Oswald Achenbach was a 19th Century German landscape painter who found his greatest inspiration in italy, in particular in the area around the Bay of Naples, with it’s dramatic vistas of Mt. Vesuvius, and Rome and its environs.

He found drama in landscapes and cities of Southern Italy as well as the daily lives the played out against them both.

Achenback was the brother of Andreas Achenback, who was also a noted landscape painter.

Oswald Achenbach studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy and later returned there to teach. His students included Themistocles von Eckenbrecher.

Painter Peter Van Dyck studied at Wesleyan University and at the Florence Academy of Art, and is currently a member of the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

His academic background shows in his dynamically balanced compositions, superbly handled color and refined draftsmanship.

Though his subjects include portraits and still life, he often focuses on interiors, in which the play of light though windows, in mirrors and across geometric arrangements of objects takes a central role.

His application of paint can vary from smooth to brusquely textured surfaces, on which his fascination with reflected and refracted light also comes into play.

His interior paintings can have some of the light infused stillness and rich reflections off dark wooden surfaces found in the interiors of Edmund Tarbell, and of the Dutch masters of interior painting like Vermeer and De Hooch who likely inspired both artists.

Van Dyck sometimes chooses subjects that other artists might see as unlikely to be rewarding, like a house heating system, a garden tractor or electric heaters, and finds in them patterns of color, texture and shape that make them seem as natural for subjects as traditional bowls of fruit or arrangements of pottery.

There are two galleries on his web site, recent work and an archive. You can also find his work represented by The John Pence Gallery, Eleanor Ettinger Gallery (work here), Grenning Gallery and Artists’ House Gallery here in Philadelphia, where he is currently part of a group exhibit that is on view until January 16, 2011.

I’m not always appreciative of floral subjects in paintings, too often they focus on the pretty at the expense of the beautiful.

Dyana E. Hesson is an artist who was born in California and is now living in Arizona, where she earned her degree in art from Arizona State University. She paints floral and botanical subjects with a difference, seeming to focus on each individual petal as if it was a sculptural object, wrapped in light and shadow.

Many of her luminous oils are painted at a relatively large scale, 40 x 40″ (100 x 100cm) or larger, though some are considerably smaller. She finds intricate landscapes of form within flowers, and renders them as crisply delineated shapes with rich colors, often accentuated by dark, softly gradated backgrounds.

Her subjects include plant forms other than flowers, and all of them have sense of botanical accuracy, though I’m certainly no expert in judging that.

Her website has a section of Original Oils, which is divided into sub-sections, as well as a section of limited edition prints. You can find additional galleries of her work on the websites for David Bonner Galleries (also here, here and here) and Manitou Galleries.

Hesson is featured in the current (January, 2011) issue of American Art Collector.