About Vytlacil Classes Workshops Visiting Artists

Residency Registration Instructors Policies

Directions Contact Gallery

Peter Clapper, Figure Painting and Drawing

Peter Clapper paints directly from nature, and quickly, usually completing each piece in one or two sittings. He prefers to depict scenes he is familiar with, and to which he has some emotional attachment. This general sense of intimacy is very much in evidence in these paintings, particularly in the gentle manner in which he coaxes each view into a structured, reassuring whole.

Peter graduated with a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1979.

Catskill Cultural Center; Platte Clove Residency  1998

Workspace Fellowship, Woodstock School of Art, Woodstock, NY  1988

Lillian Frederick-Fiolic Award, Woodstock Artists Assn., Woodstock, NY 

Marilyn Friedman, Young People's Class

This class is designed to develop the eye, hand, and mind of the young artist –– beginner or advanced. Through a number of exercises, they will learn to perceive, interpret and design. Students will gain a variety of skills, experiences, and techniques in order to build a vocabulary with which to create their own two- or three-dimensional works. There will be individual projects, as well as discussions using the school’s extensive art library.

Sculptor Marilyn Friedman studied at the Art Students League of New York, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the University of Siena, Italy. She has received numerous grants and awards for her portrait, figurative, and abstract works from such organizations as the National Academy of Design, the National Sculpture Society and the National Arts Club. Corporate commision clients include Kohler, Absolut, and Lufthansa. Ms. Friedman has taught sculpture at Parsons School of Design and Montoya Art Studios.

Back to Top

James Garvey, Forging

A military school graduate, James Garvey learned at a very young age the meaning of discipline, focus and at this place his career is launched when he receives the appointment he had been groomed for. Because he turned in this mainstream ticket to pursue something creative, it becomes an obligation to make good on. James moved onto college, graduating from Colorado State University with a Fine Arts diploma.

After college, James joined a crafts community in upstate New York and describes his experience, "After three years, I noticed that 'touch' began to tell me more than my mind; I found myself sortof yodeling a song at the forge, and I was entering a fundamental place of understanding as an. My fellow members avoided me somewhat, because they rejected my extreme position to invest so much energy into original design. I spent ten years at this artisan community. What I had been looking for was beginning to be possible, the work began to resonate."

Not so rare among entrepreneurial artists, James' work has never supported the costly operation. "It is important to realize work that can provide sentiment and it seems to become compromised very soon when the maker doesn't care in this way. I choose to devote all the attention I can bring to realize the piece I am working on. It takes time and experienced concentration."

Barney Hodes, Sculpture, Modeling in Clay

Barney Hodes’ life-size sculpture class gives students an opportunity to spend an extended period of time on a single piece of sculpture. A model will be provided to maintain one pose from two to four months.

Work produced in this class has included life-size pieces of two models combined in a single pose, torsos three times life-size and portraits five feet in height.

In explaining his approach, Mr. Hodes says, “If the work is diverse, its basis is not. This is sculpture that comes from an understanding of what the body is, based upon what the body does––an approach that hit its high-water mark in Europe during the Baroque. It is also a tradition that centered around sculpting the nude life-size or larger."

The combination of life-size work and anatomical function was the basis of the New Brooklyn School (now the New York Academy of Art), founded by Mr. Hodes and painter Francis Cunningham over twenty years ago.
Mr. Hodes was the chairman of the sculpture department at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1974 to 1980. He has taught at St. John’s University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Brooklyn College, Friends Seminary and University of North Carolina.

In March 1999, Mr. Hodes was honored to have been chosen by his colleagues at the Art Students League to join other Art Students League instructors in a show of mentors and teachers who have made a crucial difference to their students. Nothing, in almost forty years of teaching, has made him prouder.

Grace Knowlton, Mixed Media

I began as a painter, and at a certain point I started to make my paintings three-dimensional. In the process, I discovered form and space--in short, I began making sculpture, but still with a strong interest in surface--line, color and texture.

"The elements we will deal with are form, space and surface; we will experiment with interplay and balance, using various materials of our choosing."

Grace Knowlton has traveled freely through various art forms, methods and materials. Her work includes photographs, drawings, paintings and sculpture made from both natural and synthetic materials. She was graduated from Smith College with an MA and BA in Art, and received an MA in Art and Education from Columbia University Teachers College. She has exhibited in numerous exhibitions, and her work is represented in many public collections including the Smith College Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Newark Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and others.

Jay Lindsay, Ceramics

Jay Lindsay received his B.A. degree from the University of Oregon in 1966. He studied ceramics with Bob James, concentrating on clay and glaze formulation as well as kiln design, building and firing.

He has exhibited in numerous New York City venues including the Museum of Contemporary Crafts and has had many solo and group shows in the Northeast.

In 1970, Mr. Lindsay established Jay Lindsay Pottery in Carmel, New York, where he continues to specialize in large scale throw pottery as well as sculpture. He was the manager of the Garrison Art Center in Garrison, New York from 1970 to 1986 and built dozens of custom designed gas-fired kilns for potters and sculptors. From 1986 to 2002, he worked as Head Enlarger at Tallix Art Foundry, continuing his work in clay.

Mr. Lindsay has worked with many of the premier sculptors of America and is considered one of the top enlargers in the United States. His work as an enlarger includes the twenty-four foot Leonardo da Vinci Horse.

Mr. Lindsay has an extensive knowledge of clay bodies and constructing and firing ceramic sculpture.

Karen O'Neil, Painting and Drawing

In this class students work directly from still life and landscape. Students will sharpen their ability to see, to simplify masses and to relate values to build form. The focus will be on translating values into color, studying warm and cool color relationships, and the atmospheric effects of light on color.

Karen O’Neil studied at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and in Provincetown with Henry Hensche. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Her work has won several awards, including the Lillian Frederick Fiolic Award through the Woodstock Artists Association.

She has exhibited throughout the United States, and her work is represented in many private and corporate collections, including Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.

Ms. O’Neil lives in Lake Hill, New York, and has been an instructor of painting at the Woodstock School of Art since 1991. She is represented by Windham Fine Arts, Windham, New York; The Studio at Day Hill, North Falmouth, Massachusetts; and WF Gallery, Woodstock, New York.

“If painting is painting, it is drawing. You do not stop drawing when you begin to paint, for painting is drawing.” - Robert Henri

Anthony Padovano, Sculpture and Welding

Anthony Padovano has won several awards including the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Purchase Award, an Olivetti Award from the Silvermine Guild (First Prize) and the Gold Medal for Sculpture at the National Academy of Design. He has also won awards from the New York State Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He has had sixteen solo exhibitions, four of which were at the Graham Gallery. The most recent was at the Vorpal Gallery. Hilton Kramer, in a review for the New York Times, commented, “Anthony Padovano is the real thing—a sculptor with a wonderfully natural gift for the forms and methods and syntax of modern sculpture.”

Mr. Padovano’s work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Herron Museum of Art in Indiana, the Wichita Art Museum, the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and in many other public collections.

He has taught sculpture at the University of Connecticut, Columbia University, Queens College, Sarah Lawrence College, Parsons School of Design and Kingsborough College, where he is presently a member of the staff.

Mr. Padovano’s book The Process of Sculpture, a comprehensive guide to the techniques and materials for every type of sculpture, was published by Doubleday in 1981.

Wendy Shalen, Drawing and Painting from Life

“One of the principal goals as an artist is to capture and communicate intuitive responses to a subject, carefully and sensitively, whether I am working from a model, landscape or still life. Successful work conveys not only the reality that the artist confronts but the very personal reaction that is inspired by that reality.”

“I want my students to develop the tools they will need to express their own feelings and concepts through their work. The information and techniques to which they are exposed will be classical, whether we are working in charcoal, graphite, silverpoint, pastel, watercolor or oil monoprints, and they will progress from line and tone to limited and full color work. But my ultimate goal will be to enable each student to execute personal and independent statements through their work.”

Wendy Shalen has taught figure and landscape drawing and painting to adults and teens for more than 25 years. She also teaches a Portfolio Development Drawing class to high school students and adult landscape painting workshops at the Silvermine Guild School of Art in New Canaan, Connecticut.

She is a graduate of Brandeis University, where she majored in art history and studied at the Art Students League in the late 1970s with Daniel Greene, Harvey Dinnerstein and Robert Beverly Hale and privately with Burton Silverman.

She has exhibited at Allan Stone Gallery in New York City, in London at Abbot & Holder and in Martha’s Vineyard at the Carol Craven Gallery and at Gardner-Colby. She is currently a member of Art/Place, a cooperative gallery in Southport, Connecticut. Her studio is located in Waccabuc, New York.

Edward J. Walsh, Welding

“Art first chose me and then I chose art.”

Edward Walsh studied at the Art Students League, New York University and Montclair State University, where he received his B.A. degree. He was an apprentice for Manuel Carbonell for seven years, and he learned marble-carving techniques in Pietrasanta, Italy.

He has had three solo shows at Environment Gallery in New York City.

Mr. Walsh says, “My artistic history began when drawing was used as play. Pencil and paper were both the tools and toys that opened the doors of fantasy and imagination. Early sketches filled scraps and sides of homework and classroom papers with elaborate scenes of human and animal figures. These scenes were miniaturized and simplified by necessity, which became a personal test to manipulate line, shape and volume. Unknowingly, these were my early searches and explorations for aesthetic choices. 

“I am still searching as that child and young man did before, trying to reveal more to my own eyes whether my art hangs on a wall, moves in the wind or stands on a pedestal.”

Judith Weller, Sculpture

Judith Weller, a native of Israel, a traditionally trained sculptor for 30 years and a Fellow of the National Sculpture Society, has taught at NYU, Columbia, the Sculpture Center, and the Arts Center of Northern New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Jewish Museum and The New York Governorâs Mansion. Perhaps her most well-known work,ä The Garment Workerä, sited in the Garment District of New York, exemplifies her figurative work in clay, cast in bronze. Since the 90âs, she has created her figures primarily in welded steel.

Back to Top

Hans Witschi, Painting

"I integrate ugliness, to make the world more beautiful."

Painting has not only the potential of representing things around us we know. It opens doors to unknown worlds and to the visual thinking process itself. We work mostly from imagination and use certain methodes to evoke it, but we will train our eyes relentlessly on observation of the real world, because you can't see an elephant in a cloud, when you never saw one in reality.

First Class: bring 2 pre-stretched primed canvasses 18 x 24 and Oil paint or water soluble oils, etc.

Hans Witschi, born 1954, is a visual artist who studied painting in Zurich under Gustav Guldener in the 1970s. He moved to New York City in 1989 when he received the Studio Grant by the City of Zurich. Witschiâs works have been shown at the Shedhalle (Zurich), Kunsthalle Palazzo (Basel), Ursus Books (New York), Kunsthistorisches Museum Schloss Ambras (Innsbruck).

His work is in numerous collections including the Rockefeller University, the Graphic Collection of the National Library in Bern and the Mus„e d'art et d'histoire de la Ville de Neuchatel. He is the recipient of the Federal Visual Art Fellowship of Switzerland (1992).

The documentary "Witschi geht" from Paolo Poloni was shown at the Locarno Filmfestival 1992, the Filmfestival Montreal 1993 and diverse television stations throughout Europe and depicts besides the life of the artist Witschi's emigration to the US.

"Hans Witschi's paintings of human beings are incompatible with the familiar images which persecute us day and night. He presents no idyl, no mythical scenes, nor utopias; neither does he depict sexual obsessions, nor irruptions that veer off into Surrealism. Just those people twisted in space.

He paints nightmares, that which has been collectively repressed, left in the dark; that which had better not appear in the wealth of images of a brilliantly simulated world."