Michael Ward & Cheryl Kline – Realism Art Exhibition

2014 Realism Art Exhibition – MyArtContest.com

Michael Ward – Costa Mesa, CA
I began my artistic career doing pen and ink renderings of historical architecture. I began painting in 1980, first in gouache, then in acrylics. Artists whose work I admire and draw inspiration from include Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, Richard Estes and Vermeer. I am most interested in depicting what Alan Watts called the mystery of the ordinary; the workaday world we live in without seeing until we are forced to focus upon it, as in a painting.
Nearly all my paintings are based on photographs I have taken, primarily of Southern California scenes, over the years. Though it was never my intention to depict nostalgic scenes, many of the images I have painted have disappeared or been radically altered in the ever-changing landscape that is Southern California. Thus nostalgia is thrust upon the works. But what I am really after is bearing witness, and making people stop what they’re doing and pay attention, to something they may have never seen before, but that makes them feel “I know this.”
I am currently working on a series of house paintings. These simple, ordinary, unnoticed places have hidden interior lives, though they do not reveal them to us. The houses are from a variety of locations in the United States and Mexico. They are the place you grew up in, a place of nurture, experience, trial, memory and forgetting. They are all a common size, to symbolize our shared experience of being human.
Phyllis Lutjeans, Museum Educator and former curator, has said of my work: “Although Michael Ward may be called a neo-realist painter his work can ultimately be described as abstract realism. The picture image is photographically realistic, but within the context of the painting his compositions are complex and almost abstract. Deciphering the work section by section one sees how a multitiude of individual complete compositions are put together to form the entire work. For me the viewer is confronted by a realistic image that puzzles us and clearly tells the story simultaneously.”
As a painter, I am self-taught.

Title:Consequences Medium:	acrylic Size:	24 x 30
Title: Consequences
Medium: acrylic
Size: 24 x 30
Title:Field & Stream Medium:	acrylic Size:	16 x 20
Title: Field & Stream
Medium: acrylic
Size: 16 x 20

Cheryl Kline – Pacific Palisades, CA

Cheryl Kline is a classically trained painter who found her voice by painting remarkable skyscapes and cloudscapes. It reflects her love for the untamed, operatic beauty of the heavens, whose gradual yet grand changes reveal themselves to her sensibility. Kline follows an esthetic of deliberate beauty, but her paintings are more than fine praise for the esthetics of nature and light–they become, over time, magnificent statements of a holistic nature, constructions filled with visual recognition of the innate drama of the sky. The sky is a difficult thing to approach after the weight of so much art history–one thinks of the cloudscapes of Turner as an example of exquisite awareness of the visual possibilities offered by an unfettered treatment of the heavens. Kline shares Turner’s recognition that the beauty of the sky is linked to something untamable, even when she is reporting on a relatively calm combination of forms and hues.

Two of her one-of-a-kind monotypes were selected by the Royal Academy in London for the 2008 summer exhibition.

Cheryl Kline is currently represented by Cohen Rese Gallery in San Francisco. Her work has been routinely reviewed in Palisades Post, the Lost Angeles Times, Malibu Magazine and Southwest Art Magazine.

Title:Saint George and the Dragon Medium:	Oil Size:	30 x 24"
Title: Saint George and the Dragon
Medium: Oil
Size: 30 x 24″
Title:King Max Medium:	Oil Size:	20 x 16
Title: King Max
Medium: Oil
Size: 20 x 16