Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and lived much of her adult life in France, where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
A pastel is an art medium that consist of powdered pigment and a binder. It can exist in a variety of forms, including a stick, a square, a pebble, or a pan of color, though other forms are possible. The pigments used in pastels are similar to those used to produce some other colored visual arts media, such as oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation. The color effect of pastels is closer to the natural dry pigments than that of any other process.
Julian Alden Weir was an American impressionist painter and member of the Cos Cob Art Colony near Greenwich, Connecticut. Weir was also one of the founding members of "The Ten", a loosely allied group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, who banded together in 1898 to exhibit their works as a stylistically unified group.
Daniel E. Greene PSA, NA, AWS was an American artist who worked in the media of pastels and oil painting. The Encyclopædia Britannica considered Mr. Greene the foremost pastelist in the United States. His paintings and pastels are in over 700 public and private collections in the United States and abroad. Highly regarded as a portrait artist, his subjects have included leaders of Government, Banking, Education and Industry. Some of his sitters include First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Ayn Rand, Astronaut Walter Schirra, William Randolph Hearst, “Wendy’s” founder Dave Thomas, Commentator Rush Limbaugh, Composer Alan Menken, Bryant Gumbel and Bob Schieffer of CBS TV. Governmental Portraits include Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, Governor Paul Laxalt of Nevada, Governor Gerald Baliles of Virginia, Governor Benjamin Cayetano of Hawaii, and Governor Fob James of Alabama. Business sitters include the chairmen of the boards of Honeywell, Coca-Cola Company, Dupont Corporation, Endo Pharmaceuticals, American Express, The New York Stock Exchange and IBM. Mr. Greene has also painted the Deans, Presidents and Benefactors of Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Tufts, Duke, Columbia, North Carolina, West Point, Delaware, Penn State, New York, Princeton, Rutgers, Yale and Harvard Universities.
Jean-Étienne Liotard was a Genevan painter, art connoisseur and dealer. He is best known for his detailed, strikingly naturalistic portraits in pastel, and for the works from his stay in Turkey. A Huguenot of French origin and citizen of the Republic of Geneva, he was born and died in Geneva, but spent most of his career in stays in the capitals of Europe, where his portraits were much in demand. He worked in Rome, Istanbul, Paris, Vienna, London, and other cities.
The Federation of British Artists (FBA) consists of nine art societies, and is based at Mall Galleries in London where the societies' Annual Exhibitions are held. The societies represent living artists working in the United Kingdom who create contemporary figurative art. Mall Galleries aim to 'promote, inspire and educate audiences about the visual arts.'
Theodore Nikolai Lukits was a Romanian American portrait and landscape painter. His initial fame came from his portraits of glamorous actresses of the silent film era, but since his death, his Asian-inspired works, figures drawn from Hispanic California and pastel landscapes have received greater attention.
Barkley L. Hendricks was a contemporary American painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism. While he worked in a variety of media and genres throughout his career, Hendricks' best known work took the form of life-sized painted oil portraits of Black Americans.
Susanna J. Coffey is an American artist and educator. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City. She was elected a member the National Academy of Design in 1999.
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera. His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Pacita Barsana Abad was an Ivatan and Filipino-American artist. Her more than 30-year painting career began when she traveled to the United States to undertake graduate studies in Spain. She exhibited her work in over 200 museums, galleries and other venues, including 75 solo shows, around the world. Abad's work is now in public, corporate and private art collections in over 70 countries.
Jerry Weiss is an American figurative, landscape, and portrait painter and a writer. He studied classical drawing, and his career has centered on both the figure, and landscape. He says he is "intrigued by the portrait and figure as a most sacred subject."
John Nelson Shanks was an American artist and painter. His best known works include his portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales, first shown at Hirschl & Adler Gallery in New York City, April 24 to June 28, 1996 and the portrait of president Bill Clinton for the National Portrait Gallery.
Arny Karl was one of the key artists in the early stages of the California Plein-Air Revival, which started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Along with Tim Solliday and Peter Seitz Adams, Karl helped revitalize the use of pastels to paint outdoors or en plein air, as the French described regarding the practice of working directly from nature. Karl was a student of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), who was a prominent California Impressionist and the best known Early California painter to have worked in pastel. His work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, is represented in a number of prominent public and private collections and has been the subject of a number of curatorial essays.
Peter Seitz Adams is an American artist. His body of work focuses on landscapes and seascapes created en plein air in oil or pastel as well as enigmatic figure and still-life paintings. He is noted for his colorful, high-key palette and broad brushwork. Adams has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums, including throughout California, the Western United States, and on the East Coast in Philadelphia, Vermont, and New York. Adams is the longest serving President of the California Art Club and has served on its board of directors in Pasadena, California from 1993 to 2018. He is also a writer on subjects relating to historic artists for the California Art Club Newsletter, as well as for a number of the organization's exhibition catalogs.
Tim Solliday is a contemporary California Plein-Air Painter and Western Artist who is known for his San Gabriel Valley landscapes and his paintings of American Indians and other western subjects. He studied with the California Impressionist portrait and landscape painter Theodore Lukits (1897–1992) in the 1970s and began working professionally in the early 1980s. Solliday is described as a painter with a "muscular, masculine style" and has been compared to artists of the Taos Ten, especially E. Martin Hennings. He is a Signature Member of the California Art Club. He exhibits with the Laguna Plein-Air Painters Association, the Oil Painters of America and at the Maynard Dixon Invitational, which is held in Utah each year. Solliday's work has been featured in a number of American art magazines such as Southwest Art, American Artist and Art of the West. Through his plein-air work in the pastel medium and large canvasses, he has played an important role in the revival of landscape painting in Southern California.
James West Fraser is an American artist. One of the leading artists in the representational/En Plein Air tradition, Fraser has built his career on richly painted, atmospheric vistas of cities, coasts, and landscapes.
Laura Coombs Hills (1859–1952) was an American artist and illustrator who specialized in watercolor and pastel still life paintings, especially of flowers, and miniature portrait paintings on ivory. She became the first miniature painter elected to the Society of American Artists, and was a founder of the American Society of Miniature Painters. She also worked as a designer and illustrated children's books for authors such as Kate Douglas Wiggin and Anna M. Pratt.
Benjamin Hope is a British artist, based in London.
