Tuesday, September 28^th – FRED MASON
 Fred Mason is a nationally known portrait artist whose subjects include corporate executives, education leaders, museum directors, military officers, publishers and others, as well as their wives, mothers, children, dogs and horses.  His portraits hang in most of the 50 states and several foreign countries.  Mr. Mason earned a fine arts degree at the University of Utah while working as a staff artist at the Salt Lake Tribune-Telegram.  He later relocated to New York where he worked as an illustrator and commercial artist while continuing to attend the School of Visual Arts, The Art Students League, the Brooklyn Museum School and New York University.  He continues to be a member of the Society of Illustrators, while concentrating on portraiture.

Tuesday, October 12^th – ERIC HOLZMAN
The evocative and mysterious landscapes of Eric Holzman seem to move from the walls to create ambient environments which surround the viewer.  Richly textured and subtle in color, his large paintings have a fresco-like quality, while the exquisite smaller pieces are like fragments of an earlier civilization.  Although primarily a landscape painter, when figures appear in Holzman’s work, they have the haunting quality of the humans in Chinese landscapes: poignant and vulnerable.  Eric Holzman has an M.F.A. from Yale and a B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art.  He is a recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.  He has been on the faculty or a visiting artist at Bard College, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt Institute, the Chicago Art Institute, the New York Studio School and the School of Visual Arts.  He has exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, and is represented by Jason McCoy Gallery in New York City.

Tuesday, October 26^th – CARL “GENE” SPARKMAN
Gene Sparkman is a Master Pastelist elected by the Pastel Society of America 1984.  His work is in many private corporate and permanent museum collections, most notably the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.  He has exhibited widely both in the United States and Europe.  He has received over a hundred awards in juried group exhibitions.

For many years, he illustrated for numerous book publishers, magazines and advertising agencies in New York and Los Angeles. He work has been featured in the Society of Illustrators annual exhibitions both in New York and Los Angeles.

He has received his B.F.A. in illustration at the Art Center College of Design, Pasedena, CA., and his M.F.A. in visual arts at Vermont College, Montpelier, VT.  He taught at the Art Students League of New York for ten years, Pratt Institute and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.  In Connecticut, he has taught at Western Connecticut State University, University of Bridgeport, Sacred Heart University and Paier College of Art.  He is listed in Who’s Who in American Art 1986.

Tuesday, November 9^th – HUGH O’DONNELL
Hugh O’Donnell was born in London in 1950.  After receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees, O’Donnell was awarded the prestigious Japanese Monbusho Scholarship where he studied “Monumental Screen Painting” at Kyoto-Shiritsu Geijutsu Daigaku (Kyoto City University of Arts).

At the age of 29, he was included in the exhibition ‘British Art Now’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York which showcased 19 works by the artist.  At that time Hilton Kramer writing in the New York Times remarked, “He is certainly the most accomplished abstract painter to come out of Britain in some years.”

Hugh O’Donnell’s work has been shown in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Metropolitan Museum, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Royal Academy, London; The Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis; The Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, XLII Venice Biennale, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; and IV Medellin Biennal, Colombia.

Hugh O’Donnell’s work is included in many private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Rose Art Museum, MA; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Denver Museum of Art; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; Polk Museum of Art, Florida; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Arts, CT; London Contemporary Arts Society; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Mr. O’Donnell is a member of the advisory board for the Master of Fine Arts program at Western Connecticut State University.

Tuesday, November 23^rd – HOWARD MUNCE
Howard Munce – artist, designer, teacher – has been part of the Westport art scene since the 1930’s.  In 1964, after a sixteen year career as an advertising agency art director, he turned to freelance graphic design, illustration, writing and teaching.

He was a faculty member of the Paier College of Art for ten years and left the college as Professor Emeritus.  He later taught at Fairfield University.  He is the author of three art books and the editor/designer of several others.  He designed most of the graphic material for the Westport Public Library and Friends of the Library over a period of twenty-seven years.  He is co-curator of the McManus Room’s drawing collection:  Westport Artists-Past and Present.

Mr. Munce is the Honorary President of the Society of Illustrators and chairman of the Sanford Low Illustration Committee of the New Britain Museum of American Art.  He is a board member of the Westport Art Center and the Center’s first recipient of its Heida Herman Achievement Award.  He shared the Library’s Special Friend Award in 2000.  He received the Westport Arts Award in 2001.

Tuesday, November 30^th – JAMES McGARRELL
James McGarrell's paintings imaginatively juxtapose recognizable forms and hint at narrative.  They have often been called surrealist, but the artist rejects this label.  "Fiction painting" and the reference one critic made to the daydream-like nature of his work, are far more accurate descriptions as his work essentially does not invent a hallucinatory reality but rather makes reference to things of this world.  Indeed his paintings are true to life: while they do not try to copy reality by naturalistically illustrating what one place looks like at one moment, the animated interactions between the paintings' diverse elements accurately portray the ever-changing collage-like human experience of passing through and reacting to the surrounding world.

This prolific artist has completed many series of work which, taken in survey, show constant evolution of style.  The artist's work belongs to many major collections and he has exhibited widely including at The Whitney, The Hirshorn, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Venice Biennale, The Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Tate Gallery.

Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Bill Sullivan received an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.  Sullivan has a 40 year career in fine arts as a painter and printmaker and has shown his work nationally and internationally.  He has had fifteen solo shows in New York City.  His next show will be at Dannette Koke Fine Arts, NYC.  The Albany Institute of Art is planning a retrospective exhibition of his paintings.  His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Cleveland Museum, the Albany Institute of Art, and other museums.  Some of his corporate collectors are Citibank, Chase, Reader’s Digest, Mobil Oil, and U.S. Trust.  His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art News, Art in America, American Artist, Art Now, The New York Post and The Daily News, etc.  He is listed in Who’s Who in American Art and The Printworld Directory of Contemporary Prints.

Bill Sullivan’s work has been a continuing dialogue with the painter of the American Sublime, especially Frederick Edwin Church.  He and Colombian poet, Jaime Manrique, were in Colombia from 1978 until 1980, where they retraced Church’s travels.  In 1983, they went to Ecuador to follow Church’s footsteps in the Andes.  Sullivan painted and drew at many of the sites where Church had worked.  Like Church, Sullivan was influenced by the writings of Alexander Von Humboldt, and the little-known School of Quito landscape painters.  After his return to NYC, Sullivan, like Church, spent the next twenty years working from his on-site studies.  He also went on to paint Niagara Falls, another of Church’s favorite landscapes.  Sullivan and Manrique co-authored a book on Church’s travels in South America.

In New York Magazine, John Ashbery wrote that “a certain surreality permeates Bill Sullivan’s paintings of South America but this may just be the result of his painting places that look unreal to begin with.”  Elsewhere Ashbery has written, “With only a tinge of irony, Bill Sullivan makes new the brilliantly clad spaces and swooning optimism of nineteenth century luminous painting.  Reaffirming the contemplation of nature as its own reward, he also sets new tasks for painting, and undertakes them with an eagerness that is compelling.”

Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Randall Enos was born near Boston in the historic whaling town of New Bedford, Mass. Of Azorean Portuguese parents….hence his interest in whaling subjects.  In 1954, he left behind his childhood interest in cartooning and illustration for a brief flirtation with painting which lasted for two years at the School of Boston Museum of Fine Arts but quickly found his true calling as a cartoonist/illustrator and plunged immediately into the field with no further art training.

In Randall Enos’ 48-year career as an illustrator, his work has been quite varied ranging from working on the Popeye comic books to an animated film for the World’s Fair to editorial illustrations for all the major publications in America.  In addition, he has taught at Montclair University, Fairfield University, Parsons School of Design, Syracuse University and the School of Visual Arts.

His film work garnered such clients as Singer, Olivetti, CBS, NBC, Life Magazine and Xerox among others.  He won a Cannes Festival award in 1964 for a John Hancock commercial.  His editorial illustration clients include Time, Newsweek, Mobil, Business Week, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, The Atlantic, Kiplinger’s Barron’s, N.Y. Times, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Boy’s Life, Field and Stream, Forbes and others too numerous to mention.  He has worked also in the children’s book field having produced hundreds of schoolbooks ranging from kindergarten to college level and many “trade” books also.  Randall created comic strips for the National Lampoon (12 years), Playboy and The Electric Company (kid’s show) Magazine.  His work is represented in many anthologies, most notably, Who’s Who in Graphic Art, Society of Illustrators Annuals from 1961 to the present, Graphis Annuals, The Illustrator in America, American Illustration Annuals, 200 Years of American Illustration and Outstanding American Illustrators Today (published in Japan).  He is also represented in Who’s Who in America.

He says of himself, “I am a committed illustrator with no intention of being a painter.”  And……”He’s a swell guy.”

Tuesday, March 2, 2004
Roger Boyce received a B.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He has exhibited widely in both this country and Europe, having solo and group shows Bienale including the Sao Paolo Bienale, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, P.S.I., Otis Parsons Art Institute, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Cocoran Drawing Center, as well as numerous other museums, galleries, alternative spaces and site specific installations.  His paintings are in major public and private collections including the deYoung Memorial Museum, The Corcoran Gallery, Franklin Furnace, The City of San Francisco, Grey Art Gallery, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The University of California Art Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank and Miami University.

His work has been extensively reviewed and discussed in catalogues and periodicals including Art New England, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Arts Magazine, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Flash Art, Art Week and Le Monde.  He is the recipient of several prestigious awards and grants; The Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and several visiting artists grants.  Eleanor Heartney, contributing editor at Art in America writing of his work…”these works defy standard conceptions of beauty.  Though they employ jewel-like colors and pure geometric forms, there is also something slightly unnerving in the spectacle of an artwork which seems already in the process of decomposition.  We are brought back to the cyclical notion of time and the process of generation and de-generation that divides the human realm from that of the divine. 

Roger’s paintings thus hover between the two worlds of matter and spirit.  They remind us that icons are messages from another realm, and as such are imbued with spiritual power.  They both represent the divine and partake of it.  In these works, Boyce captures something of the s sense of mystery and spiritual authority that emanates from traditional icons.  But he also reminds us that perfection is not to be found in the world we see."  In addition to his own painting, Mr. Boyce is a highly published critic, having written extensively for “Art New England,” “Art in America,” “Sculpture” and “New Art Examiner.”  He has taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, Syracuse University and Princeton University.  He has been on the faculty of Smith College since 1998.

Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Robert Giusti, one of America’s best-known illustrators was born in Zurich, Switzerland and is the son of George Giusti, the famous graphic designer.  He studied at the Tyler School of Fine Arts and received a B.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy.  As a designer, he has done work for CBS, NBC, Tri-Star Pictures, Universal Pictures, Atlantic Records, Time Inc., and The New York Times.  He is best known, however, for his skilled and mysterious illustrations which have included editorial illustrations, book and album cover designs, movie posters and stamps.  His work has appeared in “Graphics,” “Print,” “Communication Arts,” “Illustrator Annuals” and 200 Years of American Illustration.  He is the recipient of gold and silver awards from the Art Directors Club, the Society of Illustrators and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. 

“Ideally for me, the process of illustration entails the re-assessment and re-arrangement of reality.  The enlightenment I get happens when I achieve this transition and come up with a viable and personal statement,” says Giusti.  “Illustration is like saying something obvious but not in an obvious way.”  Mr. Giusti has exhibited widely and has work in the collection of Time Inc., General Motors and the Smithsonian Institute.  He lives in New Milford, Connecticut. 

Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Lois Dodd  is one of the most influential American artists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Lois Dodd attended Cooper Union in New York.  She was one of the original founders of Tananger Gallery where she exhibited until 1962, when she joined Green Mountain Gallery and then Fischbach Gallery, where she exhibited regularly from 1978 through 2001.  In addition to her New York exhibitions, over a long and distinguished career, she has had regional and national shows including at Montclair Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, Trenton City Museum, New Jersey Art Museum, Lyman Allen Art Museum, Colby College, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy of Design, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Maine Coast Artists Gallery, Rahr-West Museum, Indiana University Art Museum, Maine State Museum, Museum of Art of Ogunquit, Maine, the Hudson River Museum and others too many to enumerate.

She is an elected member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design.  Her work is in the collections of Brooklyn College, Colby College, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, National Academy of Design, the Hood Museum, the Ogunquit Museum, the Wadsworth Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  She is currently represented by Alexandre Gallery in New York where she had a significant show of small paintings in December 2003, and a complementary one at the Studio School.  Writing in the New York Times, Ken Johnson says, “Ms. Dodd’s two exhibitions of small panel paintings-several landscapes at Alexandre Gallery and outdoor nudes at the New York Studio School-bring two forms of life infectiously together: that of the airy, color-and light-struck world and that of brusquely sensuous paint.”

As well as exhibitions, Ms. Dodd has had a long and distinguished career in education, teaching at Brooklyn College from 1971 to 1992.  She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at many major art programs, and has been on the board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture since 1980.  This is her third visit to Western Connecticut State University.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Adam Niklewicz received a B.F.A. in 1989 from Washington University in St. Louis, and has since published on the cover of Newsweek, Time, Business Week, Atlantic Monthly as well as book covers, art for such publishers as Random House, Dell, Doubleday, Bantam, Harper Collins, Viking/Penguin, St. Martins Press, and William Morrow.  Other clients include Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Playboy and the Washington Post.  He is the recipient of many awards from his work in illustration including those from the Society of Illustrators of New York, the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, American Illustration, The Society of Publication Designers, Print Magazine, and Communication Arts Magazine.  Mr. Niklewicz has also had an active career as a conceptual artist.  He has had a number of one-man exhibitions over the last ten years, including at the New Britain Museum of American Art, Silvermine Guild Galleries (where he received the Grumbacher Award), and Art Bank Galleries in London, England.  His work has twice been selected for inclusion in group exhibitions at the Adrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.  It has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Hartford Courant, The New Haven Register, and is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the New York City Opera, Playboy Enterprises and the Smithsonian Institution.

Adam Niklewicz is on the faculty of Central Connecticut State University, where he is an instructor in conceptual illustration.  He is a frequent visitor to the M.F.A. program at Western.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Graham Nickson is one of the most influential artists and art educators in the country, Graham Nickson was educated in England where he attended the Royal College of Art in London, and received the prix de Rome.  Upon relocating in the United States, he was a Harkness Fellow at Yale University and taught at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Studio School.  He is the recipient of an Ingraham Merrill Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.  He has been Dean of the New York Studio School of Painting and Sculpture since 1988.

Graham Nickson has exhibited extensively on an international level and in museums and important galleries in this country such as Hirschl and Adler Modern Gallery, John Bergruen, Salander O’Reilly Galleries, Fry Art Museum, William Benton Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design.  His work is represented in the collections of the Albright-Knox Museum, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Metropolitan Museum, the Neuberger Museum, the Royal College of Art and the Wellesley College Museum.  His work, which ranges between immense and stately figurative compositions, and intense, vivid, premier coup watercolors, has been the subject of many catalogues and scholarly works and has been reviewed extensively in major publications such as the New York Times, Art in America, Modern Painters, the New York Observer, New York Magazine, Art Forum, Art News and the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Dean, he has perpetuated and extended the influence of the remarkable Studio School, historically considered one of the bastions of perceptual painting in the United States.  As the central force behind the famous Drawing Marathons, held at the school and tirelessly around the country and the world, he has raised the awareness of the significance of drawing for a whole generation of art students.