Karin Kneffel

Karin Kneffel is a German born artist and similar to Elizabeth Patterson, she creates photo realistic rainscape oil paintings among other things. Her work is shown internationally in Europe and the United States. Currently, she is a painting professor at the Munich Academy of Arts.

Her artwork challenges her to recreate shadows of tree branches, reflections of rain, and other relationships between subjects and light. She started out painting simple spaces and moved on to more complex artworks. Many of her paintings now show both interior and exterior spaces as if the viewer was looking inside of a space (or vice versa). Her talent to show off light and shadow create interesting patterns throughout each piece. Kneffel’s work explores the duality of interior versus exterior, transparent versus opaque, and solidity versus pattern. The paintings are created at such a large scale that when you see it up close, the work almost turns into an abstract piece with all the patterns. I admire the amount of control and precision her paintings (specifically the raindrops) must have taken. I love how they give a sense of two layers (one being an interior space and the other being and exterior space).

Luciana Rondolini's My Silver Path

            Luciana Rondolini was born in 1976 in Buenos Aires. She received a Graphic Design degree from the Buenos Aires Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism. She also has a Bachelors in Visual Arts.

            Her series I found the most interesting, My Silver Path, consists of a giant box full of rotting fruit encrusted with silver jewelry. The jewels are plastic but look like diamonds. From afar, the viewer sees silver and shiny jewels but up close, the rotting fruit and mold on the inside of the jewels is deliberately shown. The series touches on issues such as artificial beauty and the glamour of people in the media.

            I found the series interesting because it is always changing every day as the fruit continues to grow mold and deteriorate. It draws parallels to the social media and perhaps to people and their inner and outer beauty.

“This work feels like a visual metaphor for the irony contemporary human condition. The irony being that if we spend enough time to really look at the people we feel are the most beautiful attention seekers of the bunch we shall discover that there are likely to be the most ruined.”

Joel Penkman

            Joel Penkman was born in 1979 in New Zealand. One of Penkman’s main inspirations is Wayne Thiebaud. She received a Graphic Design degree at the Canterbury University’s School of Fine Art. Afterwards, she worked as a graphic designer and now she freelances. Currently, she resides in the UK.

Her favorite subject to paint is food. The still-life paintings are isolated from a particular setting with a clean background in order to make the connection between the art and the viewer easier to form. Her goal is to trigger an emotion or a memory from each piece. Most of her pieces are made of egg tempura, which is unusual from the more popular use of oil. Each painting is a consuming process since she prepares each canvas by hand and mixes her own paint. The process is the equivalent to making a meal: a long process but worth it in the end.

I find her work inspiring because it reminds me of Thiebaud. However, Thiebaud’s work provides nostalgia of the past (with a retro feel) whereas Penkman’s is a little more modern. I also find it admirable that she took a more traditional route in preparing and painting the canvas with egg tempura.

Dirk Staschke

            Dirk Staschke is an American artist who creates ceramic sculptures of desserts. He currently resides in Canada. He graduated from the University of Montevallo with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and in 1998 he received his Masters of Fine Arts at the Alfred University. His artwork has been displayed internationally all over the United States and even South Korea.

            His artwork is inspired by vanitas still life paintings of the 16^th century and the ornate décor of Baroque Art. His latest series “Falling Feels a Lot Like Flying” explores ideas of desire and consumption displayed by a banquet style of food. His artwork explores the consequence of desires and the social culture we have today. He uses the subject of food as a nod to wealth in that the ritual of extravagant feasts was done often by the rich. These decadent meals are appealing and yet at the same time repulsive. It shows society’s excessive consumption and gluttony. “My work warns against over-consumption, not for religious reasons, like the original vanitas, but more towards the idea that [our]consumption is not sustainable.”

            I love his use of texture to recreate certain desserts. His artworks show symmetry and tension as the sculptures look as if they are going to topple over at any second.

Denis Peterson

            Denis Peterson is an American born artist who has had a role in shaping Hyperrealism. He was one of the first to emerge in the New York art scene. His work has been shown nationally in Los Angeles and New York, and also internationally in Paris and London. Peterson has received a MFA at Pratt.

            Peterson uses his artwork to express the human condition and the need for social change. Many of his paintings depict scenes from the city life and figures of homeless people. He touches on subjects such as cultural division and genocide. Peterson recreates photographs to simulate reality. He would use his own photos and paint them onto large canvases. His most recent series is a set of New York City billboards. These advertisements are shown high above people, emphasizing that they must hold up the weight of these billboards. The paintings each take about a month to finish and sell at about $46,000.

            Peterson’s artwork successfully conveys themes of commercialism and the cultural or financial divide in society today. He wants to use his artwork as a vehicle to change how we treat other people and how we can change society.

Sarah Graham

            Sarah Graham is an incredibly young artist, in my opinion, making a full time job out of her talent at the age of 30 years old. She paints mainly sweets and toys with a highly saturated color palette. Her paintings sell at about 10,000 Euros. They have been displayed all over the world in Africa, Europe and Asia. She received a BA of Fine Arts. Her influence in her style today comes from Pop Art, especially Andy Warhol. She now resides in the UK.

            Graham describes her art as attempting to bring life into a photograph. She uses her own photos, which she is very particular about because she wants to make sure the lighting, drama, balance, and colors are to her liking. Afterwards, she sketches the painting onto the canvas with yellow oil paint.

Glennray Tutor

Glennray Tutor is a painter born in Missouri in 1950. He received a Bachelors in Art and English at the University of Missouri. He also has a Masters in Fine Arts. His paintings are a part of the photorealist movement. At the start of his art career, his paintings were landscapes of the mid-western United States. Now he paints items of nostalgia like comic book panels, toys, and marbles. One of his inspirations in this genre was Ralph Goings. His artwork has been shown nationally along with other renowned artists such as Audrey Flack and Chuck Close.

Her artwork reminds me of Doug Bloodworth’s in capturing the nostalgia of childhood. It seems like nowadays technology has so much involvement with our daily lives and we forget what it was like before. Tutor’s artwork really captures the simplicity of childhood. He is credited with being the first artist to give Pop Art a deeper, metaphorical meaning. In an interview he expressed: “My paintings consist of contemporary subjects used metaphorically. In my work I'm exploring various visual qualities of objects, as well as orchestrating ideas that I find alluring, such as: communication and relationship, time, narrative, childhood and adulthood, cosmic and quantum physics. My painting compositions are an interplay of the visual, emotional and intellectual.”