Originally from New York, Howard Friedland is a painter living and working in Bozeman, Montana.

In addition to finding subjects in the area where he lives, Friedland has traveled and painted across the U.S. as well as in Europe and China.

His approach is boldly painterly, his confident brush marks describing his subjects with geometric solidity while edges dissolve into atmosphere and distance.

Freidland’s subjects fall into three broad categories, landscape, still life and other subjects, including wild and domestic animals.

I particularly enjoy his compositions that are, in essence, outdoor still life, in which sunlight reveals the objects very differently than artificial lighting.

Friedland conducts workshops both in the U.S. and abroad.

Howard Friedland is married to painter Susan Blackwood, and their website is shared, as is the Jade Street Gallery site, that offers their work for sale.

Friedland is also represented by Highlands Art Gallery, and you will find some larger images of his paintings on their site than on his own, which give you a better idea of his surface quality and brush work.

Władysław Czachórski was a Polish painter active in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Though he also painted still life, landscapes and other subjects, Czachórski was known primarily for his portraits and genre paintings of women, dressed in finery and expressively posed among flowers and elegant furnishings. These were rendered with academic realism and a finessed command of textures and tone.

Some of his compositions were apparently closely repeated with different models, perhaps because of requests from patrons, or because of the success of particular subjects.

He was also noted for his interpretations of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.

Resources for images of Czachórski’s work are somewhat scattered, and a number of the reproductions are not of good quality, but you will find enough that are to give you a feeling for his style.

Amanda Sage is a visionary artist whose intricately patterned compositions are meant to represent states of awareness or inner visions as opposed to ordinary perception of the visual world.

Sage studied with Michael Fuchs, and his father Ernst Fuchs, a well-known pioneer of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism and a mentor to the contemporary visionary art movement.

With them she studied the early Renaissance mischtechnik, or “mixed technique”, for which which Ernst Fuchs is credited with prompting a 20th century revival. In the original, egg tempera was used with oil paints and associated resins to create particularly luminous layers of color.

In the modern variation that Sage employs, a base of acrylic color is used, over which the painting is refined with casein and oil.

Common to works in the visionary art genre, many of Sage’s compositions feel influenced by 16th century Buddhist thangkas, and have a mandala-like symmetry, perhaps as an invitation for contemplation.

I also think that many of the artists in this field have been influenced by the layered imagery and geometric progressions of Salvador Dalí’s “atomic” phase.

Of particular interest in this type of painting is the indication of overlapping layers of fine-lined patterns, suggesting motion, and a different kind of visual depth than is usually encountered in painting.

Sage will be co-leading a workshop with Christopher Ulrich at beinArt Gallery in Brunswick, Australia on December 11, 2016.

She will also be teaching Mischtechnik at a three-week seminar at the Vienna Academy of Visionary Art July 8th – July 30th, 2017.