Bethann Moran Handzlik featured in Fine Art Connoisseur's "Five to Watch"

Five to Watch

by: Allison Malafronte

The plein air paintings being created by BETHANN MORAN HANDZLIK (b. 1965) are impressive not only for the amount of detail, vibrant color, and emotional content they capture but also for their sheer size, often averaging 50 inches in each direction. The Wisconsin artist does not paint small sketches outdoors to quickly gather information for larger studio landscapes. Rather, she completes almost the entire painting outdoors, sometimes spending weeks in the same spot to capture what she sees.

Take This Joy Is Electric, for example, which found the artist standing along a busy highway in Whitewater, Wisconsin, for more than two weeks in order to compose this large scene of a sunflower field. “No doubt there are challenges to working on large canvases outside for a prolonged time,” Moran-Handzlik admits. “I painted this at the end of August — I got sunburned and wind-whipped and had to strap the canvas to my van at one point to keep it from blowing around. However, it’s worth the effort. The changing light, animal sounds, and smell of the air all contribute something toward the final painting, as it evolves within the same conditions it depicts.”

BETHANN MORAN HANDZLIK (b. 1965), This Joy Is Electric, 2021, oil on canvas, 52 x 40 in.,

Moran Handzlik describes her experiences painting in nature in almost spiritual terms; during many hours of concentration she will lose herself in the composition, snapping back to reality only due to a pesky mosquito bite or falling temperatures. “Sometimes while painting, language leaves me,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I disappear. When the painting is complete the viewer can re-see, re-experience what I saw, and then be drawn repeatedly into contemplation of everything within the painting and within themselves. My hope is that the paintings will help create an appreciation for the natural world and assist people on their paths toward joy.”

Moran Handzlik earned a B.A. from Wisconsin’s St. Norbert College and then an M.F.A.from the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee. She has taught at several universities and teaches workshops regularly. This summer she will offer a plein air workshop at the Peninsula School of Art in Door County, and early next year she will return to Scotland to teach and paint. Moran Handzlik was recently a guest on artist Jeff Hein’s The Undraped Artist Podcast. She and her husband, the poet Patrick J. Moran, have three children and live in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.

Jason Rohlf Featured in Hyperallergic

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A View From the Easel

This week, artist studios in Ohio, California, Queens, and Brooklyn.

Lakshmi Rivera Amin February 27, 2023

Jason Rohlf, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

My Loft Law-protected studio is located in a heavily redeveloped portion of Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s waterfront. It’s been my home and workspace for 23 years and the ever-changing neighborhood has become a constant reminder to be grateful for this creative space. Two long tables form the heart of the studio and daily piles of upcycled shop rag paintings invite the start of every morning. Work in progress is everywhere allowing for visual cross-pollination to happen. Studio plants hug the window and are constant inspiration. Natural phenomena appear in nearly every work and I like to think of the space as a field outpost for gathering observations both real and imagined.

William Nichols featured in Chicago Life Magazine

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CHICAGO ARTISAN:

Landscape painter William Nichols portrays the journey, not the destination

BY PAMELA DITTMER McKUEN

Imagine yourself hiking a woodland trail, dodging wayward branches and muddy creeks in pursuit of a vaunted overlook with far-reaching views of astounding natural beauty. Finally, you arrive and snap a few photos for the gram. Then you turn around and scurry back to the trailhead.

William Nichols shows you what you missed along the way. The Skokie-based landscape artist forgoes mountain ranges and jeweled sunsets, instead focusing on the terrain. He simply paints whatever he encounters: the fallen log bisecting an unnamed stream, the random bough coated in lichen, a glimmer of late-day sunlight peering through the canopy, tangles of wild vegetation.

"What I do is not so much landscape but looking at nature up close," he says. "Most of my work is middle ground and foreground, which is a distinctive way of looking at nature."

As Lauren Ellis, who represents Nichols' work at CK Contemporary in San Francisco, puts it, "Unlike the typical landscape where you are looking at a composed vista, Bill brings you into the landscape in this immediate way where you feel you are experiencing it first-hand. It's like you are traversing the landscape and looking down as you walk."

Another aspect of Nichols' work that merits mention is the sheer size. His paintings are measured in feet rather than inches, almost life-size or greater, to immerse the viewer in the setting.

"When I'm looking at my (William Nichols) paintings, I'm inside that small section of garden or creek," says Tory Folliard, whose eponymous gallery in Milwaukee has repped Nichols since 1990.

A Change in Direction

Nichols began painting while attending high school in the late 1950s, a time of artistic turbulence. Surrealism, expressionism, abstractionism and pop were at the forefront, and he followed suit. He attended the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois and did postgraduate study as a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar at Slade School of Art at University College in London. Afterward, he began a 25-year career teaching art at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Although his early paintings sold well, by the early 1970s, Nichols was restless. He felt compelled to find his own style rather than continue to translate popular trends.

"It was difficult," he recalls. "You want to hang onto things around you that are successful and be part of the crowd."

Turning his attention to landscapes, he drew upon the joyous summers of his youth, which he spent with relatives in a wooded rural area of Wisconsin called Fall Creek. His days were filled with hiking, fishing and exploring, and, as a city boy, he reveled in the wonder and solitude of it all.

At first, he worked from memory with the belief that relying on photographs was a sort of cheating. Eventually, he realized the images in his mind didn't provide the depth of character he sought. In search of greater authenticity, he returned to the natural environment with a camera in tow. Many of his locations are mundane, perhaps the side of a road or an undistinguished forest. He donned hip waders and entered the water to shoot what he saw on shore.

A typical landscape positions the viewer on the bank, observing the water. Ellis says, "When you look at a William Nichols painting, you are in it."

The photographs provided subject matter but not a means to transition them to canvas. The obvious choice was realism, which he rejected as too harsh for the sentiments he wanted to convey.

"I would not be able to capture in any way, shape or form the sensibility I feel about nature, which has a softness and ambiguity and emotion to it," he says.

The technique he developed is a marriage of photorealism with the impressionism and abstraction of his early work. It's more complicated than this, but it involves thinning oil paint and applying it like watercolor. The consistency of the paint allows light to come through, reminiscent of a stained-glass window. Less manageable than undiluted pigment, it enables an amorphous quality to the work. When Nichols wishes to draw the viewer's eye to a particular area of a painting, he makes it sharper or stronger or bulkier.

"When you get up close to one of his paintings, it's abstract," Folliard says. "The further you walk away, the more it becomes super-real."

WINTER MORNING, Oil on Linen, 42 x 72”

The Traveler Comes Home

Nichols' work since 1974 has been featured in dozens of solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including the recent "Of Nature" exhibition at Tory Folliard Gallery. His paintings are held in the collections of an international clientele, such as Milwaukee Art Museum; Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida; and Stanford University.

After he retired from teaching, Nichols and his wife of 50-plus years, Sandra, moved about the country for nearly two decades in search of a new permanent home. They tried Florida and Phoenix before returning to the Chicago area about a year ago and happily settling into a 16th floor condominium in a glassy high-rise.

He keeps a pretty tight work schedule, painting for a few hours every morning and afternoon, and he takes off a month or two each year for the couple to travel. At age 80, Nichols doesn't get into the woods to photograph these days, but he has a vast library of images and slides for reference. There's so much more to paint.

"If I have attempted to do anything fresh as a landscape painter, it is that experience of stopping to look at what can be just around us if we take the time to see it," he says.

Jeanette Pasin Sloan's New Paintings Featured in Art and Antiques

JEANETTE PASIN SLOAN is recognized to her complex still life paintings that combine multiple patterns and objects into one flowing image. Each painting, blending classic still life techniques with abstraction, is more than just the items she has combined. It is a story of the reflections and the light, and how they take on a world of their own. Through July 9, Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will host a new exhibition by the artist that includes some of her latest compositions.

There is a sense of harmony to Pasin Sloan's chaotic, yet meticulous paintings that comes from the weeks, sometimes months, of planning. The ideas for the works first percolate in her head, and then she begins to arrange the objects in real life. Pasin Sloan takes many photographs at slightly different angles and views, looking for the patterns she has envisioned in her mind. Once the ideal composition is found, it's transferred to canvas.

The close crop of every work adds to the design elements, such as in Matins, which shows four mugs of various sizes and a spoon resting on a black and white tiled countertop. There is a yellow container off to the right. The dizzying display of the black and white makes simple yet near optical illusions along the mugs where each sharp corner becomes slightly curved.

My Cup Runneth Over could be seen as the cup, saucer and spoon taking center stage, except the red fabric with black polka dots is the real star as it folds, reflects and plays. The painting Duet is also simple in nature Sloan takes many photographs at slightly different angles and views, looking for the patterns she has envisioned in her mind. Once the ideal composition is found, it's transferred to canvas. The close crop of every work adds to the design elements, such as in Matins, which shows four mugs of various sizes and a spoon resting on a black and white tiled countertop. There is a yellow container off to the right. The dizzying display of the black and white makes simple yet near optical illusions along the mugs where each sharp corner becomes slightly curved. My Cup Runneth Over could be seen as the cup, saucer and spoon taking center stage, except the red fabric with black polka dots is the real star as it folds, reflects and plays. The painting Duet is also simple in nature with the two items, but this time the stripped cloth ripples and rolls and blends the surface of the mugs into the foreground and background.

In Handle with Care polka dots are at play again, but a green bowl interrupts the formulaic scene and draws the eye to the reflection in the tallest mug. What's revealed in the reflection more noticeably is not just the reflection of the patterns and objects, but also the scene that would be behind the viewer if they were standing right in front of the arrangement. That reflection of what's beyond can be found in many of Pasin Sloan's paintings perhaps as a subtle hint to the artistic process.

Fred Stonehouse Exhibition, Falling Waters, Reviewed in Shepherd Express

*To view the original article on the Shepherd Express website, please click HERE

Fred Stonehouse Evades Easy Categories

BY SHANE MCADAMS MAY 11, 2022

Fred Stonehouse PATCH, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 60”

On an imaginary spectrum from pure abstraction to crisp representation, I often wonder which side possesses the edge in revealing the private realms of the artist. On one hand, an intuitive composition of formal marks is the deepest and most interior language imaginable, but on the other hand, it sometimes is too much of an interpretive inkblot. While objective subject matter tends to force the terms, it also has the potential to burrow into spaces with more specificity … even if the specificity leads back to uncertainty.

This is a rhetorical consideration, and the answer is “both,” and “it depends.” Nevertheless, it seemed a helpful framework to place in front of the work in Fred Stonehouse’s current exhibition, “Falling Waters,” at Tory Folliard Gallery on view through May 28. At least it did for me in the wake of a night of weird dreaming. Stonehouse’s work teems with detail and specificity. Its superficial resolution and directness almost seem to spurn any sort of abstract interpretation. Even the most uninitiated viewer would refrain from referring to any of his cast of tightly rendered objects and characters as “abstract.” Every piece of content is identifiable if not nameable. From a butterfly, a snake, a sparrow, and a frog in Lost Creek Falls, to a tiger and a trout in Catch, the viewer’s left brain doesn’t have to do too much work finding its bearings. However, where, say, a ‘50s era Willem de Kooning seduces viewers with abstract arrangements of color, and encourages more concrete language,, Stonehouse’s work goes in the opposite direction.

In his work Patch, which features a bear-headed human figure clutching a whole watermelon, and stoically peering and salivating at a nearby cobra coiled around its own half melon, we naturally want to piece together a narrative. Butterflies flutter behind the central action and a waterfall gurgles in the deeper background. Is this mythology, symbolism, surrealism, or confessional? Time with the work starts to tell us more, but also less.

With similar suggestiveness, Next presents a figure donning a skeleton costume with butterfly wings, holding a large pear. The centered and foregrounded figure cowers awkwardly against a theatrical moonlit ring of waterfalls. It’s a bizarre and eerie scenario, evoking the nightmarish Sissy Spacek prom queen scene in the film Carrie, with his tears of blood gathering his brow. Both are drenched in wet shame in an otherwise ideal setting. The theatricality of the painting is further advanced by its repurposed vintage frame which functions, as it does in others, as a high-relief proscenium. From stage to stage as it were, eccentric detail to eccentric detail, the psychic residue builds. Any progress toward clarity founders. One slowly stops reading the work and instead builds a vague picture of total interiority that gets consistently more dreamlike.

You know when you have a technicolor nightmare about your high school English teacher, dressed like Marie Antoinette, chasing you with a 5th edition copy of Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, around a pool, at night, that might have been your grandmother’s, but is bottomless and lava, that you describe to a good friend with all the detail that woke you sweating at 2 a.m. … and they’re left totally puzzled? You try to give them more details, but it doesn’t help. They only get bored. Of course, they’d get it if only they could trace your dream inventory into your limbic system with you. But alas they can’t. Given this, Fred Stonehouse’s paintings might be as close as one can get to inhabiting a single kaleidoscopic interior subconscious. Not in one work. Not in two, but across many, in a hiccupping chain of irrational interior reflections. Even though the content may be identifiable in Stonehouse’s paintings, it eventually coalesces into a cloud of general strangeness that leaves the images behind, to linger abstractly, like a fever dream … or an abstract painting in reverse.

Fred Stonehouse NEXT acrylic on wood, 48 x 24”

MOWA Exhibition of Marion Coffey Featured in Shepherd Express

*To read the original article on the Shepherd Express website, please click HERE

MOWA Exhibit Honoring Marion Coffey Long Overdue

BY MICHAEL MUCKIAN APR. 19, 2022

Milwaukee native Marion Coffey always planned to be an illustrator, artist and printmaker, and her sea of accomplishments is testament to her extensive talent, intellectual curiosity, and expressive nature. The one thing Coffey never accomplished during her lifetime was being honored with her own dedicated exhibition. The Museum of Wisconsin Art has, at long last, rectified that shortfall.

“Marion Coffey: The Art of Color,” which opens at the West Bend museum on May 7, is a showcase of vibrant colors, natural scenery, and visual chronicles of her travels to Europe and Africa. Coffey, who passed away in 2011 at age 87, once said, that she painted images “not exactly how they may look, but how I seem them.” Apparently, she saw everything with the same level of simplicity and high emotions with the same bright promises of a better world.

“She has a joyous expression in her work, and we haven’t had enough of that lately,” says MOWA Executive Director Laurie Winters, who curated the exhibition of 40 pieces by the late artist with the help of her daughter Lisa Coffey-Robbins. “This is her very first exhibition and my only regret is that this didn’t happen during her lifetime.”

Coffey was born to a single mother, Mary Kunzelmann, in Milwaukee in 1924, and shortly thereafter the pair moved to Chicago. Coffey’s mother was a salesperson, and as a little girl Marion would stay in the car while her mother made sales calls. Armed with a pad of paper, crayons and colored pencils, Marion entertained herself by drawing while her mother worked, laying the cornerstones of her artistic career. She went on to attend a variety of prestigious art schools, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fountainebleau School of Art, 40 miles southeast of Paris, France.

In the 1940s, Coffey went work at a major Chicago ad agency, one of the first women illustrators in the industry. The agency’s clients included Coca-Cola, Coppertone Suntan Lotion and RCA. Her advertising work was realistic and anecdotal, in distinct contrast with her later fine art, and she sometimes used her own image when it was appropriate. She also did illustrations for the Chicago Tribune and, after returning to Wisconsin to live with her mother in West Bend, for the Milwaukee Journal. In 1952, she married John Louis Coffey, who eventually went on to become Judge Jack Coffey, occupying the bench with the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Marion Coffey eventually abandoned commercial art for a more expressive form of fine art, much of it showing influences of both French Impressionism and German Expressionism, as well as that of American artist Milton Avery. She found inspiration in her plein-air paintings of the Wisconsin countryside and loved working with handmade paper, exhibiting her work at the Charles Allis Museum and other are galleries and venues.

“Marion Coffey worked very boldly, and that’s surprising,” Winters says. “She did things more tediously and laboriously because she was a perfectionist about color, and she knew how to make her colors come alive.”

Marion Coffey: The Art of Color runs May 7 through July 10 at The Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Avenue, West Bend. An opening reception will be held May 7 from 2 to 4 p.m. For more information, visit wisconsinart.org.

Paula Swaydan Grebel featured in Door County Pulse Magazine

To see the original article on the Door County Pulse website, please click HERE

Deliberate by Design: How Paula Swaydan Grebel navigates the artistic process

By Tom Groenfeldt, April 21st, 2022

Paula Swaydan Grebel approaches her painting very deliberately: sorting through images, making selections, doing small drawings and then making a sketch on paper — a sketch she may enlarge, shrink or cut apart to insert a new image in the middle. Only then does she begin to transfer the image to canvas in oil paint.

But she didn’t always work like this. In another lifetime, she describes a way of working that was very loose.

“I was trained to just go and do the work,” said Swaydan Grebel, who has a BFA from California State University–Long Beach. She and her husband, Randy, moved to Plymouth, Wisconsin, for work and bought a place in Egg Harbor about 18 years ago. They retired there full time two years ago.

Over the years, Swaydan Grebel continued her art education and credits Catherine Kehoe, a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist and painter, with helping her to organize, structure and gear her work toward her own temperament.

Before arranging her workflow to fit her way of working, “I found that I was always fixing the painting,” Swaydan Grebel said. “The design wasn’t right; the drawing wasn’t right; the color wasn’t right. A lot ended up in the trash. Kehoe had a process that connected with my personality. I think a lot. I’m methodical. I enjoy the designing portion.”

Instead of working piecemeal, Swaydan Grebel said she likes to see images in a group and then work on the design. That starts with thumbnail sketches, about two inches by two inches.

“These help me to understand the possibilities, to think past the image, and come up with a decent design,” she explained, adding that it can take weeks to create a drawing to transfer onto the canvas. 

Her latest bit of education comes from her family.

“We have a new grandson – our first – and when I see him look at the world, it’s so cool,” Swaydan Grebel said. “That’s how I want to see things: the way a child does when it is all new.”

With the drawing complete, she then decides which colors to use.
“In every painting, I try a different set of colors,” she said. “It’s been a good challenge.”
As an aid in remembering the color choices, Swaydan Grebel writes down the chosen colors in a book coordinated with the artwork.

“Finally, when I start painting, I will cover one section at a time. The middle of this process is when I want to wipe and correct. I resist this desire,” she said. “Once the canvas surface is covered from top to bottom, it becomes a painting. I love that part. It’s magical!”

Swaydan Grebel’s paintings are infused with color and show a strong sense of design, expressed in color and texture. She has a strong interest in artists throughout history, making references in conversation to Bonnard, Morandi, Bruegel, Albers, Cézanne and Philip Guston – quite a range.

Now she’s intent on creating a body of work that consists of paintings of interiors.

“The interiors have a bit of landscape because there’s usually a window, and usually they have at least one still life in them,” Swaydan Grebel said. “I find it fun, exciting.”

To make it challenging, she has given up her full-range palette with multiple variations of each color, settling on yellow, blue, red and white. 

Like many artists, she also seeks inspiration away from home. In the winter, she and Randy load up their Subaru Forester and head to California to visit family. The back of the car contains an easel, paint, turpentine and panels.

“My husband gets the back seat – well, I also take a little bit of that too,” Swaydan Grebel said. “Winter is a big chunk of my time; I can’t just not work” – especially this year, when she had a show at the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee opening in March. In Door County, her work is shown at Cappaert Contemporary in Egg Harbor.

MPR: Art Hounds recommend art-based road trips in Minnesota featuring T.L. Solien

*To read the article and listen to the segment on the MPR website, please click HERE

Art Hounds recommend art-based road trips in Minnesota

Emily Bright

June 20, 2021

T.L. Solien, "Wasteland," 2011. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 78 by 96 inches.Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

T.L. Solien, "Wasteland," 2011. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 78 by 96 inches.

Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

Visual artists Lisa Bergh and Andrew Nordin of New London, Minn., recently took an art-themed road trip that included a stop at the Nemeth Art Center in Park Rapids, Minn. and the T. L. Solien exhibit “See the Sky.”

Solien’s large scale paintings captivated them. They described the drama of his contemporary work — its humor and pain and emotional charge — as well as his skill with color. “There's actually some subtle moments in some of the smaller pieces that I found myself kind of stuck on,” said Nordin, who was struck by Solien's use of the color yellow.

T.L. Solien, "The Renunciation 2," 2015. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 72 by 96 inches.Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

T.L. Solien, "The Renunciation 2," 2015. Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 72 by 96 inches.

Courtesy of Nemeth Art Center

“I always love going to the Nemeth Art Center,” added Bergh, “You enter into the space through the [Hubbard County] Historical Museum with tons of artifacts, which even made more sense when you walk [up the big stairs] into Solien’s work, because the show is just built on all these artifacts of his personal history of culture.”

T.L. Solien’s show runs through July 17, with a closing reception on July 10 at 4 p.m.