Lee Copen
What is your artistic medium?
I work with both watercolor and oils.
What artist inspires you and why?
I am inspired by so many artists. It is hard to pick just one, but if I have to pick, I would say Isaac Levitan, a 19th- century Russian landscape painter. He painted simple scenes, but could make sky, water and trees just vibrate with life, energy and light. I simply love his work.
How do you decide what you want to create?
I am drawn to the landscape, especially beautiful skies, water, reflections and trees. Everywhere I look, I see incredible beauty, and I love to capture what I see in paint and share it with others.
When did you realize that art was your passion?
Like so many artists, I started young. I was drawing and painting as a child, and through the years my passion has only grown. I have worked as a graphic artist, architectural illustrator, high school art teacher and fine artist. I cannot imagine my life without art.
Dale Dicker
What is your artistic medium?
Welded steel/three-dimensional illustration.
What artist inspires you and why?
The 20th-century American sculptor David Smith has been a primary influencer. He saw the beauty in industrial metal and its discards as a palette of infinite possibilities.
How do you decide what you want to create?
It comes internally and externally for me via emotions, the environment. My pieces are smaller, meant to create an intimacy between the piece and the viewer.
When did you realize that art was your passion?
When I experienced a true sense of the joy of working with metal around age 24. Though I had worked with photography, glass and stone as a palette, they didn’t excite me. Once I found metal, I knew I didn’t want to work in anything else.
Elaine “Laney” Haake
What is your artistic medium?
I have experience in a variety of mediums, but currently focus almost exclusively on painting in oil.
What artist inspires you and why?
Nicolai Fechin’s portraits move me each time I see them. Vincent Van Gogh’s life story teaches us to share our interpretation of the world as we see it, regardless of what others think.
Contemporary artists I admire include Dan Gerhartz, whose portraits are infused with beautiful color, light and brushstrokes; Phil Starke, who was one of my first plein air teachers; and Adam Clague, who is not only an amazing artist, but a gifted and generous teacher.
How do you decide what you want to create?
I choose subjects to paint that have special meaning to me and something I have personally experienced. My understanding of what I am painting is deeply enhanced when I have walked through a valley or stream to get to a view I want to paint, or I’ve had the opportunity to be immersed in the history of a place, or I’ve spent time with an individual whose portrait I want to capture.
When did you realize that art was your passion?
As a child I lived just blocks from the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. and would wander the halls wondering about the people who had created those paintings. I finally took my first art class about 20 years ago. It’s been a long time coming, but the feelings I had in those early visits to the museum are finally being realized as I am able to pursue my passion for creating art.
Douglas Simes
What is your artistic medium?
For this series of drawings, I used Cretacolor oil-based sanguine pencil. Cretacolor makes a dry sanguine pencil as well, but it’s a little flakey, and I find I have more control with the oil-based. It’s not as forgiving, but I prefer it. When I first started drawing with sanguine, the late New York artist Anthony (Bud) Panzera was interviewed by one of my Art Students League instructors, Ephraim Rubenstein, and he specified the Cretacolor oil-based pencil for use on Rives heavyweight cream paper. He said he had a box of them, all sharpened, at his workstation when drawing. I don’t have a box of them, but I try to have as many as possible nearby. I enjoy sanguine pencil for its classical look and the softly luscious image it achieves. When I first tried it out, I had been drawing primarily with graphite. Switching to sanguine was like switching from a point-and-shoot to an SLR camera with a zoom lens.
What artist inspires you and why?
Well, as we all do, I have so many, and each for specific reasons: Hendrick Goltzius, Rembrandt, Eakins, Sargent, Hopper, Charles White, Paul Cadmus. I could go on. But if I had to choose one artist, fundamental to all these influences is Michelangelo. My project is the figure and portrait, and there is no better teacher of how to draw these subjects, in terms of the knowledge of anatomy it requires and the mastery of materials and technique one should achieve, than this master from the Renaissance. Just looking at his drawings makes me want to draw. In the past I’ve given myself the exercise of doing copies of Michelangelo drawings in silverpoint.
How do you decide what you want to create?
I prefer to draw from life. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to hire a model in a private studio space, so I’m at the mercy of meet-up groups and the models hired and posed by the administrators. So, in some respects, the decision is made for me. After the pose is established, I do have a choice of point of view, and I like to have a position where the model is in three-quarter light. Faces are important to me, whether in a figure drawing or a more constricted portrait composition. And the body has a language of its own. I was a professional actor for 25 years, and I strive to make a connection with the model as I would with an acting partner in a scene. It’s crucial for me to discover something about the stationary person before me that is more than the transcription of their form.
When Covid struck, I was prevented from working with models, so I turned to some family photo albums, mostly snapshots taken by my father with his beloved Polaroid camera in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those photos which touched me in an acutely personal and emotional way became source material for projects which I called “Memory Drawings.” The titles of these pieces all include the date when the source photo was taken. In the case of “Marineland, 1961,” I was really curious to see how the effect of sanguine pencil would work on the black and white image.
When did you realize that art was your passion?
I started drawing, and even watercolor painting, in very early childhood. I remember actually wanting to become an artist and saying so. My father wasn’t very encouraging (“You want to starve?”). When I started experimenting with the figure, my mother, who had studied textile design and art in her youth, told me I’d need to learn anatomy, which seemed a bit daunting. My friends discovered my figure drawing book, and I was mercilessly teased. I continued drawing into middle school, but then became interested in acting and the theatre; drawing came to an end. In college, the girl I was in love with left me for an artist. In response I thought, “I’ll show her; I’ll become an actor!” and I went after that full bore. So, one way or another, I had become an artist after all.
One morning after I had turned 48, I ruminated on the drawing I used to do as a child and willed myself to pick up a pencil. Within a month I was in my first life drawing class at the Art Students League of New York. I had come full circle.