Painting in the Park: Featuring Craig Nelson

Award winning artist Craig Nelson has been creating inviting and environmental paintings for almost thirty years. His light, luminous, and sensual coastalscapes are portrayed in rich oils and capture the unique beauty of the Coastal regions. Craig’s passion for the Coast is evident in his paintings which depict foliage covered dunes, shapely cypress, majestic cliffs, and mirrored wet sands. His coastal paintings depict the peace and tranquility of the ocean and its special relationship to humanity.

A Cool Drink by Craig Nelson

Craig received a BFA with distinction from the Art Center College in California and is currently the Department Chairman of Fine Arts, Drawing, and Painting at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, California.

Selected commissions include: Count Basie, MGM Record Corp, Sammy Davis, Jr., MGM Record Corp., Neil Simon, MCA Inc., Natalie Cole, Capitol Records, Inc., Loretta Lynn, MCA, Inc., A.C. Eichenger, Private, James Garner, Private, Frank Sinatra, Capitol Records, Inc., Richard Petty, Franklin Mint, Inc., Mr. And Mrs. Joris Brinkerhoff, Private, and Mr. and Mrs. R. Kiperman, Private.

Craig’s numerous awards and achievements include five gold medals, two silver medals, The Best in Show in, and over 200 awards of excellence from the Society of Illustrators in Los Angeles, California and a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators in New York. Craig has been published in Communication Arts Annual and JCA (in Japan).

Nelson’s work can be found at Ella Walton Richardson Fine Art located at 58 Broad street in downtown Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Karen Weihs

Karen Weihs is a native of Charleston, SC, with a BFA from the University of Georgia. She began her professional career as a graphic designer for Sea Pines Corporation. Karen says, “As a contemporary oil painter and colorist, I love to create images that depict endless visual space. Forsaking all details, I conjure patterns of light, air, weather and reflection that feel ethereal and diffused. Layered pigments, contrasting colors and geometric shapes breathe life into my images, and while my landscapes are minimal in representational content, I find viewers often see the familiar in the abstract.”

Karen also likes to create modern intuitive expressionistic paintings that resemble figures. She calls these her getting out of my mind pieces. She wrote a popular book called Out of My Mind about creativity. Karen maintains that professional artists need to evolve, be self-taught, even if it means changing styles frequently. She often likes to go out into the field and create a painting from start to finish, en plein air. She maintains that a painter must be familiar with the palette as a pianist is to the keys on the piano. It takes practice, and there is no better way to learn and grow as an artist than from nature. From these field studies, she sees not only what is there, but what is possible for taking realism and making it feel larger and even more simple and dramatic, even more abstract. The more you look, the more simple you can make a painting more interesting than nature, editing out most of the detail and simplifying.  Learning from nature is about fleeting moments captured by the brush and palette knife, recording the natural world in record time before it is gone.

Serenity by Karen Weihs

Karen creates luminous oil paintings from her Carolina home studio. She has been at her easel for 20 years creating contemporary landscapes and intuitive playful images from out of her mind. She teaches regularly at the Bascom Museum in Highlands as well as other places in the US and Europe. Karen goes outdoors en plein air, or outside to paint from life. When not outside painting from life, and when she feels like she wants to go out of her mind, she creates in the studio some colorful, playful landscapes or intuitive abstracted coloristic paintings. She calls these her folly paintings. From “field to folly,” she likes both styles of painting. The large colorful paintings always have a minuscule part of what she has seen out in the field. She starts out with the brush, making the shapes she wants, to get the basic painting into play. Then she changes to a large palette knife with lots of paint making the texture by gliding the cake-knife-like shape palette knife through the first few layers of the painting. The effect is finished off by glazing, a technique that has been tested through years of experimenting with oil mediums. Sometimes her layers are as many as 8-10 glazing layers or more.

Her love of the simple, abstracted shapes led her to do colorful a geometric/figurative feeling series, one she calls her Wild Angels Series, another the textured Red Series, resulting in a 2009 WNC signature award.

In 1994, Karen received Artist of America award. With many more awards and publications, Karen continues to paint with much recognition. She feels that UGA instructor Lamar Dodd and mentor Frank Licciardi inspired her style of painting which has slowly evolved through work. But early on, she was taken in by the works as a teenager when viewing Charlestonian artist Alice Ravenel Huger Smith at the Gibbes Museum.

Karen has a large collector base in addition to hanging in corporate offices and restaurants including two Governor’s homes, The Biltmore Estate and The Mansion of Turtle Creek Restaurant.

Karen’s work can be found at Ella W. Richardson Fine Art located on 58 Broad street in downtown Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring John Hull

John Hull, represented by Corrigan Gallery, tells stories of life passages – “a series of psychological stories filled with boredom and wonder.” He wants to show human relationships and “the individual’s struggle to find equilibrium amidst passion and doubt.” He says, “…no matter how many different series or narrative ideas I explore as a painter, I think I end up telling the same story.”

John Hull received a BA from Yale University and MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work is included in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Israel Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Greenville County Art Museum, the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum and Yale University Art Gallery. He has exhibited since 1981 with a long list of solo shows including 1985 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and More Gallery, Philadelphia as well as the J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky in 1990. With many shows in between nationwide, the most recent solo shows were at the Wichita Art Museum in 2006 and the Alpha Gallery, Boston in 2007.

Night Patrol by John Hull

Hull’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at number of museums and galleries including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Academy of Design, Borgenicht Gallery, P.S. 1, One Penn Center, Tatistcheff Gallery and A.R.T. Resources all in New York; the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, The Center for the Visual Arts, Plus Gallery and Ron Judish Fine Arts in Colorado; the Neuburger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; The National Gallery of New Zealand; the Tampa Art Museum, Florida; The Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana; the New House Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor, New York; Rutgers University Art Museum, Newark, New Jersey; the Butler Museum of Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Ulrich Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Schmucker Art Gallery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and the Greenville County Art Museum and the Halsey Institute in South Carolina.

Hull has received four National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists’ Fellowships, one from the Maryland Arts Council, the Thomas Benedict Clarke Prize for Painting in 2004 from the National Academy of Design and an Achievement Award in 1995 from American Artist Magazine. He has taught at Augustana College in Illinois, Yale University and the University of Colorado. He is now Professor of Painting and Department Chair of Studio Art at the College of Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Mark Kelvin Horton

Mark Kelvin Horton was born and raised in rural North Carolina. After graduating from East Carolina University School of Art in 1983, Horton moved to New York City to begin a career in advertising and design. He carried with him the dream of someday becoming a painter.

Eighteen years of living in New York were spent working as a creative director in various advertising agencies and eventually founding his own design company. Those years also provided an invaluable opportunity for Horton to view and study firsthand the seemingly endless number of masterworks of art in the city’s museums and galleries. Horton became particularly fascinated with the works of George Inness, Herman Herzog, Frederick Church and the tonalist photographer, Edward Steichen. He was also captivated by the realism of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer as well as the romantic landscapes of the Hudson River School painters. The experience had a profound effect on his artistic development.

Walking to Work by Mark Kelvin Horton

During his years working as an artistic director and designer, Horton continued to nurture his “fine art side”, drawing, sketching and painting whenever he had the opportunity. In early 2001 Horton made the decision to devote himself full-time to painting. He left New York City and returned to his Southern roots, moving to Charleston, South Carolina.

Horton is particularly fascinated with the effects of light and weather upon the landscape. He paints beyond a literal interpretation of a scene to portray nature in a way that reflects his own ideas and sensibilities while capturing the spirit, color and changing light of a place.

Horton’s artwork can be found at Horton Hayes Fine Art located at 30 State Street in downtown Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Lese Corrigan

Charleston native Lese Corrigan’s work is representational but more expressionistic than realistic. The paintings are full of color and the joyful playfulness of life; surfaces imbued with light – color and texture being the defining structure. Corrigan fully immersed herself in the visual arts in the late 1980s, working her way through the different opportunities in the art community. An oil painter, whose portraits and landscapes pull together in a vibrant expressionistic manner the play of light and the resulting changes in hue and shade that delight the eye in the course of the day, Corrigan also works in other media – linocuts, photography and clay sculpture.

Five O’Clock by Lese Corrigan

Coca Cola commissioned a painting that was presented to Barbara Bush in 1995. She was poster artist for the Charleston Cup Steeplechase 2003 and featured in the Fall 2003 issue of the international Orient Express Magazine. Corrigan and her painting debuted on Turner South Network’s 3 Day Weekend Charleston’s episode that premiered in 2005 and she was the Gibbes Museum Poets’ and Painters’ program artist in residence for 2005. She painted the image for the poster for the Queen City Classic Horse Show in Charlotte, North Carolina for 2006. Corrigan’s paintings are in collections in the United States, France, Great Britain and Japan. In 2006, Ros Smith created a five minute film documentary entitled “Curlesque” on Corrigan’s painting process. A solo show in 2006 utilized the Fibonnacci and golden rectangle relations and in 2008 explored her Charleston surroundings with Mid-River. Her 2010 show presented a different viewpoint of her home with a group of paintings that work as one.

Corrigan’s work was selected for the Medical University of South Carolina’s contemporary collection for the new 2008 Ashley River Tower. She was the president for 2009 of the CFADA – Charleston Fine Art Dealers’ Association and remains active in the promotion of Charleston as the fine arts’ destination it has been for centuries.

Corrigan’s work can be found at Corrigan Gallery located at 62 Queen street in downtown Charleston and her new works will be on display during the Charleston Fine Art Annual on November 2.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Chris Groves

Light After Dark by Chris Groves

Chris Groves’ love of art grew from his early experiences with nature and the introduction of a master sculpture in his youth. Groves was born in Boulder, Colorado, but soon moved with his family to Slidell, Louisiana. Those early years in Slidell were spent outside, exploring the woods, swimming in the bayou, boating, fishing, playing with snakes and other wild animals. It was during those years that Groves learned to love the outdoors and nature.

At the age of ten, Groves’ family returned to Boulder where he continued his exploration of nature with countless hikes, mountain climbs and camping trips. His parents gave him a nature-drawing book and Groves latched onto it as a source of awe and inspiration. He would spend countless hours copying the drawings and enhancing them with his own interpretation. His parents, recognizing their sons’ talent and appreciation of art, hired a private tutor to instruct him in basic techniques. Soon, Groves’ interest turned from nature to people. Groves looked to magazines, friends and siblings as a source of inspiration and drew detailed portraits of their faces.

In high school, Groves met sculptor, Glenna Goodacre, the mother of a school friend. Meeting with her and seeing some of the success she enjoyed as a artist (Vietnam Women’s memorial, Sacagawea US Dollar design) helped to inspire Groves’ own artistic aspirations.

After graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a B.F.A. in Environmental Design, Groves spent the next ten years as an art director for two large companies, all the while continuing to study and hone his fine art skills.

Groves has studied at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, the Colorado Academy of Art, the Loveland Art Academy, the Cottonwood Art Academy and the Denver Arts Students League. He also enjoyed a private, two- year mentorship with artist Jay Moore, which he considers a turning point in his artistic career.

Groves paintings hang in numerous private and corporate collections and he is the recipient of multiple awards and recognitions.

Groves’ talent is on full display at Horton Hayes Fine Art  located at 30 State street in downtown Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Nancy Hoerter

Working in oils, Nancy Hoerter excels at combining the play of light with the lushness of flowers and fruit in her still-life paintings.

Into the Grove by Nancy Hoerter

Hoerter was born in Amityville, New York, and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Auburn University. Thereafter, she spent several years working as an award-winning designer and art director. Nancy has studied with several nationally-acclaimed impressionists, including Ted Goerschner, Kim English and Ovanes Berberian. She continues to develop and enhance her art through regular classes with Elizabeth Bronson, ASMA (McClellanville, SC), painting trips to the American Southwest and study in France.

Hoerter’s background in design combined with extensive formal training result in exquisite compositions highlighted by the confident use of color and highly expressive brushstrokes. Her oil paintings are popular with numerous collectors across the United States and abroad. In 2010, her work was selected to show in the prestigious Oil Painters of America’s 19th National Juried Exhibition.

Hoerter’s work can be found at Horton Hayes Fine Art located at 30 State street in downtown Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Shannon Runquist

Shannon Runquist was born is Savannah, Georgia and has spent most of her life in the South. She has lived on St. Simons Island, Georgia and currently resides in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and spends summers on Cape Cod. Spending time near the shore, she has developed a great love for coastal regions and the elements that define them. She has painted and studied in Europe, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

Weight and See by Shannon Runquist

Runquist has participated in many national and international exhibitions including consecutive years at the Salmagundi Club in New York City and the Salon International. She enjoys traveling and painting en plein air as well as working in her home studio. Her paintings hang in both corporate and private collections in the United States and abroad.

According to Runquist, “I would like for my paintings to convey a timeless aesthetic. They are often an extension of an emotion at the time I am painting but I hope my work remains ambiguous. I paint what is familiar to me, what I have collected or a place I have been. My favorite paintings are ones that tell a story but leave a little mystery for the viewer.”

Runquist’s talents can be seen on full display at Horton Hayes Fine Art located at 30 State Street in downtown Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Shannon Smith

Charleston native Shannon Smith has quickly ventured beyond the title of up-and-coming artist and has established a solid reputation within the fine art community. Regardless of what subject she chooses to paint, Smith has proven to possess an unusually keen eye and an unrivaled sensitivity to light. It is her attention to detail coupled with the use of strong, warm and cool colors that she uses to delicately capture the fading light of the late afternoon hours.

Oyster Catch by Shannon Smith

In many of her canvases, Shannon Smith paints strong contrasts of color, with dramatic darks and subdued grey tones juxtaposed with warmer, more radiant hues. But, as always, her main focus is capturing light. Born and raised in the Lowcountry, many of her works are inspired by the beauty of coastal landscapes and downtown Charleston scenes.

Smith has also painted in Europe and studied with nationally known artists such as Kim English and Gregg Kreutz. “I’m inspired by the drama of light interacting with the subject or a mood created by a scene, telling us stories.” For Smith, art has always been a natural part of life. She was raised in a household of artists. Her mother is noted oil painter Betty Anglin Smith, and her siblings Jennifer Smith Rogers and Tripp Smith are also accomplished artists. It was this constant immersion in art that helped foster 34-year-old Smith’s talent from an early age.

After completing her BFA at Clemson University in 1994, Smith began painting professionally. She has been honored by the Oil Painters of America and she is a signature member of the Plein Air Painters of the Southeast. In addition to showing in Charleston she is also represented in Atlanta and Martha’s Vineyard. Corporate collections include pieces in the Clemson University Foundation and Piggly Wiggly Corporate Headquarters.

Smith’s work can be found at Smith Killian Fine Art located at 9 Queen street in downtown Charleston.

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Painting in the Park: Featuring Jennifer Smith Rogers

Charleston native, Jennifer Smith Rogers, is known for her themes of architecture and vistas seen from towering over the city. Her works weave together the themes of light and architecture, portraying a near symbiotic relationship between the two. “As far as what inspires me to paint, a lot of it is the light and the way it interacts with the landscape.” Just as her paintings center on light and architecture, Roger’s life has always revolved around art. Raised in a household of artists, her mother, Betty Anglin Smith, and her sister, Shannon Smith, are also highly-regarded painters. Her brother, Tripp Smith is an accomplished photographer.

Shem Creek Sunset by Jennifer Smith Rogers

Although Rogers is an integral part of the Smith family of artists, she has certainly carved out a name of her own. Over the years, her works have been featured in galleries all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Charleston, SC, to Martha’s Vineyard, MA. In addition, many of her works now hang in prominent corporate and private collections, including Walt Disney World, the Medical University of South Carolina, Ethyl Corp. in Richmond, VA, the Family Circle Cup on Daniel Island, SC and Tristan Restaurant in Charleston, SC. She is also an associate member of the Oil Painters of America and a winner of the prestigious first place award from Piccolo Spoleto 2000. Rogers takes her success in stride, continually diving into her passion for painting.

Whilst Rogers has painted in locations ranging from Maine to Italy, she always finds herself drawn back to the familiarity of the Lowcountry. Even more particular, she finds herself drawn to the late afternoons and early evenings, when the colors are the most dramatic. “I am fascinated with the fleeting light at day’s end because its drama and color changes so quickly,” she says. “It is the most dramatic time of day because you get the highest contrast between light and dark. I am also intrigued by nighttime. Trying to capture the natural light of the moon, the artificial lights of the storefronts, lanterns and streetlights is both challenging and enthralling.” The light’s intensity against the dark of night sharply illuminates the buildings, store front windows and church steeples.

Rogers’ bold, thick brushstrokes create a sense of urgency and immediacy in her work as though she is fighting against time to capture each second of light before it fades. Combining this with her use of vibrant, warm colors, she expertly portrays more than just the landscape, but the mood of a place as well. Whether rooftop views of Charleston, vacant store front windows, illuminated by the headlights of moving cars, or desolate windswept beaches at sunset, Rogers’ lush oils continually deliver a fresh and distinctive style, one that her admirers have come to love.

Rogers’ work can be found at Smith Killian Fine Art located at 9 Queen street in downtown Charleston.

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