Chester Dewitt Rose

"Over the past two decades my beliefs and assumptions have changed, some abandoned, some becoming deeper, less beliefs and more certainties. The largest has been a abandonment of overt story telling in favor of discovery, less an oratory more a record of the conversation that occurs in my efforts to discover and understand life through the process of transposing time based visual and emotional perception into a 2 dimensional or static form . Toward this end I have found that the suggestion of a thing is more powerful than a description. This allows the painting to act as an emotional catalyst rather than a didactic tool, enabling the viewer to discover and experience themselves in the piece. A more poetic way of expressing this would be to say the painting acts as a translucent mirror,. Hopefully helping the viewer to feel their individual experience in the larger context of the beauty and pain of being, what has been called the human condition. The discovery of which nourishes the empathy that binds us together and grants the strength and desire to be."

Chester's paintings are in the collections of The Albany Institute of History & Art, The L.A. Countty Museum and many more private and public collections in the United States.

Nick Patten

“Settling on a composition for one of my room interior paintings is a progressive process. I pick and choose the most interesting and necessary elements from an array of photographs, often adding items from my imagination. Light & Dark is a primary focus of my painting, with particular attention to brush stroke and gradation in the darkest areas. Through working from photographs with the aim of creating believable paintings, I strive to bring a quiet drama to everyday scenes. My paintings are never intended to be “photographic”. In part, my aim is to make paintings where the content of the image is most compelling, and how the painting was made is secondary. In a sense, attempting to make the work exceed the medium.”

Nick Patten, a contemporary realist painter, is a native of Troy, New York, he received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. People love the mysterious light in his paintings, and one art critic referred to him as an “American Vermeer.”

He has been a full time artist for more than 20 years, and he states that: ''my goal is to be able to paint what I want to see''.