Spanierman Gallery, LLC, is pleased to announce the opening on October 3, 2000 of Wildlife Art--2000, an exhibition featuring more than fifty paintings of world wildlife subjects by six North American contemporary artists who are foremost in the field: Douglas Allen, John Felsing, Stanley Meltzoff, Lanford Monroe, John Schoenherr, and Lindsay Scott. Our first show of wildlife art, Natural Habitat: Contemporary Wildlife Artists of North America, held in 1998, assembled works by wildlife artists from the United States and Canada to highlight one of today’s most important world issues: the conservation and protection of our increasingly threatened wildlife and the natural environments in which they live. Like its predecessor, Wildlife Art--2000 underscores the key role played by artists in environmental conservation on a global scale, promoting a better understanding of the dire need for humankind to accept full responsibility for our planet and all its inhabitants.

The exhibition's opening reception on Tuesday, October 3rd, will benefit the Yellowstone Park Foundation, as will ten percent of all sales from the show. Accompanying the exhibition will be a forty-page catalogue with thirty full-color illustrations. The catalogue is available for sale from the gallery in soft cover for $20.00 postpaid.

Part of a broad and growing global movement of wildlife artists, contemporary American painters and sculptors of wildlife are receiving increasing recognition for raising public consciousness about the preservation of wild species and the protection of their environments as well as for creating works that capture the beauty and drama of animals living freely in nature. While the artists share a concern for representing animals with realism and precision, their interests and points of focus are extremely diverse, reflecting a wide range of aesthetic, environmental, and expressive concerns.

The six artists included in Wildlife Art--2000 each take innovative and unique approaches to their subject matter. Douglas Allen, who lives in Neshanic Station, New Jersey, closely observes his subjects in the wild and creates painterly depictions of animals against broad backdrops of mountains, grasslands, and forests. Quietly capturing dramatic moments through implied narratives, his works recall the tradition of Frederic Remington. Lindsay Scott grew up in Zimbabwe and now splits her time between Ventura, California, and the Marakana Valley in New Zealand, when she is not traveling around the world in search of subjects. Like Allen, she works from direct studies. She also relies on her background as a botanical researcher and biologist. Her precise oil paintings and exquisitely detailed pencil drawings convey the drama and spirit of African and North American wildlife.

For the landscape and wildlife painter John Felsing, the lakes, streams, and forests in the vicinity of his home in Mason, Michigan, provide an infinite source of inspiration. Finding beauty in modest, unpretentious corners of nature, he paints throughout the seasons, capturing nuances of light, atmosphere, and color and creating works that reflect the legacy of the Impressionist and Tonalist traditions. Lanford Monroe, who lives in Taos, New Mexico, also draws on the Impressionist tradition, rendering works that straddle the line between landscape and wildlife painting. Her arrangements, characterized by soft-edged forms and restrained, tranquil compositions, capture evocative, mysterious, and subtle moments in familiar countrysides. Another artist who expresses his personal response to the natural world, the rural New Jersey painter John Schoenherr produces images of mammals and birds that underscore his gifts as a draftsman, his keen sense of compositional design, and his masterful handling of light.

Stanley Meltzoff, like so many other wildlife artists, paints directly from his subject matter. However, rather than working on land, this Fair Haven, New Jersey, painter is distinguished as the first submersive artist. He has come to know life in the sea intimately over a lifetime of diving, and paints underwater creatures including swordfish, sailfish, turtles, bluefish, and sting rays with a mastery that reflects his years as an eminent illustrator and his familiarity with the history of art, especially from the Baroque period through Impressionism.

In Wildlife Art--2000, Spanierman Gallery, known for its long-established reputation as a leader in the field of American art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrates its continued commitment to the vital, exciting, and important group of works created by America’s finest wildlife artists working today.