Judith Pond Kudlow is an artist living and working in New York City, where she co-founded with artist Andrea J. Smith a classical atelier named NYK Academy, formerly the Harlem Studio of Art.

Kudlow’s primary subjects are still life and figurative, the former in particular is appealing for the feeling of harmony in her compositions. Her exacting draftsmanship privieds a solid structure from which her reserved color palette and controlled values project a feeling of quiet presence.

I get the impression that she uses soft edges in many places, but it’s difficult to tell; the frustratingly small images on her website, particularly of her figurative work, reveal little about the nature of her surface or rendering.

There are slightly larger images of her still life subjects on the websites of the Principle Gallery in Virginia, and Anderson Fine Art Gallery in Georgia.

Kudlow has an instructional video, published by American Artist, titled Classical Painting: The Realist Sight Size Method.

Virginia artist Ray Berry walks a line between representation and suggestion, his strongly seasonal landscapes reveal themselves on closer inspection to be strikingly physical applications of paint.

He works both in oil and the difficult hot wax process of encaustic, the latter giving even greater leeway for producing a textural surface, to the point of being almost sculptural.

The brusque application of paint and rough scumbling over many surfaces gives Berry’s forms intriguingly indistinct edges that can be perceived as simultaneously soft or hard. In his landscapes it can impart a tonalist quality, and in his still life pieces, a fascinatingly shifting object-to-ground relationship.

The textural paint application in his landscapes can also give their otherwise still, contemplative subjects an element of suggested movement — from the nature of the directional masses within the surface of the paint itself — adding the the push-pull of contrasting elements.

Berry’s work will be on display at an exhibit titled “Hidden Hanover” at the Flippo Gallery of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland VA, from tomorrow, April 19, to May 31, 2015.

[Via Duane Keiser (see my previous posts on Duane Keiser)]