Posts by paragonfineart

Born in Detroit, Michigan (1961), John Wiercioch earned a BA at UI at South Bend and an MFA from Radford University. After working in art museums for 15 years, he closed that career as the Director of Education at the Art Museum of Western Virginia (Roanoke, Va). In 2000, Wiercioch founded Roanoke Masterworks, a custom…

Thomas Wharton studied painting at The Art Student’s League of New York, The New York Studio School, The New York Academy of Art, The Grand Central Academy, and The National Academy of Design. His work has won many awards, including The Georgie Read Barton Award, The Katlin Seascape Award, the Windsor Newton Award, and the…

Known for her cubist imagery in painting and printmaking, Grace Martin was born in Morgantown, West Virginia. She was a life-long student, learning from such important artists as her elder distant cousin, Blanche Lazzell and the German-born Hans Hofmann. In 1929 she visited Provincetown at the invitation of Lazzell, who coached her in the technique…

Prolific, highly energized, George Snyder has been exploring space and time on canvas for over four decades. Growing up on the edge of urban Charleston, West Virginia, his earliest memories of his grandmother’s beautiful, color quilt patterns drew him into a fascination with geometry, pattern, and color with the underpinning of exquisite craftsmanship. Educated at…

Printmaker/Artist/Retired Faculty Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, WV Rhonda J. Smith has lived in Keedysville, Maryland for over 40 years. She came to this area from Kentucky and Texas where she earned a BFA in painting at Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY and her MFA in printmaking from the University of North Texas, Denton TX. Smith taught…

I use the camera to explore. It is a reason to go to special places, a way to be immersed, a way to look carefully. I work largely in the tradition of straight photography. I am not intellectual about what I do – my approach is completely intuitive, and not the least bit conceptual. I…

Laurie Meyer has lived and painted in Charleston [SC] for nearly forty years. Following careers as a teacher and pharmaceutical sales, Laurie devoted her focus to being a professional artist in 1997. Laurie paints in watercolor and oil and recently added gouache to her resume. No matter the medium, she seeks the resonance of light…

“Painting is a compulsion to me, a most welcome one. I view painting as a language that can express qualities of experience impossible to express in other terms –an experience that over time all artists seek and develop for their own style, own theme. I consider these barns to be not unlike the cathedral that…

Having spent her youth in southern California and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Cathy has made her home in the Greenbrier Valley for the past 45 years, moving here as part of the “Back-to-the Land” movement in the 1970’s. She began exploring her artistic interests as a teenager with pencil and pen+ink drawings and continued to…

Antiques possess a special ability to resurrect long-forgotten lives. As I comb through Goodwill, I can see the history of people I’ll never meet. It might be a well-loved set of chipped china or a set so pristine it has never seen the light of day. Even a wedding gown, perfectly boxed and preserved or…