Painting Insights Richard K Blades & Simon Renshaw

This week we are joined by Gavin Glakas. Gavin is a painter and teacher whose draftsmanship and technical skills result in brilliant paintings, capturing the life and soul of the scene. From plein air landscapes to portraiture, Gavin shares insights into his creative journey and development as a painter.
Learn more about Gavin here

This week we are joined by painter and teacher, Bhavani Krishnan
Born in Switzerland and raised in India, Bhavani Krishnan currently lives and paints in beautiful Oregon, USA. After pursuing a career in engineering, she picked up the brush again in 2012 and rediscovered her passion for art. She has always found tremendous inspiration in nature, expressed by her love for art, hiking, and travel.
Bhavani strives for painterly realism in the various subjects that she paints in oils. Her paintings are built upon abstract shapes of colors, yet they are representational. Painting from life is the ultimate thrill for her. She is inspired by patterns of light and shadow, evocative passages of color and exciting variety of shapes. Her vision as an artist is to convey this spark in her painting in hopes of transcending her visual experience to the viewer.
Learn more about Bhavani here

This week we are joined by Ken Goshen, who shares his insight into his painting journey, teaching and art education.
Ken Goshen (חן גושן, b. 1988, Jerusalem) is an artist and educator based in NYC. His paintings bring together classical techniques and contemporary outlooks, striving to bridge the gap between tradition and progress. Goshen’s recent paintings are currently exhibited at the Jerusalem Biennale, at the Museum of Jewish Art at Hechal Shlomo.
Goshen teaches painting and drawing at his school, Goshen Art Academy, located in midtown Manhattan, and he also provides online art lessons to hundreds of students worldwide. He is passionate about equipping contemporary art enthusiasts with classical skills, and believes that art–like language–can be learned by anyone. Goshen regards both his artistic creations and his teaching as integral components of an overarching mission: to contribute as much meaningful art to the world as possible, with a lesser emphasis on whether it originates from his own hand or that of his students
Learn more about Ken here

This week we are joined by John Wentz. John Wentz is a contemporary artist whose work is an exploration of process and technique. Working within the classical idiom of the human figure, his goal is to reduce and simplify the image to its core fundamentals: composition, color, and mark-making. Paint application and brush strokes are broad and simplified as a means to connect and convey these ideas to the viewer with an abstract sensibility.
John joins us to talk about his artistic journey, techniques and the ideas behind his work.
Learn more about John here

This week we are joined by Sharon Schock. An Oil and Gouache painter from California, her paintings sing with the natural light of the area. Sharon shares with us her creative journey, her process and navigating being a painter and mother. Sharon’s works are beautifully captured moments in time and we are delighted that she shared her insights with us.
Learn more about Sharon here

David Baird (b. 1986, USA) is an oil painter and draftsman focused primarily on figurative work. While inspired by subject matter familiar to art history, his work is equally motivated by the translation of perception into painting, a process by which the sensuality of experience is in constant tension with the materiality of paint.
Benefitting from extensive exposure to some of Europe's greatest works of art, the artist has traveled broadly. He has attended classes throughout the US and Europe, including Ryder Studio School (NM, USA), the Art Students League (NYC, USA), Studio Escalier (FR), and the Jerusalem Studio School (Jerusalem, IL). In 2019, the artist was awarded the Avigdor Arikha Masterclass Scholarship to continue his studies in Italy.
He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the inaugural exhibition Memento Vivere in 2021, celebrating the reopening of the historic Lyme Academy in Lyme, CT. In 2022, he won first prize in the New York Figurative Show at the prestigious Salmagundi Club in New York, NY, and was subsequently invited to exhibit in the first ever Hartley Invitational at the same institution. Most recently his work was featured alongside some of the most prominent figurative artists working today in the show Beyond Description, a dual-gallery exhibition taking place simultaneously in Seattle, WA and New York, NY.
The artist is represented by Tregony Gallery in London, UK, and Mary Woerner Fine Arts in West Palm Beach, FL. He currently lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama.