Kyle Sims, Fine Art Connoisseur, October 2015

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There is a lot of superb art being made these days; this column shines light on a trio of gifted individuals.

KYLE SIMS (b. 1980) paints highly realistic scenes of North America’s wildlife, including bear, bighorn sheep, bison, deer, elk, moose, mountain goat, pronghorn, and river otter, as well as diverse members of the canine and feline families.

He was born and raised near Cheyenne, where his parents encouraged his artistic instincts early on. By 13, Sims began to focus on animal painting, inspired particularly by the widely published Belgian animalier Carl Brenders (b. 1937). Within three years, the boy started to attend workshops taught by talents like Paco Young, Terry Isaac, and Daniel Smith, who encouraged him to admire such historical forerunners as Wilhelm Kuhnert, Carl Rungius, Bob Kuhn, and Joaquín Sorolla, plus living role models like Richard Schmid and

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Clyde Aspevig. Because they dry quickly, Sims started out painting in acrylics, but now focuses on oils.

Sims went on to earn his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, the location of which allowed him to explore the scenic Beartooth Mountains regularly. He has been observing nature first-hand ever since, examining its details up close and working outdoors in all kinds of weather.

“Painting on location,” Sims explains, “trains you to see and interpret how life really looks to the eye, rather than to the camera. If I go outside and make a really fine field study, it’s so much more satisfying than anything else I could do. I love the sketchy spontaneity of painting in the field — and I’m out to capture that same look and feel in my studio work.”

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K YLE SIMS (b. 1980), A Day in the Slough, 2015, oil on linen, 36 x 56 in., Trailside Galleries, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Indeed, in addition to being impeccably accurate, Sims’s scenes possess a sense of atmosphere that transcends documentation, and he is particularly admired for his compositions, which often crop out portions of the animal’s form to bring us closer to the action.

Sims’s next solo show is set to occur September 7–20 at his sole representative, Trailside Galleries (Jackson Hole, Wyoming). His art will also be sold at two other Wyoming venues that month: Western Visions and the Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale. (See page XX for details on these events.)

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ILIYA MIROCHNIK (b. 1988) Fathers and Sons 2015, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 in.

Dacia Gallery, New York City

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ILIYA MIROCHNIK (b. 1988) paints landscapes and still lifes, but he is particularly noted for complex portraits of his friends and family members, painted in oils and often large in scale.

When he was two, Mirochnik emigrated with his family from the Ukrainian city of Odessa to Brooklyn, where he grew up. The boy started taking art classes at age 12 and then, having earned admission to New York City’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, studied after school at the Art Students League of New York and at the Bridgeview School of Fine Arts, where several instructors had been trained in the former Soviet Union.

In 2006, Mirochnik enrolled in St. Petersburg’s prestigious Repin State Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he spent seven years earning B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees. There he mastered figure drawing, anatomy, and perspective, and he concedes that “it is precisely this training that allows me to diverge from it” today. Now, based in a Manhattan studio, Mirochnik aims “to connect the Russian aesthetic with American sensibilities,” and has focused this effort on figure paintings set in his home or studio. Not surprisingly, he admires the intimate domestic scenes of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), who also believed that the home can, in Mirochnik’s words, “speak to everyone.”

Even more than Bonnard, Mirochnik juxtaposes images — for example, a portrait within a portrait.

This practice owes much to the visual culture of comic books and graphic novels in which he grew up, and to our contemporary Internet world of frames and pop-ups. This also references a historical tradition that belongs less to painting than to printmaking, in which drawn frames have played integral compositional roles. The resulting compositions evoke ambiguous narratives, some of which even Mirochnik does not fully grasp as he works: “there are times,” he admits, “when the image comes before understanding of the image.” By juxtaposing “a geographical and social solidity” (e.g., his family’s living room) “on a psychological instability, I enable the various strata of daily existence (financial, intellectual, personal, spiritual, etc.) to intersect and result in inner conflict,” Mirochnik explains.

A suitable example is illustrated here: Fathers and Sons “is essentially a portrait of my father, but the canvas also includes a self-portrait assuming a pose that is unnatural to me, but one in which my father often falls asleep. It’s a painting about connections I have, and it’s also about the relationship I have with my father, which has changed as I get older.” It’s pertinent that Mirochnik loves reading poetry, and that he says “there is something of the poetic that I am striving to achieve.” We don’t expect poems to tell immediately coherent stories, so perhaps it’s best to allow Mirochnik’s scenes, like poetry, to sink in over time.

Mirochnik is represented by James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery (Holmdel, NJ), and his first solo exhibition will open October 1 at his other representative, Manhattan’s Dacia Gallery.

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LORI WHITE

LORI WHITE (b. 1955) is a painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and still lifes who came to fine art from an unusual direction. Having grown up in western Pennsylvania, she earned her B.S. degree from Virginia’s George Mason University, then relocated to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to earn her Ph.D. in physiology. Based in central North Carolina ever since, White pursued a successful career as an environmental scientist, but over time shifted toward art-making through studies with such diverse talents as Greg Biolchini, Scott Christensen, Sean Dye, Albert Handell, Chad Hughes, Caroline Jasper, L. Diane Johnson, Kevin Macpherson, Bob Rohm, Frank Serrano, and (especially) Luana Luconi Winner.

Today White brings an environmentalist’s passion to her easel, always seeking ways to show viewers how beautiful and fragile our planet is, and hopefully spurring them to help protect it. The results are smaller paintings made outdoors, and larger ones developed back in the studio. Underway now are several series, including landscapes and cityscapes of North Carolina that encompass not only marshes, lakes, and streams, but also vineyards, barns, and glistening streets. White is particularly enchanted by “those mornings when heavy fog can transform the most mundane lake or stream into an otherworldly place and time,” and has been creating still life scenes that capture “those anticipatory moments when we are planning our next travels.” She has also developed expertise in painting historic architecture (of which North Carolina has a great deal), as well as such birds as herons, ospreys, and geese.

White is represented by five different venues in North Carolina: Ambleside Gallery (Greensboro), Hill Country Woodworks (Chapel Hill), Tipping Paint Gallery (Raleigh), Village Art Circle (Cary), and Visual Art Exchange (Raleigh). She has several works on view through November 1 at Saladelia Hock Plaza (2424 Erwin Road, Durham), and Visual Arts Exchange has scheduled her next show there for January 8–30, 2016.

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(b. 1955), Day Lilies, 2014, oil on canvas, 20 x 10 in., Ambleside Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina

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