Tanner is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the Virginia Museum's Statewide Partnership Program, instructing painting workshops throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. Tanner is an active member of The Portrait Society of America and The American Society for Classical Realism. Whether painting traditional oil portraits, still-lifes, or creating unique figure studies celebrating the beauty of the human form, Tanner upholds the fine traditions of realist painters both past and present. View a portfolio at www.TannerPortraits.com.

Juror Comments

I would like to thank Art Works for giving me the opportunity to share in the joy of the Richmond art community coming together to stretch our creative muscles. We are all very grateful to Paula and Glenda in their efforts to provide an environment that nurtures our collective and individual growth. Clearly, there is an abundance of talent in our small city, but is a difficult task to "judge" another artist's work, and label that work as good, better, and best.

Due to space limitations, some pieces submitted were not included in the shows. Sometimes this was simply due to the piece being one of many the artist had submitted. There were pieces that made it into the show that were Expressionistic or Abstract which, although not my taste in painting, were technically sound and designed well. Of the rejected work, often I saw pieces where it was clear that the artist was attempting a realistic, or representational picture, but the piece lacked the technical finesse to pull it off. This does not mean to say that "representational" has to mean high polish, or photorealistic. On the contrary, the French Impressionists were representational painters, and although their paintings lacked the polish of a Raphael or Caravaggio, they were still concerned with convincing color, value, line and composition. It is those basic elements of good painting that I found missing in some of the works. For those artists, please know that as an artist striving for realism--whether loose like an Impressionist, or polished like the Classical Realists-you will always and should always be held to a higher standard of picture making. Drawing skills and understanding value and color are a must. As a representational painter myself, I recognize and share your struggle to continually improve, and hope you will see this as an opportunity to push yourselves further.

The works that placed in the various categories combined interesting imagery with an attention to craft. Each displayed a thoughtful use of color, an understanding of value, and strong design skills that leave a lasting impression on the viewer. I particularly enjoyed Thomas Bradshaw's Lake Tahoe, a landscape in the great Impressionist tradition in its study of the effects of outdoor lighting. His use of broken color to create value shifts in the snow and trees is visually masterful, not to mention his simple and effective composition. Betsy Morgan, Justin Gohde, and Joe Delulio are all successful in giving their still life and interior paintings energy and vitality through brilliant colors and, in Morgan's case, the strong vertical format is an interesting change of pace. Cynthia Losen has cut away all excess in her closely cropped picture Smokin', to provide the viewer with all he or she needs to understand the story being told, and the equally close view of a plant in Ronnie Moseberth's Branches is a great use of negative and positive space in a composition. Phoebe Antrim also shares a successful understanding of how form and color can be arranged in her Window Gardens, as does David J. Lisowki in his delightfully quirky photograph Bubbles. Of the figurative work, I can't stop thinking about the haunting figure in Terry Smith's Disconnected. The stylized, disfigured anatomy directly confronts the viewer, and provides a narrative that invites a contemplation of adversity. The same pathos is not found in the work of Cathyann Burgess, but her combination of technical skill and interesting subjects in Looking and Wait and Wonder provide a moody ambiance to the pictures. The ambiance in Jenni Plavnieks Warm About is downright gleeful, evocative of the blaring, thumping bass beat and sweaty rhythm of some hip urban hot spot.

Best of luck to everyone and enjoy the show!

David Tanner

 

" Warm" by Jenni Plavnieks

$950, Pastel

3rd Place "Go Figure" Show

 

" Wait and Wonder" by Cathyann Burgess

 

" Interior View " by Joe DeIulio

$125, Photography

Third Place "In Bloom" Show

" Window Gardens " by Pheobe Antrim