Our heartiest congratulations go to Gary Louis Smith for taking second place in the London National Portrait Gallery’s BP awards for his stunning painting, Holly. We think he should have won first place!
For more information on the Holly project, see Louis’s site at: louissmithportraits.co.uk
Damir Simic unveiled a huge 200 x 275 cm painting called First Day. His June 16th exhibition in the City Museum of Sisak, Croatia, represents the culmination of an exciting project that lasted a year and a half—our photo shows Damir’s daughter sitting in front of the painting, to give an idea of its size. The catalogue for this exhibition was written by Bishop Vlado Kosic.
In May of this year, Damir’s extremely successful show Forgotten Beauty opened in the W.H. Patterson gallery in London, England. The show was visited in Damir’s studio by the Croatian President, Ivo Josipovic and was opened in London by H.E. Tomic, the Ambassador of the Croatian Republic to the United Kingdom.
The December 2010 issue of Playboy features an article on Damir and his beautiful nudes.
Naomi Marino, alumnus and former instructor at the Angel Academy, received a prestigious commission to paint the portrait of Dutch vascular surgeon and professor Bert Eikelboom. On the 31st of May, Naomi travelled to Utrecht for the unveiling of the portrait at an event to honour Professor Eikelboom’s achievements in his field. The painting now hangs in the permanent collection in Utrecht’s internationally acclaimed UMC (Universitair Medisch Centrum). The portrait was a glowing success!
Christina Mastrangelo held a three-month solo show of her work at the Michelle and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. The reception had a huge number of people in attendance and her lovely still life Perishables quickly sold to a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Cesar Santos recently enjoyed his first one-man solo exhibition in New York City at the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery. Entitled Syncretism, the show is a collection of over 20 new paintings that explore the future of contemporary realism as it evolves from contradictory genres of art.
Cesar’s website is under construction for the moment, but you can see his work at: artlibre.net
Nancy Fletcher was selected to paint the portrait of the Bishop of Lincoln, Dr John Saxbee. Bishop Saxbee expressed a wish to have a quietly understated portrait, wanting only a couple of items of personal significance featured in the painting.
As well as this, Nancy’s painting The Portrait Artist was selected for the Windsor & Newton Painting Award at this year’s annual exhibition for The Royal Society of British Artists, held at Mall Galleries in London.
Mark Cummings’s painting, Donnie Hawley of Hawleywood’s Barbershop was selected as a finalist by The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009. The juried exhibition included 49 works that were on view from Oct. 23, 2009 through Sept 6, 2010 at The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The competition received 3,300 entries in a variety of visual arts media, from digital animation and video to large-scale drawings, prints and photographs and a plethora of painted and sculpted portraits.
Cyril de Chambrier has had great success and critical acclaim with his first solo show in Genolier, Switzerland. Subtitled The Homecoming of an Art that Transcends Nature, the exhibition includes paintings of landscape, still life and the figure.