Fine Art Connoisseur July/August 2025

When Fine Art Connoisseur launched two decades ago, classical realism stood at the margins — a whisper in an art world dominated by modernist voices. The traditions of rigorous draftsmanship and high finish, once the pinnacle of artistic achievement, had nearly vanished. Only a handful of ateliers dared teach what colleges had abandoned; life drawing classes had withered; and Old Master techniques seemed destined for obscurity. I launched this magazine with a singular conviction: that beauty, craft, and tradition deserve not just preservation, but celebration. Alongside visionaries like Fred Ross’s Art Renewal Center, we embarked on what many considered a quixotic mission - to champion art the establishment had declared irrelevant. Today, I write from the midst of a renaissance we helped ignite. The transformation has been nothing short of…

"A picture is worth a thousand words.” This famous adage has always been self-evident, but it’s urgently relevant now as our society ponders the huge benefits and the huge pitfalls of imagery generated by artificial intelligence (AI), including “deepfakes” — realisticlooking yet misleading media created with AI. Much precious time and needless effort will be saved by employing AI, yet there is a human aspect to handmade fine art that we must not ignore. As editor of Fine Art Connoisseur, I am committed to sharing what motivates real artists to do what they do, and I hope you’ll agree that this issue attains that goal. And because young people always represent the future, I hope that you will share the magazine — after you have finished reading it -with a…

Even when Sam Sussman is at home, he’s never quite there. When the novelist is in his third-floor Manhattan walkup, which his late mother occupied in the mid-1970s, he’s aware of what transpired there, as well as memories that are not exactly his. And when he visits the farmhouse he and his mother shared in upstate New York — where he fondly remembers riding horses and gathering eggs as a boy — he is keenly aware of change. “Home is always mythic,” Sussman says, “and the place that is home is never fully itself. When I’m back at the house and memories arise, I see that the trees have transformed, the landscape has transformed, the house itself has transformed, and I’m not a child anymore.” Sussman is an especially thoughtful…

First, the good news. The visibility of women artists and art professionals - both historical and living — is on the rise and growing steadily. The National Gallery of Art is just about to close its successful presentation of the gifted artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012); the nonprofit organization American Women Artists is achieving its goal to schedule 25 shows of members’ art in 25 museums; and Long Island’s Heckscher Museum of Art is preparing to unveil its groundbreaking show devoted to sculptor Emma Stebbins (1815–1882). Organizations and institutions of all kinds are busy training, encouraging, and exhibiting women artists. The talented artists highlighted in this section of the magazine reflect just some of the vitality we all are enjoying today. Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur congratulates them on their achievements…

CAROLINE NELSON (b. 1998) creates luminous figurative paintings in oils, especially of women, as well as still lifes. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, she was born and raised in Arlington, a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. “I always wanted to be an artist,” Nelson explains. “My parents have been steadfast supporters of my dream, which was further encouraged by art teachers from elementary school onward.” She drew particular inspiration from the portraitist Valerie Nelson, her grandmother, and cherished childhood visits to the studio in her 18thcentury Maryland home, where distinguished artists like Daniel E. Greene taught workshops. (His demo of Valerie Nelson’s husband remains in the family collection.) Nelson also benefitted from visits to Washington’s renowned museums, saying it was a “formative experience to gaze at the Raphaels, Rembrandts, and Vermeers.” When…

All too often, we take them for granted. Every now and then, though, we slow down to refocus on the sheer wonder of our sun and our moon. A Without the former, we simply could not exist, and it is the moon that governs our tides and (usually) illuminates our nights. From the dawn of time, humankind has tried to make sense of them, and although science has made huge progress in furthering our understanding, the sun and moon still enthrall, puzzle, and surprise us, catching us off-guard with solar flares or eclipses that remind us how not in control we Earthlings are. Visual artists have always been intrigued by these celestial phenomena, and many of them working today are making unique contributions to our collective archive of images. Rather…