All lectures will take place in Viewing Room 1 in White Hall at 11a.m. at the W.C.S.U. MidTown Campus

John Arthur, Independent Curator
Tuesday, September 8

John Arthur has been acknowledged internationally as an authority on contemporary American realism and figurative painting. His books and museum catalogues include Richard Estes: The Urban Landscape (Boston Museum of Fine Arts & Little Brown), Realist Drawings and Watercolors (NYGS-Little Brown) Realism / Photorealism (Philbrook Art Museum & University of Missouri Press), Robert Cottingham: The Complete Prints (Springfield Art Museum & University of Washington Press), Realists at Work: Studio Interviews and Working Methods of Ten Contemporary Realists (Watson Guptill), Spirit of Place: Contemporary Landscape Painting & the American Tradition (Bulfinch-Little Brown),  Richard Estes: Paintings and Prints (Pomegranate Artbooks), and Green Woods & Crystal Waters: The American Landscape Tradition (Philbrook Museum & University of Washington Press). He has recently completed Theophilus Brown: Paintings, Collages, & Prints (Chameleon Books), which is the first monograph on the well-known Bay Area figurative painter.

John Arthur has curated numerous exhibits, including America 1976, a Bicentennial project sponsored by the United States Department of the Interior. It opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and toured major American museums for two years. He organized mid-career retrospectives of the paintings of Jack Beal (Boston University Art Gallery, Virginia Museum, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art), Richard Estes (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Hirshhorn Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art) and Alfred Leslie (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Hirshhorn Museum, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art).

He has served as an advisor to the National Endowment of the Arts, Department of the Interior, National Science Foundation, GSA Art and Architecture Program, and the Department of State.  Since 1975 he has advised private collectors, galleries, and museums in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

Mr. Arthur will discuss the landscape tradition in American painting and his perspective on contemporary images of nature.

Victor Juhasz, Illustrator
Tuesday, September 22

A graduate of the Parsons School of Design, Victor Juhasz began illustrating for the New York Times in 1974 while still a student and has been working non-stop ever since. His humorous caricatures and illustrations have been commissioned by major magazines, newspapers, advertising agencies, and book publishers, both national and international, and his clients include Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, The Washington Post, Oxford University Press, St. Martin’s Press, The New York Observer, and many others.

Victor also illustrates children’s books. Recent titles include R Is For Rhyme Published in the Spring of ’06 by Sleeping Bear Press, and D is for Democracy: A Citizen’s Alphabet, written by Elissa Grodin, also published by Sleeping Bear, to much critical and commercial success.

Victor serves on the Board of Directors of the Society of Illustrators, has appeared in numerous exhibitions, and has been the recipient of awards and citations for his work.

Lynette Lombard, Painter
Tuesday, October 13

Lynette Lombard has an undergraduate degree Goldsmith’s College  School of Art at the University of London and an M.F.A. from Yale.

Of her landscape inspired, semi-abstract canvases she says, "I paint the landscapes of southern Spain and western Illinois. What compels me is how light, form, color, and composition are informed by the feeling of walking a terrain, working in all kinds of weather and fusing several moments of time into one painting. These elemental experiences evoke and structure a sense of place.”

Ms. Lombard exhibits regularly in New York where she is a member of Bowery Gallery. In 2007 her work in an exhibition at the New York Studio School was the subject of an essay by art critic Lance Esplund.

She teaches painting, printmaking and the interpretation of landscape at Knox College, where she is co- chair of the art department.

Yuko Shimizu, Illustrator
Thursday, October 22

Originally pursuing a career in advertising and marketing with a large Public Relations firm in Japan, Yuko Shimizu eventually realized that art was her true calling.  She received her M.F.A.  from SVA in New York, where she now teaches Illustration courses and advises MFA students. Her clients include Microsoft, Pepsi, VISA, MTV, TARGET, T-Mobile, Neiman Marcus, Warner Elektra Atlantic Music, NPR, among others.

She has received numerous awards including the Gold and Silver Medals from the Society of Illustrators, Silver Awards Spectrum, Magazine of the Year Award Society of Publication Designers, Gold and Silver Awards Society of Illustrators LA and many others.

She has lectured or taught at many significant schools including Parsons School of Design (NYC), Pratt Institute (NYC), Fashion Institute of Technology (NYC), Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY), University of The Arts (Philadelphia, PA), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA), Savanna College of Art and Design (Atlanta, GA), Washington University (St. Louis, MO), Art Center College Of Design (Pasadena, CA), Otis College of Art and Design (LA).

Susanna Coffey, Painter
Tuesday, November 3

Susanna Coffey, widely acknowledged as one of the most significant painters of her generation, has been a frequent visitor to Western. Her whimsical, ironic or grave self-portraits have been recognizable as art world icons for many years. Her work of the last decade, however, which addresses the traumas of 9/11 and the subsequent wars in the Middle East, has a power and gravitas that raises questions of disturbing profundity.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Alan Artner says: “The challenge for a contemporary representational artist living in troubled times is to bear witness convincingly within one's own personal style.”

“(Coffey) does it by situating head-and-shoulders self-portraits at the center bottom, of landscapes of holocaust. None of the images is specific beyond the portraits, yet any viewer in the United States will grasp that they are "about" our

most recent war. All of them, including one done with the patterns of camouflage, are atmosphere pieces in which the artist turns back and sometimes closes her eyes. They're not political in the currently approved sense, but

they are nonetheless harrowing…”

And in the Winter 2006 “Art Journal” Carol Becker writes:

“…in Coffey’s works the painter puts a version of herself into bombed-out

landscapes of fire and catastrophe, creating, as she says, a “culpability of presence.” She has created the nonportrait self- portrait, the body-self as witness to humanity’s atavistic fascination with violence and devastation. These paintings capture the hidden forces of thanatos and the dark gods of war that live in the primal recesses of human consciousness, unable to evolve.”

Susanna Coffey has a B.F.A. from the University of Connecticut and a M.F.A. from Yale. Her work has been widely exhibited and is in many major public collections. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation grant and holds the L. H. Sellers Endowed chair in Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Gurney, Illustrator
Tuesday, November 17

After earning a B.A. in Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley and studying painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena it makes sense that James Gurney found work as an Illustrator for National Geographic Magazine. From 1984-2005 he worked on numerous assignments, including a piece on Patagonian Dinosaurs.

His recent book Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, was published by Andrews McMeel in 2007 and has received wide praise:

Walt Reed, author of The Illustrator in America, 1860—2000 called it: "… an intriguing combination of art, science and imagination, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara is a fascinating story, handsomely presented in a series of original paintings that can each stand alone as works of art. Through them, Gurney joins the company of America's noted illustrators such as Howard Pyle (who also wrote and illustrated many of his own stories), Maxfield Parrish, and N.C. Wyeth."

According to USA Today "Gurney renders an entire world, complete with its own footprint alphabet and code of gentle living: 'Breathe Deep, Seek Peace.'"
, and the Associated Press said it was "In a class with Jurassic Park."

Gurney has received numerous awards including: a Gold Medal for Creativity for his Dinosaur Stamps, the Best of Show from the Art Director's Club, 49th Annual Show, a Silver Medal from the Society of Illustrators, the World Fantasy Award, from the World Fantasy Association, 4 Gold & Silver Awards, from the Spectrum Annual of Fantasy Art, 2 Hugo Awards, and 7 Chesley Awards.

Bill Sullivan, Painter
Tuesday, December 1

Poet John Ashbery writes of Bill Sullivan’s work:

“With only a tinge of irony, Bill Sullivan makes new the vast spaces and swooning optimism of nineteenth-century Luminist painting. Reaffirming the contemplation of nature as its own reward, he also sets new tasks for painting, and undertakes them with compelling eagerness. After spending several years in South America amid the landscapes that attracted Fredrick Edwin Church and Martin Heade, among others, he refined and strengthened this awesome imagery after returning to New York. A certain Surreality floats through these vaporous visions of Columbia, though this may just be the result of Sullivan's careful documentation of scenes that looked unreal to begin with.”

In 2007 Bill Sullivan’s landscape work was featured in a major retrospective at the Albany Institute of History and Art, and a biography by the writer James Manrigue was published by Groundwater Press.

His recent work has returned to the figure in a series of confrontational frontal portraits, many of them in his characteristic landscape settings. Bill Sullivan has an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an exhibition record of national and international scope going back for forty years. His work is regularly reviewed in Art in America, Art News and the New York Times. His work is in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hudson River Museum, the Cleveland Museum and the Museum of the City of New York.