PORTRAIT ARTIST - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Fine Art Oil Painter and Commissioned
Anna Rose Bain (b. 1985) is a fine art oil painter and commissioned portrait artist based in Denver, CO. Her paintings often depict people in peaceful settings or places that evoke happiness. She especially loves painting women and children, and seeks to convey all of her subjects with honesty and sensitivity.
Anna was self taught until college. Inspired by her grandfather, who started painting at the age of 70, Anna spent her free time as a child sketching from nature and poring over art books. She studied fine art at Hillsdale College from 2003-2007, and in 2006 she took a figure painting course at the Florence Academy of Art. After graduating from Hillsdale with honors and distinguishing herself as the first student in the school's history to have a solo senior show, she continued her education by studying with several renowned artists including Judith Carducci, Clayton J. Beck, III, Nancy Guzik, and more.
Anna now resides in Westminster with her husband Steve and daughter Cecelia, having recently moved from the Dallas area. She works full-time as a fine art oil painter and commissioned portrait artist. She also teaches workshops, and is actively involved in the local arts communities. Having had such inspiring teachers and role models in her own life, she firmly believes in sharing her passion and knowledge of classical art with other aspiring artists, as well as showing practical ways to stay up to date in today's changing art market. She is a signature member of the Oil Painters of America. She is also an associate member of American Women Artists, the International Guild of Realism, the California Art Club, and the Portrait Society of America. Her award-winning work can be found in numerous private and public collections around the world.
Anna's style employs a direct painting method while drawing from classical roots. She gains inspiration from the joys and struggles in her life, seeking to make the world a better place through her art. Her paintings are an expression of gratitude and an exploration of the questions one faces at different stages of their life. For example, her award winning self portrait, "The Wait and the Reward," is a coming to terms with change and a joyous celebration of new life.
In November, 2006, Betsy Ashton returned to the portrait artist career that she abandoned in 1971, when she took a long detour into television news. Three credits shy of a master of fine arts degree in painting from The American University in Washington, DC, she was an illustrator, artist and art teacher, who sold many pen and ink, charcoal, and acrylic portraits before creating a program in which she taught art on WTTG-TV's Panorama television program. This quickly led to her reporting and anchoring radio and television news for nearly two decades, first in Washington, D.C., and later at WCBS-TV and CBS News in New York City. While covering the courts for WJLA-TV News in Washington, she became the first and only TV news reporter ever to draw her own courtroom sketches while covering trials - a feat possible only because lawyers are so redundant! Her sketches were shown daily on television and later exhibited and sold by the Jane Haslem Gallery in Washington.
Ashton resumed painting portraits at the urging of renowned painter Everett Raymond Kinstler, NA, whose workshops she attended at the National Academy School of Fine Arts and the Art Students' League in New York. At Kinstler's recommendation, she also took Michael Shane Neal's portrait painting workshops in Nashville, Tennessee, and studied painting full time for two years with Mary Beth McKenzie and Sharon Sprung at the National Academy School of Fine Arts. She has also taken workshops with Wolf Kahn, Peter Cox and Morton Kaisch at the National Academy School, and painted in Florence, Italy, with McKenzie and the Art Students' League. In the mid and late 1960s, she studied with Ben Summerford, Helene Herzbrun, Robert D'Arista, Robert Gates and Gene Davis at The American University and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC.
In 2013, Ashton completed the official portrait of former Ambassador Philip Lader, which will hang in the collection of the U.S. Embassy in London. In 2012, she joined the jury panel of the Salmagundi Club in New York City and became an Exhibiting Artist at The National Arts Club. Her 2009 portrait of actor Hal Holbrook is in the Hall of Fame collection of The Players in New York City, and her 2009 portrait of author Louise Erdrich is in the collection of the Kenyon Review at Kenyon College. In 2007-8, Ashton won four successive scholarships to The National Academy School of Fine Arts.
Cyd Wicker has paintings in private and public collections. Notable portraits she has painted in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota are:
Job Titles:
- Chief of Surgery, Hennepin County Medical Center, ( Ret. )
Job Titles:
- Founder of the Women 's Center at the University of St. Thomas
Ellen Cooper has enjoyed an extraordinary career as a portrait artist of distinction. Highly regarded by her peers as well as collectors, her canvases have hung in museums, and are represented in many private, corporate, and institutional collections. Her work has garnered over twenty national and international awards in just the last few years, including the First Place and People's Choice awards at the Portrait Society of America's International Portrait Competition.
Her dedication to perfecting her art stems from a passionate love for painting and commitment to the tradition of portraiture. With boundless energy and poise she meticulously approaches each subject with a well-honed eye and flawless draftsmanship. But it is her understanding of paint, color, form, and light, coupled with her ability to visualize people's character, that gives her work a sense of being more than just accurate renditions; her paintings seem to reflect a living truth about each subject.
She and her work have been featured in many publications including International Artist, The Art of the Portrait, and American Art Collector. Her award winning painting Marmee's Garden In the Snow was featured on the cover of Artist's Magazine in 2011. Her non-commissioned painting Judy was part of the Inspiring Figures: American Women and Figurative Art at the Butler Institute of American Art, where it hung alongside paintings by American icons such as Cecilia Beaux and Mary Cassatt.
Ms. Cooper was educated at Tyler School of Art and Temple University where she received her BFA (summa cum laude) and MFA (magna cum laude) degrees. Her pursuit of mastery led to further study under contemporary portrait painting masters. This process of continuing education has resulted in an expansive knowledge of the portrait, which she in turn shares with her own students in the art of painting. Ellen Cooper has achieved Signature Status with the Portrait Society of America. She lives and teaches in the Philadelphia area.
For all of her success and accolades, Ellen Cooper remains fully grounded. She is a very real, down to earth person; a characteristic that plays an important role in working with her subjects to get them to "be themselves" when sitting. Ellen's commissioned work is diverse and includes family and children, as well as distinguished corporate, judicial, medical, academic, philanthropic, and governmental leaders.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Board / CEO Pentair Corporation
Gerald P. York graduated from Yale College. His clients include Procter & Gamble and Becton, Dickinson & Company. As the result of a competition Mr. York was selected by the chairman of Sotheby's to paint the official university portrait of the president of Yale in 1995. Mr. York has won numerous awards for his work.
Portrait painter Heather Marcus maintains studios in New York City and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Her recent portraits include subjects residing in New York, New Jersey, Texas, California, Connecticut, Washington, Massachusetts, England, and Bermuda.
The artist earned a BFA in Sculpture With Distinction from the University of Kansas. Her formal training as a portrait artist and painter was at the Kansas City Art Institute and The New York Studio School. She continues to improve her portrait painting technique through studying portraits by the masters on frequent visits to the major museums of New York, London, Paris, and Florence.
Heather Marcus has been listed in Who's Who in Art in America since 1995. She has worked more than 20 years making sculpture, oil paintings, and portraits, including private and corporate commissions. Her work is found nationwide in corporate collections and prestigious private collections. She has had 19 solo exhibitions and participated in 62 invitational and juried exhibitions since 1984.
She is a member of The Portrait Society of America.
Job Titles:
- President of Mutual Insurance Services
Any person familiar with the work of Johanna Spinks will tell you the British-born artist is as much a storyteller as she is a classically trained portrait artist. Whether she is bringing the vibrancy of a local community to life through her Face of Ventura and Face of Malibu portrait projects or rendering a model in an imagined Parisian interior, Johanna's whimsical and romantic style is the signature attribute of her award-winning work.
The artist's background serves as a good explanation for this. She started out telling stories as a young journalist who emigrated from the UK to New York at just 22 years old. She later became a top Hollywood makeup artist, using her brushes to bring magazine pages,TV and film, to life. When she decided to put down the powder brushes to pursue oil portraiture full time, it wasn't long before she was receiving international acclaim and was featured in publications including The New York Times, American Artist Magazine and Art Talk. Johanna won The Daler Rowney Award for Painting Excellence at Oil Painters of America National Show in 2008. More recently, fifty-eight of Johanna's portraits, all painted from life, were accepted into the permanent collection of The Museum of Ventura County in California, an honor she holds most dear.
Primarily a portrait artist but also an avid landscape and still life painter, Johanna considers artists such as John Singer Sargent, Johannes Vermeer, and Anders Zorn to be major influencers of her work. Her mentor is seven time presidential painter Everett Raymond Kinstler, N.A., who she trained under at The Art Students League of New York and The National Academy of Design, New York. Of her work Mr. Kinstler wrote:"Johanna's paintings are filled with the joy of life, they are passionate and colourful."
With her unique style, Johanna has been on the teaching faculty of The California Art Institute and The Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and is frequently asked to give public painting demonstrations of her life painting techniques. She also received a certificate of distinction for her three year term as the California State Ambassador for the Portrait Society of America.
Unsurprisingly, Johanna is masterful at capturing the imaginations of her students and collectors worldwide on social media. With her 365 Days of Drawing project in 2010-which was featured in American Artist Magazine-Johanna's Facebook and blog followers avidly followed along as the artist drew whatever captured her imagination every day for a year. Whether she spends 2 hours on a piece or 2 months, Johanna's unique talent lies in her ability to render everything-from the quotidian to the exquisite-in a style which has a luxe and timeless finish.
Her paintings hang internationally in private and public collections including The New York Players Club (where her work hangs alongside her idol John Singer Sargent); The Episcopalian Dioceses of Los Angeles and South Carolina; The British Heritage Museum, Canada; The Museum of La Grand Vigne, Dinan, France; and in the private collection of the Forbes Family. More recently, her 2 year long "Face of Ventura" project in California won her the 2013 Mayor's Art Award for Artist in The Community. Her juried show acceptances include the Oil Painters of America National Shows, OPA Salon Shows, The Portrait Society of Atlanta, Jack Richeson International 75, and The California Art Club Gold Medal Shows.
Job Titles:
- Memorial Award, Allied Artist of America, Inc. Show, New York
Brazier's official Portraits hang in government, corporate, academic and religious institutions across the country. Nearly 150 public figures have been her subjects. She is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, both in Washington, D.C.
She has won awards on four occasions from the Portrait Society of America and her work has been published in several art magazines and books.
As well as portrait work, she is an avid painter of landscapes, still life and figurative subjects and is a member of Plein Air Painters of the Southeast. She is the founder of Plein Air Richmond.
Loryn has owned Brazier Gallery for over 17 years Prior to that she had owned an advertising agency and was also an illustrator. Her work has been profoundly influenced by artists such as P.S. Kroyer, John Singer Sargent, Cecelia Beaux, Joaquin Sorolla and by her former teacher and valued friend, Everett Raymond Kinstler.
Job Titles:
- President, University of Iowa
Nationally, award-winning artist Sonia paints official and family portraits for clients worldwide. Recent commissions include Karen Van Winkle, first female president of the Harvard Club of Boston, President John Ettling of SUNY Plattsburgh, Dr. Zakir A.R. Dhange of the Dhange Hospital in India and a posthumous of Pearle L. Crawford & benefactor portrait for the Pearle L. Crawford Memorial Library. She received Finalist awards in 3 national competitions including at the Portrait Society of Atlanta in 2009 and 2010, as well as the Art Guild in Manhasset, New York in 2010.
Susan Boone Durkee has painted many luminaries as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, former United States Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige, The Governor of South Dakota, Congressman Collins of Texas, Gloria Steinem for the M.S. Foundation, the CEO of UST, the CEO of Phillips Medical, the President of Bouvier Insurance, and the President of Standard Oil of Connecticut, besides many Heads of prestigious Preparatory Schools such as: Hotchkiss, Emma Willard and Choate.
An award-winning artist, Susan works out of her spacious West Redding, Connecticut studio, The Lobster Pot, so named by Mark Twain who owned the property at the turn of the century. A true New Englander, Susan is a direct descendants of some of the earliest families that settled in America in the mid-1600's.
Susan has made art a lifelong commitment. To her, each portrait is an opportunity to express the unique spirit of each individual character. She believes a portrait is a cherished legacy to be shared and honored generation after generation.
Her work is displayed in private and Institutional collections throughout the country and she has been featured on 4 Cable Television Shows, appeared in Fairfield Country Times magazine, The Artist Magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Magazine, MSNBC Connecticut News, Ridgefield Magazine, Morris Media, The News Times, Signature Magazine, The Johns Hopkins Odyssey magazine, The Weston Magazine Group and National Geographic.
Susan has won awards and has participated in many prestigious Juried National Art Shows including: The Oil Painters of America, American Women Artists, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, Connecticut Portrait Society, National Art Museum of Sport and Salmagundi Club.
Born in 1944, Virgil Elliott was fortunate enough to have been the first son of Dollye McAlister Elliott, a schoolteacher and amateur artist, who began his art education in the second year of his life. The first lesson kindled a lifelong burning obsession with art, and his talents developed rapidly with constant practice drawing, and, later, painting. The excellent instruction of illustrators Robert Fawcett, Albert Dorne, Austin Briggs, Steven Dohanos, Harold Von Schmidt and others, via correspondence course, helped him tremendously,and by his late teens, he was an accomplished draftsman and competent oil painter. As a soldier in the U.S. Army he traveled to Europe in 1963,returning to the United States in 1965. While overseas, he took art classes in the evenings with an instructor whose last name he cannot recall, an American named "Ken," who taught at the USO in Mannheim, Germany, and who helped young PFC Elliott advance his painting skills still further. And of course there were museums full of Old Master paintings throughout Europe to inspire him.
Profoundly moved by the works of the Old Masters, particularly Rembrandt and Vermeer, Elliott was dissatisfied with his own abilities, and sought to learn still more. Quickly becoming disillusioned with college-level art instruction at the colleges and universities he attended for several years following his discharge from the Army, due to their emphasis on "modern" styles which did not interest him, he endeavored to teach himself from that point onward. His quest for knowledge drove him to search out old manuscripts to study, and to travel far and wide to view the Old Master paintings wherever they might be found, in addition to constant ongoing practice drawing and painting. Several years as a freelance commercial artist helped to hone his talents, and in 1982 he felt he was ready to begin his career in fine art.
He has won many honors, awards and distinctions since his fine arts debut, and has become a sought-after teacher, lecturer, art show judge and writer in addition to the ongoing demand for his talents as a portrait painter and fine artist. In 1985 he was awarded the American Portrait Society's certification, a distinction shared by only 24 artists in the world. As an outspoken member of the Artists' Advisory Panel to the California State Fair in 1987, Elliott spearheaded a successful effort to open the State Fair's art show to representational art, which had been previously excluded from the show, and to depose the officials responsible for its exclusion. He was elected an Associate Guild Member by the American Society of Classical Realism in 1996, and was made a Signature Member of the American Society of Portrait Artists that same year, in addition to winning an award in The Artist's Magazine's portrait competition. His book, Traditional Oil Painting: Advanced Techniques and Concepts from the Renaissance to the Present, a 21-year project, was published in 2007 by Watson-Guptill Publications (now Random House). Virgil Elliott has had articles published in American Artist magazine, The Artist's Magazine, The Portrait Signature, the Chronicle of Higher Education, On the Level and other publications. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Art Renewal Center, and a member of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Subcommittee on Artist's Paints and Materials. Virgil Elliott is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, and the Art Renewal Center's Gallery of Living Masters.
The Atelier of Virgil Elliott is in the northern California wine country town of Petaluma, 40 miles north of San Francisco, where Elliott paints, teaches and writes. He lives nearby with his wife, singer/actress Annie Lore, in Penngrove, California.
William Thomas Chambers is a graduate of the American Academy of Art in Chicago and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northeastern Illinois University. He has studied under such distinguished artists as Cedric Egeli, Daniel Green, David Leffel, John Howard Sanden, Richard Schmid, and Burt Silverman.
His portraits reflect his background as an award-winning illustrator. His portfolio demonstrates his ability to capture the unique personalities of his subjects. In addition to his many personal portraits are his official portraits, including the official commissions of four-term Illinois Governor James R. Thompson and the recent commission of two-term Governor Jim Edgar. Both portraits hang in the State Capitol Rotunda in Springfield, Illinois. Among other notable dignitaries in his portfolio-former Northwestern University Presidents Robert Strotz and Arnold Weber; Martin Fienstein, the former director of the Washington Opera; Former Secretery of Defense Melvin Laird, as well as numerous CEO's and Fortune 500 corporate figures.
His popular celebrity portraits commissioned by the Bradford Exchange figure equally in prominence. Some of these works include scenes from the movie Annie and Sandy, My Fair Lady, Gone with the Wind, King and I, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In addition are the commemorative plates in honor of Mothers Day, and a triptych painting in celebration of the Christmas Nativity entitled The Night the Angels Sang. More recently thirteen portraits of Princess Diana of Wales were also commissioned by the Bradford Exchange.