The Gift of Art Brandon Brown 2023

THE GIFT OF ART

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WISHING YOU ABUNDANT JOY THIS HOLIDAY SEASON AND A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR –Brandon Brown Director of Sales

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 bbrown@lewallengalleries.com | lewallengalleries.com Cover: Roy Lichtenstein Bull No. VI, (42/100) 1973 Linocut on paper 27 x 35 in

BEN ARONSON is recognized as one of America's most respected and evocative

painters of the contemporary urban landscape.

Aronson’s cityscapes demonstrate the artist’s remarkable capacity to convey the sensory experience of a captured moment in the life of a city by employing masterful combinations of impressionistic atmosphere, color, and light. Aronson's signature synthesis of realism and abstraction expressively translates the everyday reality of metropolitan forms and life – rooftops, skyscrapers, streets, stop signs, and sidewalks – into a tableaux of urban geometry, motion, light, and shadow that uniquely compresses the spirit of a place. The artist’s expressive painterly style is characterized by fluid, yet restrained brushwork. “The main objective is not merely to capture physical likeness,” Aronson says, “but rather to aim for the most concentrated form of a powerful visual experience.”

In 2007, arts writer George Tysh noted Aronson’s firm place in art history – positioning him with Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, and Fairfield Porter, "[All four are] realists whose compositions express an acute awareness of underlying geometries and forms, and who never forgot about the paint in painting."

His paintings uncannily concentrate and epitomize visual resonances of the cityscape, whether it be New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Côte d’Azur, or any other place – and transform the everyday into orchestrations of inestimable beauty. Like the poetry of the place itself, his paintings inspire the mind and stir the heart.

Ben Aronson, Downtown Over Broadway, 2021 Oil on panel 36 x 13.38 in

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Over the course of his distinguished seven-decade artistic career, Bill Barrett has become legendary for exploring in his elegant and lyrical sculpture the interplay between positive and negative space in bronze and other metals, material one thinks of as static and inflexible.

Additionally, Barrett is widely acclaimed for a singular level of technical mastery.

His graceful sculptures coherently transform visual symmetry with improvisational sequences of gestural spontaneity and free-flowing movement. Paradoxically, for art rendered in the solidity of metal, Barrett’s work nevertheless calls to mind the fluidity of calligraphic strokes frozen in space and portray a dream-like sense of floating forms and emanating energy.

His alluring constructions strike an exquisite balance between volume and space, light and shadow, organic intuition and tectonic invention. Barrett’s command of the formal relationships between these forces evokes a fluid choreography and reveals the consummate skill and unequaled vision of one of the foremost sculptors of our time.

The energy of modernist gesture infuses his graceful, dance-like metal forms with an ironic spontaneity reminiscent of action painting and the improvisational spirit of Abstract Expressionism. For this reason, Barrett’s work manifests a striking quality of kinesis that manages to seem elegant and organic, despite the solidity of the metal medium.

Art historian and critic Peter Frank has written about Barrett’s work noting that, "These sculptures are not bodies gesturing, they are the gestures themselves.”

Bill Barrett Ellis, 2020 Bronze 91 x 48 x 18 in

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Dutch artist Peter Bremers employs the experience of travel as the foundation for his internationally recognized glass sculptures.

Inspired by a journey he undertook to the Antarctic in a deep-sea sailing vessel, the kilncast glass works that constitute his Icebergs & Paraphernalia series concretize the artist’s recollections of the region’s passing swells and ice floes. Merging undulating wave-like shapes with angular holes and arches, the compositions recall both the fissures of melting glaciers and the unfathomable depths of ice gliding below the sea’s surface.

Characterized by their rich earth-hued glass, angular structures, and intricately cut channels, the works in Bremers’s recently developed Canyons & Deserts series essentialize and evoke the austere and awe-inspiring landscape formations of the American Southwest.

Using gestures of the hand to approximate the visual effects of erosion and stratification, the series proposes a dynamic contrast between human and geologic time.

Bremers was born in 1957 in Maastricht, The Netherlands, where he studied sculpture at the University of Fine Arts from 1976 to 1980 and three-dimensional design at the Jan van Eyck Academie from 1986 to 1988. Searching for suitable ways of realising his artistic ideas, he at first worked with a wide range of materials, including glass, plastic, steel and stone. In 1989, he attended a course given by Lino Tagliapietra at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, but the strongest impetus to turn to glass as his ideal material had come three years earlier, during a workshop held at the Jan van Eyck Academie by the senior Dutch glass artist A.D. Copier (1901-1991).

Peter Bremers Connected Space, 2017 Kiln-cast glass 26 x 14 x 7.5 in

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PETER BUREGA confers a personal vision of nature in his art as an intangible,

ethereal place of light and color.

Burega expresses his contemplative response to nature in part through careful nuances of light, shadow, and color, which he skillfully applies in layers. Intertwining warm wisps of ochre, briskly refreshing blues, and other subdued passages of color, Burega’s art gives the sensation of emotionally charged air, both weightless and expressive.

Though Burega’s works may contain vague hints of what we might recognize as land, bodies of water, horizon lines, or sunlight cast from above, they suggest places where we might perceive with our imagination or intuition rather than with any of our five basic human senses. Enlisting dynamic textures, subtle harmonies of color, and radiant light to suggest a range of emotion tonalities, Burega’s paintings become windows into the uncharted landscapes of the inner self.

Peter Burega was born in 1965 in Montreal, Canada, and currently lives and works part of the year on the island of St. Martin, French West Indies and part of the year in Savannah, Georgia. He trained as a concert pianist at the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, received a B.A. in Art History and Sociology from McGill University in Montreal, and subsequently earned a J.D. from Whittier College in Los Angeles. His art is included in numerous collections across the United States.

Peter Burega Changing Light - Le Galion, 2022 Oil on panel 60 x 60 in

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DAN CHRISTENSEN (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s

foremost color abstractionists.

The great critic Clement Greenberg anointed him in 1990 as “one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.” Greenberg viewed Christensen as an exemplar of “post-painterly abstraction”—a term he coined for the movement that followed Abstract Expressionism in modernist progress towards what Greenberg regarded as a “pure art” that would eschew subject matter, spatial illusion, and an artist’s persona in favor of revealing the “truthfulness” of the canvas.

In the ’70s, he picked up a squeegee to create a series referred to as his “plaid” paintings and, later, a series of all-over paintings with off-white or near-black top layers known as the “slab” paintings. In the ’80s, he began using spray again, both over and under a layer of thick paint he scored with expressive marks. Late in the decade he began a new series of “loop” paintings, eventually settling on a centered, circular motif. In the ’90s, he created vibrant variations on this motif, with stacked orbs and oblique ovals hovering on brushed or dripped painterly fields of electric and often luminescent color. These “circle” paintings are among the most celebrated paintings of his career.

Dan Christensen World Wind, 1988 Acrylic on canvas 69.5 x 58 in

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JOHN FINCHER has for more than 40 years created art that celebrates what the

artist terms modestly "the trappings of the American West."

Distinguished by a singular blend of sensuality and authentic realism, his art explores diverse art historical and personal references to offer new understandings of America's natural and cultural landscapes. Exercising a profound economy of means, his works derive startling emotional resonance from a combination of rigorously balanced composition, nuanced brushwork, dramatic shadowing, and the application of intense points of contrasting colors to punctuate significant visual elements. His images of towering poplars, pine limbs set against crystalline skies, richly hued desert hillsides, the array of colors within canopies of aspens turning, and aggressively cropped prickly pears unravel the manifold cultural meanings inscribed within representations of the mythic American West.

Born in Hamilton, Texas, in 1941, John Fincher earned his MFA from University of Oklahoma in 1966. The artist’s works have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and have been represented in important group exhibitions at such significant venues as SITE Santa Fe, the Aspen Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. His work resides in major public institutions including the Smithsonian Institution, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Witchita Art Museum, and the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History.

John Fincher Getty Pine, 2009 Oil on linen 44 x 56 in

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Woody Gwyn is one of America’s foremost contemporary landscape painters.

Gwyn captures the crystalline light and vast expanses of our ever-changing American terrain. His work is characterized by dramatic angles, panoramic formats, startling color, aggressive cropping, and an acute contrast between the natural and manmade. Whether depicting monumental Western mesas, tranquil wooded clearings, or shimmering oceanic vistas, the results offer new ways of seeing a world he reveres.

Departing from the increasingly conceptual protocols of contemporary art, Gwyn emphasizes that landscape is not merely a construct shaped by human ideologies and cultural policies—that, in fact, it continuously moves and shapes us. As landscape painting marks the state of our conception of nature, Gwyn familiarizes us to shifts in our contemporary vision. The breadth of his strikingly horizontal panoramas slowly leads the eye through sensuous ribbons of scenery that resist immediate comprehensibility.

Woody Gwyn was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1944, and received his arts education from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Having moved to New Mexico in 1974, Gwyn found in his new home an awe-inspiring sense of space and scale, the ideal environment to center his artistic practice. His work has been exhibited in national and international museums including the Tel Aviv Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel; le Centre Nationale des Arts Plastiques in Paris, France; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery of George Washington University in Washington, DC; and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Gwyn was the 2010 recipient of New Mexico’s highest artistic honor, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Painting.

Woody Gwyn Rio Sapello, 2020-2022 Oil on linen 60 x 41.75 in

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Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, Wolf Kahn (1927 – 2020) immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940.

In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with renowned teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, later becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree earned in just one year.

He and other former Hofmann students established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery where Kahn had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Kahn received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Traveling extensively, he painted landscapes in Egypt, Greece, Hawaii, Italy, Kenya, Maine, Mexico, and New Mexico. He spent his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, with his wife, the painter Emily Mason.

Wolf Kahn regularly exhibited at galleries and museums across North America. His work may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Wolf Kahn Barn in a Summer Haze, 1984 Oil on canvas 36 x 52 in

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The noted painter Jason Kowalski is regarded for his reverential images of the American landscape, which are suffused with sunlight, nostalgia, and remarkable detail.

Kowalski’s motels, diners, bowling alleys, and other buildings each invoke the passage of time, their paint jobs fading and their signage sun-bleached. However, Kowalski’s remarkable imagery is painted with both veneration and beauty, invoking the romantic associations and relationships that we might have with the past.

Rather than memento mori, Kowalski’s scenes of the crumbling architecture, automobiles, and signage of highway towns and communities on the cusp of the American countryside evoke a spirit of resilience even as his subjects transform with age. According to Kowalski, “There is beauty in the undone, the abandon...” and his affectionate treatment of these nearly forgotten places gestures toward our shared sense of American memory. In so doing, his art also appeals to our sense nostalgia—a feeling that hinges on both memory and our ability to form a sense of story.

Jason Kowalski was born in Boynton Beach, Florida but spent most of his childhood in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art from the Laguna College of Art and Design in 2009. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications across the United States.

Jason Kowalski Best Western, 2023 Oil & mixed media on panel 48 x 72 in

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With a successful career spanning more than forty years, RON KINGSWOOD is renowned for his distinctive paintings of animals in their natural habitats.

With his gestural brushstrokes and a lifelong study of the outdoors, Kingswood’s work exists at the exciting intersection of naturalism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism. Offering a refreshing and iconoclastic approach to wildlife art, Kingswood stuns with his unexpected compositions and mastery of color. Using oil paint on canvas, he shapes a tangible sense of place–from bare minimalist snowscapes to dense woodland scenes. Each quiet moment allows the viewer an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the unfettered and noble lives of the animal kingdom, inviting meditation about the preciousness of nature.

Ron Kingswood The Clearing, 2003 Oil on canvas 55.75 x 63 in

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Up close JIVAN LEE's paintings celebrate paint for paint’s sake – luscious, colorful, moldable. When viewed at distance, the paintings collect into studies of light, architecture, and landscape – a transformation that highlights the relationships between raw material and familiar image.

Lee’s oil paintings explore the raw material of paint to create images and engender emotional response. He has become a leading figure of contemporary landscape painting, known for his lively sense of color, his textural application of paint, and his reflective, cerebral approach to engaging with his subject. His art engages his viewers in a visceral involvement with the landscape, which he achieves through a highly physical plein-air painting process.

Lee is inspired by the landscape and artists of the Southwest. Whether conveying the shifting hues of backlit clouds, or a New Mexico river valley set ablaze in sunlight, Lee communicates a visceral, momentary feeling of being in a place and surrounded by natural beauty. He does this in part by emphasizing the sheer physical nature of his work.

Jivan Lee West from 150 in the Snow, 2022 Oil on panel 30 x 36 in

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One of America’s foremost non-representational painters, Emily Mason (1932– 2019) spent more than five decades exploring her distinctive vein of lyrical, luminous abstraction. Robert Berlind said of her in Art in America: “Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado.”

Her place secure in art history, Mason enjoyed a long and distinguished career at the heart of the evolution of American abstract painting. Her oil on canvas paintings are distinguished by a sense of intriguing intimacy combined with uncompromising, though gentle, intensity. They evince a sense of structure within open, luminous space and juxtapose robust color harmonies with vivid contrasts that create an engaging optical vibration.

Born and raised in New York City, Mason graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art and then studied at Bennington College before attending and graduating from the Cooper Union. She spent 1956-58 in Italy on a Fullbright grant for painting and for part of that time studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice.

During Mason’s two-year stay in Italy she married the painter Wolf Kahn, whom she had met earlier in New York.

Emily Mason Sounded, 2014 Oil on canvas 52 x 48 in

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For more than fifty years, Forrest Moses (1934 – 2021) was known for painting graceful visual responses to place through distinctive and complex rhythms of color, line, and form that reveal the sudden transcendent quality of the simple experience of being in nature.

Establishing a dynamic tension between abstraction and representation, Forrest Moses’s masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize both the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures. He presents an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke.

Profoundly influenced by Japanese aesthetics, Moses embraces the principle of wabi-sabi: the realization that things become more beautiful as they decay, age, and transition. In this way, the marks of his oil paintings and ink-based monotypes reference the practices and philosophies of sumi-e ink masters. During his career, Moses sought, in his words, "to discover nature’s truth and give life to a painted image by understanding the rhythms and pulses behind appearances.”

Forrest Moses Autumn Reflection, 2012 Oil on canvas 36 x 95.75 in

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Eloquently distilling the essence of daily life in these Indigenous communities, Elias Rivera's (1937 – 2019) striking canvases are brimming with figures bathed in radiant light and color.

With a successful career spanning more than half a century, Elias Rivera was a renowned Santa Fe-based painter. In his vibrant works inspired by Dutch, Spanish, and Italian Old Master paintings, Rivera chronicles vivid scenes of life in New Mexico, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. Capturing moments in time, almost cinematically, Rivera portrays bustling markets and the unique customs of these diverse peoples in his exquisite, original compositions.

Born in Bronx, NY, Elias Rivera attended the School of Industrial Arts from 1953 to 1954, and then the Art Students League from 1955 to 1961, where he studied with and was mentored by artist Frank Mason. Rivera moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1982, where he met his future wife, artist Susan Contreras, and lived and worked throughout the rest of his life. He received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2004. A major monograph entitled Elias Rivera was published in 2006 with an essay by well-known art critic and writer Edward Lucie-Smith. Following a tragic car accident in 2011, Rivera stopped working in 2015 and passed away in 2019 in Santa Fe.

Elias Rivera Flowers of the Mind #5, 2002 Oil on canvas 50 x 60 in

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Over a career that spanned four decades, JACK ROTH (1927–2004) built his early success in the Abstract Expressionist movement by cultivating a remarkable body of color abstract painting.

Roth’s art evolved alongside the vanguard of postwar American art through Color Field abstraction and beyond. Jack Roth began his career in art as one of the youngest artists— just 27 years of age—whose work was selected for the landmark “Younger American Painters” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which helped to introduce Abstract Expressionism to the American public in 1954. This exhibition, which traveled to major art museums across the United States, included many leading artists of the day, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, many of whom were decades his elder.

Roth’s early works feature densely brushed canvases that exhibit a highly expressive quality of gesture. With a sense of graphic immediacy and arrangements of fresh, even color, Roth’s later work often incorporated broad shapes of stained matte pigment on unprimed canvas. They often employed an unusual use of line and negative space, sometimes evoking the flat, ‘cutout’ shapes of Matisse’s late paintings.

Jack Roth (1927–2004) Rope Dancer #21, 1980 Acrylic on canvas 67 x 80 in

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BRIAN RUTENBERG's paintings exude luminous flashes of exuberant color that offer a timeless sense of the excitement of the natural world. Their extraordinary visual energy is fresh and vital and helps to convey “the idea that that painting can be a means to attain ecstasy.”

Nature forms the inspiration for Brian Rutenberg’s sumptuous abstract orchestrations of color, line, and space. His intention is to create what he calls “sustained meditations on the sheer transformative power of looking” and to express his own brimming sense of wonder in the experience of the beauty of the land. With rich color, densely painted surfaces, and vague references to elements of landscape, his paintings evince an aesthetically powerful conjunction between the intuitive and the seen, the felt and the observed.

Rutenberg’s work has been described as “possessing” the landscape, evoking a sense of being in the midst of the woods rather than looking at a picture of one. His works have the quality of participatory feeling rather than detached observation. About this he says, “My paintings present the landscape in the same way I learned to see it, by lying on my belly with my chin in the dirt, foreground so close I can taste it and background far away.

No middle ground. Here was the whole of a view, not from above looking down, but from a mollusk’s vantage point, a million miles close.”

Brian Rutenberg Phlox 3, 2016 Oil on linen 82 x 60 in

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FRITZ SCHOLDER (1937–2005) is acclaimed as a major figure in American art history and as a prominent Modernist painter. Scholder was pivotal for his provocative figural representation and groundbreaking reinvention of the portrayal of Native Americans in contemporary art. At a time when Native American art was dominated by romantic images of the stoic and invariably head-dressed Indian Brave, Scholder imagined the Native American subjects of his paintings with cigarettes, beer cans, and dark glasses, in pickup trucks and blue jeans. In turn elegant and radical, Scholder explored Native American identity with poignancy and bravery.

Charting new territories in his bold and evocative paintings, Scholder is highly regarded for his expressive renderings of distorted and distressed figures. Using vibrant yet dissonant colors and strong, gestural brushwork, Scholder masterfully unleashes mythology-inspired, psychologically-charged themes upon his enigmatic canvases. Scholder’s complex and emotive paintings skillfully articulate the inner workings of a visionary, labyrinthine mind at work. Most well-known for his often controversial portraits of the modern Indian, Scholder also conjures elements of the occult and dark religious iconography within his body of figural work.

Fritz Scholder (1937–2005) Shaman as a Stag, n.d.

Acrylic on canvas 80 x 68 in

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With a keen eye and a tremendous dexterity with graphite, SKIP STEINWORTH has built a distinguished reputation for his radiant compositions over the past forty years.

Composing arrangements in the style of a 17th-century Dutch still life, Steinworth brings verve and mystery to his renderings of commonplace objects. Using humble graphite, Steinworth breathes life into his insightful groupings of inanimate forms. His guiding principle is that each pencil mark must serve to define and convey the full intentions of the works. Embracing a modest palette of black, gray, and white, he skillfully conveys the essence of spirituality encapsulated within specific moments in time.

Skip Steinworth Single White Daylily, 2020 Graphite on board 21.5 x 13 in

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LINDA STOJAK is an extraordinarily accomplished painter whose successful

career spans more than three decades.

She is noted for exploring the convergences between the corporeal and the ethereal in the context of spare, though emotionally complex female forms. Within the liminal space between identity and anonymity she presents alluring emanations, veiled in mystery, that invite a personal search for meaning.

These figures read less as individuals but instead as timeless specters of humanity and feminity. Some of her figures hover on the canvas like ghosts, receding into smoky, sensuous darkness, while others are grounded in thick outlines that link firmly with their backgrounds. Close observation of her surfaces of apparently monochromatic color reveals an incredible range of tonality and finely-graded hue. Stojak imbues her paintings with rich atmosphere and a reductive sense of suggestion through only the essential. Her figures are solitary, alone, but not lonely. She says, "My hope is for my work to help people accept the emotions in themselves."

Linda Stojak Untitled (Figure 133), 2021 Oil on canvas 72 x 48 in

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ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923 – 1997) was one of the most influential and

innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction.

These paintings reinvigorated the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s, he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated

Roy Lichtenstein Bull No. 1, (42/100) 1973 Lithograph, screenprint, & linocut on paper 27 x 35 in

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Roy Lichtenstein Bull No. VI, (42/100) 1973 Lithograph, screenprint, & linocut on paper 27 x 35 in

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 lewallengalleries.com | bbrown@lewallengalleries.com © 2023 LewAllen Galleries Artwork ©16Each Artist