Eric Schindler Gallery

Mark Pehanich is a painter and sculptor originally from Chicago. He has a BFA from Northern Illinois University and an MFA from Brooklyn College, where he studied with Lee Bontecou, Phillip Pearlstein, Alan D’Arcangelo, and Lennart Anderson. He has taught painting, drawing and sculpture at the Appomattox Regional Governors School and Richard Bland College. After living in Brooklyn for 18 years Mark moved to Petersburg, where he and his wife converted an old cotton and peanut warehouse into studio spaces.

Mark has exhibited his paintings and sculpture widely, including the BrooklynMuseum, Stamford Museum, Butler Institute of Art, El Paso Museum, Virginia Tech, and Kyoto Gallery in Japan. A former board member of the Sculptors Guild and the National Mural Society, he has created murals and large scale public sculpture in New York and Virginia. Mark is the recipient of numerous awards including the Charles G. Shaw award.

Miguel Carter-Fisher is currently based in his hometown, Richmond, Virginia. His interest in the arts began as a child and was nurtured by his father, the late painter Bill Fisher. At 18 he moved to Connecticut, where he studied both painting and philosophy at the University of Hartford. After graduating, Miguel moved to Brooklyn to attend the New York Academy of Art. There he studied traditional drawing, painting, and composition techniques. After graduate school, he worked at Soho Art Materials, where he educated artists, collectors, and galleries on diverse methods and materials of painting. Since returning to Richmond in 2014, Miguel has taught at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Milk River Arts, Bon Air Juvenile Corrections Center through Art 180, and Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently an assistant professor and studio arts coordinator at Virginia State University. Miguel’s work has been exhibited at various galleries in New York, Virginia, DC, Massachusetts, Washington, and abroad.

Dave Moore is a Virginia artist who studied at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has painted, lived, and shown work widely and his paintings are in private collections across the country. Dave has been living and painting around Charlottesville for the last decade, and has no real plans to leave.

Julie Elkins received a BFA in Craft and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002. She first gained recognition for her porcelain sculptures exhibited at SOFA Chicago in 2003. From there, her work made its way into permanent collections of The Mint Museum of Craft and Design, The Fuller Craft Museum, and the Kamn Teapot Foundation. Currently she teaches ceramics at Virginia State University, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Studio School. She leads many creative workshops in the community, and was the Sculptor in Residence at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Rodin exhibition in 2016.

Nicole Renee Randall's work in inspired by her life and the lives of the women around her. She works with acrylics on wood panels in a narrative style that is personal, poignant and often heart wrenching.

b. 1969 Washington, DC

BFA - VCU

As of 2019 I see my paintings as unhinged landscapes within a variety of controlled abstractions. It's an all-over process involving the blending of multiple images, concepts and strategies. In working this way I hope to convey a manic yet beautiful world.

"His works may be confined to canvas, but local artist Scott Phillips’ paintings are in a constant state of movement. Intensely worked, his fluid brush leads line, color and imagery to a conclusion that no two people will view the same."

— Style Weekly

Kelly Queener was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Hollins University. In 2005 she joined an artists collective called the Magic Twig Community. In 2008 she graduated from the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. While painting is her primary medium, she continues other interests including: music and animation/video. In 2015 she was awarded a professional fellowship through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She currently lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Born in Poland in 1974, Agnes Grochulska is a contemporary realist painter working mainly in oils. She also enjoys creating drawings in ink, graphite and charcoal.

Agnes studied design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia where her paintings can be seen at Eric Schindler Gallery. Her work has been shown at Dacia Gallery in New York City, Abend Gallery in Denver, Colorado, The Frank Gallery and Conde Contemporary in Miami, Florida and other places.

Agnes’ work has won several awards and has been published in different publications including Artist’s Magazine, Drawing Magazine, Artists on Art Magazine, and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

Agnes is interested in a broad spectrum of themes and subjects in her art. She is drawn to the human subject with all the emotion, meaning, and importance that only the human form can carry. Another idea she likes to explore is the landscape around her, trying to capture the essence of the place.

I like to think about things we can't or don't see. All my work is born out of that place. We were made to seek — beauty, justice, truth — things unseen — and to make them visible through our lives.

My academic career started as a Provost Scholar at VCU and ended with a First Degree in Printmaking at Loughborough University School of Art and Design in the Midlands of England. I have taken the love of process and technique found in etching and applied it to my current painting work.

I currently reside in the tiny beautiful state of Rhode Island.

Tracey St. Peter is a Detroit, Michigan-born artist currently living and working in Richmond, Virginia. Awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from College for Creative Studies, she went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from Eastern Michigan University with concentrations in Painting and Sculpture. In her final year of study for her Masters, Tracey had an opportunity to participate in a European cultural history program, visiting 13 countries from England to Egypt. This program offered an immersive opportunity to explore Art, History, Literature and cultural points of interest. This would prove to be a life-changing event, shaping her perspectives on the role of Art and Artist in society.

After graduating, Tracey spent a year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a resident artist at the Broad Street Artists Collective. Relocating to Brooklyn NY in 1993, she lived worked and showed until 2006, having 4 solo shows in Brooklyn during that time. Since moving to Richmond in 2007, Tracey has become an active member of the Richmond Arts community and has exhibited work in multiple solo shows at the Eric Schindler Gallery.

Tracey is a full-time artist who currently has works in University and private collections and has shown widely in the United States. A Painter who has incorporated Sculpture in her work since her MFA thesis exhibition, for many years she concentrated solely on oil painting. Central focal points gave way to images that seem to move past the picture plane. Flat canvas surfaces transitioned into oil painting on round surfaces. Round globe sculptures painted on all sides that rotated, working as multiple paintings on one surface, led the artist to more deeply explore sculpture. Currently she creates both sculpture and painting in encaustic wax and paper maché.

In recent years, Tracey has focused on the use of sustainable materials in her work. Paper maché sculpture covered in encaustic wax has been her primary medium. These simple materials, flour, salt, paper bags from the local market, bees wax and pine tar resin, combine to make sculpture that looks like carved stone.

Dolly Holmes is a painter living in Petersburg, Virginia. Educated at The Cooper Union and Hunter College in New York, Dolly sees her mentors as the early American modernists, such as Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Arthur Dove. She and her husband moved from Brooklyn to Petersburg in 1997 to renovate an 1828 house, to live more simply and focus more time on their artwork. In 2002 they bought an old pawnshop, which they use for studio space. Dolly has shown at New York’s Painting Center and Soho Center for Visual Artists, Perspective Gallery at Virginia Tech, artSTRAND in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the Offsite Gallery in Norfolk, Sol Cooper Gallery and Walton Gallery in Petersburg. She also has a fish from GoFish! Richmond, still installed at Grace and Foushee Streets.

Ted RANDLER (b. 1959, Stamford, Connecticut) spent a large part of his childhood moving with his family to New York, Illinois and Texas before settling in Bowling Green, Virginia. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1982 and Masters of Fine Art from Syracuse University in 1985. After graduate school, he resided in New York City for a number years before relocating to Virginia.

He has worked in marketing and magazine publishing including URGE, a regional fine arts journal which Randler led as well as contributed art criticism.

Richmond artist Alix Petrie was born October 29, 1973 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1984, Alix moved from Canada to Richmond with her parents and two brothers.

She grew up in a home where from an early age she was encouraged to follow her passion to express herself in drawing and painting. After completing her secondary education at Tucker High School, she enrolled in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and then went on to the Blue Ridge Community College Veterinary Tech program. This education has provided the platform for her to follow her two great loves, painting and caring for animals.

Bold flat planes of acrylic color characterize her early work, which was inspired by people and events from her personal experience. Her more recent work in oils focuses on the organic. Inspirations from nature wash across her canvasses welcoming the viewer to participate fully in their warmth.  Seasons and echoes of fields and flowers figure prominently.

Once there was a fox who chased an invisible bird.

Stories build bridges between the seen and unseen world—breathing life into a ways of being, understanding, and feeling, that, at it’s most profound, illumines a path toward enlightenment.

My work rises from a quiet mind, without censorship. I simply follow it towards its natural conclusion. I love the marriage of word and image, which, when properly balanced, are ever receiving and ever expanding, making active participants of those involved in their hearing, seeing, reading or re-telling.

My favorite place to be is standing upon the bridge, peering over the edge at the beauty that ebbs and flows beneath.

I am grateful and flattered.

In contentment I find happiness. In gratitude I find contentment. In humility I find gratitude.

I have a place to work and create and a family I love and support and who love and support me. I have a place to call home. I have enough. I write it out because I need reminding.

I tell and write stories to my three girls (and my wife). Images come through me that others appreciate. I have had the good fortune to have been invited to speak and teach at the International Mokuhanga Conference in Japan as well as at many other institutions nationwide. In addition I am flattered by all the supporters and collectors who choose to live with me and my work as well as institutions who have chosen my work for their permanent collections such as The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Savanah College of Art and Design, Vanderbilt University Heard Library among many others.

Kristen Peyton is a painter and printmaker working from observation and invention. She earned a Master of Fine Art in Painting from the University of New Hampshire in May of 2017 and a Bachelor of Arts from the College of William and Mary in 2012. Kristen is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a resident of Richmond, Virginia. Currently, she is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at William & Mary.

My work is a gesture of hospitality. It is an invitation into the profound presence of a chosen visual moment. I offer to my viewer the gift of “eternal timefullness.” Artist and writer, Makoto Fujimura, speaks of “eternal timefullness” in his book Refractions: “A timeful experience is given when our minds are allowed to fully respond to the senses… It’s what William Blake, the eighteenth-century poet, meant when he wrote, ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wildflower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.’” Through my work I offer an attentive lens of captured light, time, and space. As if composing a haiku, I aspire for my work to be structured with poignant simplicity. I play on canvas in paint, tottering between abstraction and resolution. With each piece I invite the viewer to pause, fully enter the created space of my works, stay a while, and experience something of the visual abundance of our world.

— Kristen Peyton

“I paint quasi-realistic people in abstracted settings from people's personal photos. People often feel like they know or have seen the subjects of my work. Not likely, unless you were drinking with those kids at beach-week, or were at that new years eve party in Austria. My subjects come mostly from internet photos albums and image search engines. The images I am drawn to have universal qualities that I collage into new and sometimes strange scenarios, way out of context of the original photos. I often wonder if an unwitting model is out there thinking, ‘I feel like someone is painting me.’"

— JPocklington

JPocklington’s work is no longer available, but he will always be remembered as a great artist, dear friend, and valued member of our community.

Collection from private estate.

BIO

Masters of Sculpture, VCU

Bachelor of Fine Arts, William and Mary

Faculty Adjunct at VCU, 1990-1991

Artist Board Member, 1708 East Main Street, Richmond, VA., 1990-1992

AWARDS

Friends Award, Juried Exhibition, The Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA.Peninsula Fine Arts Center Award, Juried Exhibition, The Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA

Grant Recipient, The Pollack-Krasner Foundation

Karen Levy Graduation Award, Juried Exhibition, The Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

“Uncle”, Eric Schindler Gallery, Richmond, VA

“More Than A Perfect World”, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA

“From the Heart”, Astra Design, Richmond, VA

Jepson School, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA

“Object Makers”, Group show, The Hand Workshop Art Center, Richmond, VA

“Not So Simple”, Group show, 901 E Street, Washington D.C.

One Person show, The Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA

Richmond International Airport, Richmond, VA

New Work, 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA

Gallery Two, 1708 East Main Street, Richmond, VA

Clark Pollock Gallery, WRIC TV, Arboretum, Richmond, VA

One Person Show, Riverfront Gallery, Richmond, VA

Sculpture ’91, 1708 East Main Street, Richmond, VA

Vittorio Colaizzi holds an MFA in painting and a PhD in art history from VCU. He has held one-person exhibitions at the Eric Schindler Gallery in Richmond and Stump Town Gallery in Alma, Wisconsin, and has participated in group exhibitions in Richmond, Norfolk, Courtland, Minneapolis, and Brooklyn. He received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship in 2006. His monograph on Robert Ryman was published by Phaidon in 2017, and he has also published essays on Trudy Benson, Joan Thorne, and Thornton Willis. Colaizzi is an associate professor of art history at Old Dominion University.

"The human form is the foundation of my work. Figures are given autonomous reign of the canvas to engage the viewer's imagination with direct eye contact as a focal point for subjective interpretation. My paintings are conceived to let viewers draw their own conclusions as to the subject's emotional state, situation and place in life. Through color, perspective and dimension, my goal is to reconsider the seemingly ordinary. In my attempt to free myself from the confines of traditional portraiture, the emphasis is to capture a moment in the human psyche rather than strict, realistic rendering. By mixing finely worked figures against flat fields of color and pattern, the people in my paintings are thrust to the foreground to be seen in an empathetic light. It is my intention for the subjects to affect the viewers subconsciously."

Bob Scott is an illustrator and collage artist living in Richmond Virginia. His illustration clients include, IBM, Wente Vineyards and The New York Times. He started making collages for fun while working as an illustrator in New York City, and began focusing on them as a form of artistic expression about 9 years ago. He views his collages as a combination of both art and archeology. His process involves unearthing images buried within the pages of old publications and on the covers of vintage paperbacks and then reinterpreting them into collage art.