Ilene Richard

Ilene Richard is an artist and illustrator working at Western Avenue Studios in Lowell, MA. She has published many children's books through book giants like Houghton Mifflin, McGraw Hill and Macmillan. She has also had numerous group and solo shows of her paintings.

Her illustrations are tight and careful in execution, her figurative fine art paintings are loose and free, and both have high energy and bold color. The paintings have a little cartoon and a little (yes, again) Alice Neel in them, and are vibrant and almost singing with energy. The shapes she uses are flat and appealing, the compositions leave great negative shapes around the figures which she fills with big colors and funky landscape items.

The females in her paintings have a self presence that reminds me of Mary Cassatt females. Even if posed in classically female surroundings, dress, or situations, sometimes uncomfortable in some way, the women all seem inhabited by someone smart, solid and THINKING. So many paintings that are of women lack this sense of being inhabited, and I always love when I see it.

Ilene's artist biography on her site is an inspiring story of perseverance and hard work.

Debra Bretton Robinson

Debra Bretton Robinson is a painter in Lowell, MA at the Western Avenue Studios. Her landscape paintings use vibrant color and big chunky shapes to transform her subjects into venues filled with life, depth and energy. Using analagous colors, complimentary colors, tertiary triads, her bold color combinations make the paintings hum and sing.
She uses a strong, satisfying balance of warm and cool tones, which make paintings feel solid and substantial. Her compositions and color together create large abstract designs out of realistic views.
She reminds me of Alice Neel in her confident use of paint and color and shape.

Anne Lyman Powers

I just saw that Childs Gallery in Boston is having a show of Anne Lyman Powers work. All I know about her so far is that she was born in 1922, started her work in post-world war II, and is considered a representational expressionist.

Lori Ann Levy-Holm

Lori Ann Levy-Holm is a teacher, artist, author and graduate of the Hartford University MFA in Illustration program. Her site is focused on a book she wrote and illustrated, "Courage is Contagious," about a girl who led a school walkout in Virginia in 1961. These three illustrations are from the book. I love the dramatic points of view disappearing into white backgrounds, intriguing compositions, and sense of calm and determination.

Michal Truelsen

I love Michal Truelsen's new prints outside her Western Ave. Studio. They seem both outer space and storm related, the compositions are dynamic, and to me they are another portrait of outer events describing an inner experience.

Lies and War by Barbara Haack

Barbara Haack's sculpture, Lies and War, was in a Newburyport Art Association show in 2006. The black garden boxes, filled with black gravel and black tire tread driven through with nails, seemed a silent, succinct statement of what we are organically, horribly growing with wars in the Middle East and our dependence and focus on other people's oil.

Agnes Martin by Annie Leibovitz

This is a portrait of painter Agnes Martin from the book,'Annie Leibovitz At Work'. In the book, Leibovitz describes Martin as a Buddhist, who believes that art is an interaction with the divine. She asked Martin what she does every morning in the studio, to which Martin answered "I sit here and wait to be inspired." This portrait shows Martin (and Leibovitz?) perhaps at that moment of inspiration.
I love that she tries to portray an inner experience with an exterior event.

Barbara DiLorenzo

Book dummy and original art for children's book by Barbara DiLorenzo of Ipswich, MA. Saw this today in the window of the Wavepaint Design and gallery in Ipswich, which Barbara runs.

Anita Kunz

Conceptual paintings by Anita Kunz that use metaphor, science, surreality, the figure, portraiture, exaggeration. Her work appears in Time, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and she does a lot of personal work, too. Canadian.

Barbara Adrian

Barbara Adrian is an artist living and working in New York City. She is a Magical Realist, blending traditional, realist painting techniques with psychological and personal imagery.

She studied painting with Reginald Marsh in the 1950s, and is a contemporary of Isabel Bishop. She teaches at the Art Students League in New York.
Here is a link to a great article about her from American Artist Magazine.

Tanya Miller

Another artist I found on Google's Artist of the Day -- Tanya Miller, born in Russia, now living in Canada. I like her mixture of psychological elements, nature, and art history.

Georgia O'Keefe

I have two calendars of Georgia O'Keefe prints this year, one at work and one at home. I started looking at all of the images as self portraits. The ones with two flowers could be portraits of her and Alfred Stieglitz: two artists working alongside each other, at times one overshadowing one another.

The barns looked to me, too, to be portraits. Ends of Barns looks like a protective grouping, each building with only tiny windows to their interiors. The adobe church painting could be her inner life, the relationship she has with art, the relationship one has with the divine.