.

How is your work different than everything else out there?

What distinguishes my work as a photographer is that I think of the medium as one of light, not representation. For many years I have been working in my studio with diffused north light and a transparent white or black scrim, making whatever object is juxtaposed with it less literal rather than more so; my goal is to make visible a quality that is invisible – to transform the object from something seen that is valued for its striking outer aspects to something seen that is valued as the expression of something unseen, … Click here to read more

Jacques Jarrige

Artist Q&A with Jacques Jarrige

Jacques Jarrige is a Paris-based artist working in the confluence of fine art and decorative art with sculptural and functional objects in relation to the body and human scaled spaces. He is represented by Valerie Goodman Gallery in New York.

“Double Dining Table”, beech wood, 42 x 30 x 120 in | 107 x 76 x 305 cm, 2020

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

I love the work of Henry Moore. I first saw his work at the Château de Bagatelle in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, which is famous for its rose garden. In this naturalistic English landscape style park setting, Moore’s work gave me the feeling that I was meant to be a sculptor. It was his work that made me believe I was meant to do it.

How did you become a professional artist?

I have always felt strongly connected to art. My father was an avid art collector, so there were a lot of paintings in my home as a child. There were also two small, distinctive Rodin sculptures that were always in the house, and now, in the back of my mind.

Through studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts and decorative art at Ecole Supérieure d’Art Moderne, I became drawn to creating more sculptural works. The first object I created was a chair made of rebar I had envisioned in my mind. I bought a welding gun and created the piece in my kitchen. By physically creating a work of art in this manner, I understood it more and became less reliant on drawing in my practice. I was inspired that I could directly create what I had envisioned.

In school I was not interested in pursuing anything other than drawing. Not music, math or any other field, and later architecture wasn’t really satisfying. … Click here to read more