Karl Friedrich Lessing was a 19th century German painter who specialized in landscape and history painting.

In his landscapes, Lessing was influenced by the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, and Lessing himself became an influential teacher and painter, one of the primary figures in the Dusseldorf school of landscape painting.

Lessing reveled in the weathered textures of stone castles and keeps, rocky outcroppings and forbidding hills. I particularly enjoy the almost theatrical way he plays with light, highlighting particular areas of his compositions with strong contrasts in value.

Unfortunately, sources for his work are a bit scattered and thin, but I’ve gathered what I can below.

Brazilian painter Alxeandre Reider is based in São Paulo, where he was born where he studied at the Pan American School of Arts. He also added to his study of painting with several trips to Europe.

Reider’s landscapes are often given a dramatic feeling of depth by his use of atmospheric perspective, at times creating several distinct planes of value and color changes. His evocations of the Brazilian landscape range from sweeping vistas of mountains to intimate glens and wooded paths.

His muted, controlled greens are sometimes punctuated with higher chroma passages of spring blossoms.

Reider’s website has galleries of his finished landscapes, smaller works and studies. Though in Portuguese, the site is easy enough to navigate, Galeria de Obras is his gallery of work.

Reider teaches classes and workshops in São Paulo, and also highlights them on his blog.

There is an article on José Rosário’s blog, in Portuguese, that also features additional images of Reider’s work.

Kelly Carmody is a painter based in Waltham, MA, who focuses on portraits and still life.

In her still life, Carmody works in a painterly, immediate approach, and has an interestingly different common theme of dead birds along with the more expected florals, food and vessels. Not a completely unusual theme for artists, particularly going back to Baroque still life that features game birds, but Carmody’s approach is different enough to make you take notice.

In her portraits, she appears to work with more refined brushwork. Her subjects — captured either as bust or full length portraits — have an interesting variety of personality types, though in several, particularly those of young girls, Carmody has brought out their defiant side, as though confronting both the painter and the viewer with an attitude of “I’m who I am, whether you like it or not.”

A number of her portraits (for example, those in ovals, above) are done at small size of roughly 5×7. Carmody calls these “Portraits in Little” and has a separate website devoted to them.

Carmody conducts regular classes in her Waltham studio, as well as occasionally conducting workshops.

Kelly Carmody’s work is currently on display in a solo show at the Sloane Merrill Gallery in Boston titled Kelly Carmody: Evocations that runs until December 9, 2015.

[Via Leo Mancini-Hresko]