Art Bites

  You Tube Video of the Atelier Alternative

    To have an image look into you, as much as you look into it, is my goal as I create an image. I want you to lock eyes with the character in the piece and feel what it is he or she maybe feeling and create a story, a world even, in your mind. There is a goal to keep a person looking. Good characters in a piece draw a viewer in. As does an incredible amount of detail, design, and imagery. -Paintings- Using a specific technique of oil painting, I aim to create images that have a life like quality. Subjects in the paintings usually portait a connection to mortality, stress, and loss of control. Its that loss of control that creates a certain side of us, a side of us that has been defeated. Its that side that either goes on auto-pilot or goes mad. Masks are an important part of culture and psychology. They can be a literal mask and/or psychological mask. I like to explore both through my art. -Ink Drawings- Developed over years of doodling o...

  Michael Angelo Gagliardi was born in New York City in 1962 to Irish and Italian Parents.  He grew up living in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, where he attended Msgr. Farrell High School.  He received a B.F.A. in painting and sculpture and a M.A. in Theatrical Design from C.W. College of Long Island University in 1985.  Michael Angelo sold his first painting in a bar on St Mark’s Place at the tender age of 17.  He is eternally grateful for not being carded that day.  Upon graduating college MA moved back to NYC where he kept studios in the East Village then Williamsburg Brooklyn.  Though finding his own path artistically, he is still to this day influenced by the Neo-Expressionist style.  Making a living in the NYC off Broadway theatre scene MA learned to be a scenic artist and stage craftsperson.  He never stopped making his own art showing mostly at that time in the smaller East Village Galleries.  Along with a group o...

When I was 22 I had a drug induced psychotic break. Reality stopped having any meaning and for a few days there, I felt like everything I’d been experiencing in my life until that moment suddenly came rushing out in vividly artistic psychedelic animations. When I sank back into consciousness, I was surprised to find out my “real” world no longer existed. I had to rebuild. From scratch. So I made a painting. And then another one. And another one. And slowly but surely, a new world emerged. My paintings are the way I create my world. I live something and then I paint about it. Or I paint something and then I live it. I’ve created thousands of pieces. And each one corresponds to a part of my self and my experience that I can only express through a painting. I’m classically trained and appreciate the foundation that gave me to explore my insider roots to teach myself new techniques. The broad range I’ve been able to master lets me create in virtually any style from 17th Cen...

Allison Manasse is a Chicago-based painter whose work focuses on color theory and the emotive qualities of color in an organic and meditative manner. Her work is intuitive, insightful and inspired by in-the-moment choices and reactions.  For Allison, painting is an opportunity for self-reflection and a kind of emotional therapy.  Her work is driven by experiences and people, particularly those who are no longer alive.  Her paintings are filled with colors and moods that reflect her interconnected relationships with people, places, and, for Allison, icons, which emulate those who are significant to her.  Allison received her Bachelor's degree in 2007 from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI in Studio Art and Art History.  She has shown her work in Appleton as well as Chicago since graduation.  While at Lawrence University, Allison's art focused on drawing and figural studies.  In Art History she gravitated towards the Abstract Expression...

James Schneider’s art has an approach to beauty, which is somewhat unconventional. Having his studies in the Classical styles of Painting and Drawing formed through his education at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his focus has always been to understand that which he finds beautiful, in that fine line between the lovely and the confounding. His method of creating this beautiful melancholy we gradually realize that his naturalistic pictures have a deeper meaning, in that all beauty is spiritual in its nature. James’s studies during the years he spent with Chicago Imagists Michiko Itantani and Phil Hanson in the Advanced Painting Studios at SAIC were enhanced by concurrently working under Peggy McNamara, Artist in Residence at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Whether it’s a finely manicured graphite portrait or a painting of old growth urban decay he found that the most adequate way to convey emotion is through the laws of logical li...

Education      Chicago School of Art Institute Graduate,1953. Studied with Boris Anisfeld.      Traveled in Europe Studying Art in 1955 -56 after 2 years in the  US Army. Solo Exhibitions     Harold Decker Gallery, Norfolk. Va,  1964.     Cudahy Gallery, Richmond, Va. 1965.                                                                                                          ...