NUMU Atelier Director, Gabriel Coke, has been teaching oil painting and drawing to teens, pre- teens and adults since 2012. Discovering the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, in 1996, Coke has continued to learn and teach in what has become a revived educational tradition within a global atelier community. Apart from practicing traditional drawing and painting skills, he also enjoys the process of managing and facilitating a well functioning art studio, while teaching a variety of techniques with different approaches catered to each individual student’s need and ability. Preparing young students for a future education and career in art, Coke himself has studied nationally and internationally at the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York City, Frovik Kunstskole in Norway, École Albert de Fois in France, the studio of Anthony Ryder in New Mexico, and the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle.

Coke’s service has been to represent artists of all ages so they are recognized and supported; preparing and maintaining a studio that gives them the best possible conditions to be successful and devotes his energy to assist them in becoming qualified to pursue higher education in art elsewhere. Many students devote several years with Coke and then go on to pursue art school or arts education in college.

Within the adult community he strives to create a studio that offers a connection to the global atelier network beyond the Bay Area. The many friendships he has made within the art world has allowed him to invite internationally acclaimed professional painters to teach for NUMU’s Visiting Artists Program. The combined offerings for students of all ages has created a small community of parents, teachers, students and art lovers. Says Coke, “ The sum of what I helped create has surpassed many of my expectations and I am honored to have taught so many.”

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Adrian Gottlieb is an internationally distinguished artist who began painting commissioned works at an extraordinarily early age. His broad fine arts education includes a degree in illustration from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He studied each summer at Charles Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy while still an undergraduate, and then immediately enrolled at The Florence Academy of Art to complete three years of intensive training in drawing and classical painting.

While viewing Gottlieb’s paintings, one is immediately struck by the painterly quality of his work. Although he has expanded his themes, Gottlieb’s passion remains centered on figurative compositions and commissioned portraits. It is in this genre that Gottlieb excels, especially in infusing the two-dimensional surface with a luminous vitality; a palpable energy that is unique to his work.

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David Gray’s signature style reveals a personal and contemporary expression of beauty and order which pays homage to the classical tradition in its craftsmanship. His painting evoke a sense of peace, stillness, and a contemplative mood. Gray’s award winning works have been covered by major art publications including Southwest Art, Art of the West, and American Art Collector. He also teaches several workshops in portraiture and still life painting throughout the United States and abroad.

Gray’s work is an exploration in style which retains the mastery of classical draftsmanship but finds a new freedom of brushwork and color application. This new dialect of painting is influenced in part by French Impressionism of the late 19th Century, particularly the work of Monet. Forms are often suggested rather than completely rendered, though a solidly sculpted structure is still evident. Gray’s work communicates a stirring beauty and meditative stillness, while pushing that expression into a new strength of emotion through bold brushwork, inventiveness, and a creative conviction. Says Gray, “I’m not simply a ‘Realist.’ I find in my best work, my subjects seem to hover somewhere between the visible natural realm and some place divine...”

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Brianna Lee is an artist with a love of beauty and the human form, whose work is a continuous search for life’s intrinsic beauty. She gleans inspiration from the people she meets, the abundance of nature and the deep rooted traditions of realist painting and drawing. Lee studied contemporary and traditional painting techniques at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and in the private atelier of portrait artist Adrian Gottlieb. She also received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, with honors, from the prestigious Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, CA.

Lee teaches for several independent art academies and atelier programs throughout California, is a member of the American Women Artists Association, and has been featured in numerous art publications. She exhibits her work in various group exhibitions internationally including Los Angeles, Orange County, Toronto, Cincinnati, and New York. Lee currently paints full-time in her North Visalia studio and travels occasionally for commissions and to teach workshops.

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At a young age, Jim McVicker was “jolted to life by looking at landscape paintings.” Moved by the sensitivity he saw in 19th Century French landscapes, his perception of the world was changed, inspiring him to commit to becoming a full-time artist. McVicker’s style has been described as invigorating and effortless. Through paint he pursues atmosphere, form, light, and solid drawing. In his work McVicker seeks to express the “elusive spiritual energy, the mystery of nature and life, [and] the unknown.” He believes that without this sensitivity to the land, his work would be merely marks on a surface.

Jim McVicker is an elite, versatile painter, best known for his plein air landscapes, yet clearly focused regardless of the subject. He loves life, nature and the visual experience and successfully communicates those through his work. He thinks of art in broad terms and does not define it except as it pertains to him and his work. He sees art as a way of defining life and one’s experiences. McVicker isn’t interested in merely reproducing nature, however, he does try to paint what he sees, sometimes pushing color and light where he thinks the painting needs it, giving little thought to composition except in a very intuitive way.

His advice to those wanting to take up the sport: “Look at great work from the past and not just contemporary painters... Work with painters better than you are, find an artist’s work you like, and if they offer a workshop, take it. Learn some fundamentals first, don’t show up at a workshop without any or very little experience. Observe nature and paint what you see. All the information is there.”

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Cuong Nguyen’s ability to highlight the beauty in the world around him is something that informs his art as well as his own perspective. One might say that he represents the opposite of the tortured artist cliché: despite the fact that his formative years in Vietnam were characterized by significant hardship, his romantic and sometimes mysterious portraits and still life paintings reflect his positive outlook and determination to persevere. Growing up in poverty after the fall of Saigon, Nguyen earned extra money for his family by doing street portraits, which lead to his admittance to Saigon’s Academy of Art while still in high school, where he studied until emigrating to the United States in 1991. He would go on to complete his education at San Jose State University, earning a degree in illustration.

Nguyen works in both oil paints and pastels, though viewers may, at first, have trouble distinguishing the two media. Though he almost never blends his strokes, Nguyen achieves a level of detail and smoothness of gradations that is unusual in pastel paintings. Regardless of media, however, Nguyen’s paintings always reveal a fundamentally optimistic view of the world and a sense of wonder towards the beauty that surrounds us. Nguyen is a member of the Oil Painters of America and the International Guild of Realism, as well as being a Distinguished Pastellist with the Pastel Society of the West Coast.

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Sarah Sedwick is an oil painter who makes her home in Eugene, Oregon. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she began oil painting at age ten. In 2001, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, with a focus on illustration and painting, and a minor degree in art history. Her work focuses mainly on still life and portraiture, and occasionally, nudes and plein air landscapes. Sedwick’s paintings celebrate the beauty of the everyday world around her, and are inspired by color combinations and perceptual effects. In still lifes, she explores the possibilities inherent in ordinary objects when they are truly lived-with and seen, and paints them from direct observation and under varied lighting situations.

As a passionate educator, teaching is an integral part of Sedwick’s creative work. She conducts workshops on still life and portrait renderings in oil paints, and also facilitates an online mentorship program, working intensively with students from all over the world. Since 2008, Sedwick has been chronicling her art journey through her studio blog, posting new paintings as they are created.

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As an artist, Robert K. Semans is concerned primarily with light and its effect on form and color. Whether that form be a stand of trees in the afternoon sun, an old man’s head, or an antique ceramic pitcher, to Semans, even the most commonplace objects take on a profound beauty when seen, literally and figuratively, in an interesting light. The texture of surfaces is also of great interest to him as he attempts to create a tactile feel in the application of paint, hence one of the reasons for his interest in palette knife painting. Semans enjoys painting a wide range of subject matter, even the occasional abstract, but always comes back to the human form in its endless variety and mystery.

In 1968 Robert Semans enrolled in the art department of San Jose State University and began studies with Maynard D. Stewart. In 1970, after receiving his Masters Degree, Semans moved to Florence, Italy where he worked for the next two years in the studio of Italian artist- teacher Nerina Simi. In his second year there, he also taught painting and drawing at Gonzaga University-in-Florence. This led to an invitation to be Artist-in- Residence at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. It was here that he began his work in portraiture with paintings of several prominent figures in the community. Semans paintings may be found in several prestigious public and private collections nationwide and he has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions around the country. Now back in San Jose, Semans is a member of the California Art Club, Oil Painters of America, and the Portrait Society of America.

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Artist and arts educator, Oliver Sin began his career as a computer game concept artist at LucasArts. Since 2001, he has taught in the School of Fine Arts and 2D Animation at his alma mater, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration in 1996. Sin has been drawn to since childhood having started drawing at the age of three. Portraiture, his preferred form of expression, is practiced consistently, not only as an art professor, but as a favorite hobby as well. Sin creates sensitive, emotional and dramatic portraits in vine charcoal that capture the insight and warmth of each subject leaving behind an essence of the subject’s personality on the paper.

Sin is deeply inspired by artists such as Nicolai Fechin, John Sargent and Jose Roko and employs the influences of distinguished artists and mentors Zhaoming Wu, Henry Yan, and Chun- Wei Chien. Their tireless guidance has urged him to put greater efforts in capturing fleeting human expressions resulting in works of precise composition and evocative harmonies in figurative portraits.

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Conor Walton was born in Dublin and studied painting at the National College of Art, Dublin, graduating with a Joint Honors Degree in the History of Art and Fine Art Painting in 1993, winning the prestigious Taylor Prize that same year. After furthering his artistic studies with a Master of Arts in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, Walton moved

to Florence, Italy, to master the traditional skills
of fine art drawing and color at the Charles Cecil Studios. The teaching method used at the studios derives from the Italian Renaissance where before any individual experimentation is permitted, all students must first learn the fundamental skills
of draftsmanship and the sight-size method of figure drawing and painting from the model. Walton returned to Ireland in 1996 where he has remained, painting full-time, ever since.

Walton favors two of the most traditional and perhaps challenging genres: portraiture and still life. His extraordinary draftsmanship and mastery of light and shadow, as well as his understanding of color and composition, makes Walton one of Ireland’s premier artists. He considers himself a figurative painter in the European tradition and maintains his craft at the highest levels using paint to explore issues of truth, meaning and value. All of Walton’s paintings represent his attempt to answer the questions in the title of Paul Gauguin’s famous painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?)

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Although Zhaoming Wu is best known for his figurative painting using live models and flowing, draped textiles, he draws inspiration from and paints the landscape. He sees the resemblance of natural elements in the curves of the human body and folds of the cloth, visualizing the figure as landscape. Influenced by the 19th Century European painters, Wu describes his work as “representational, but not traditionally classical.” This technique can be seen through the combination of more modern elements and an understanding and appreciation of design. Utilizing his knowledge of heightened colors and values, Wu ventures to make powerful, conscious decisions about their application.

Born and raised in Guangzhou, China, Wu graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and taught there as an assistant professor for seven years. After moving to San Francisco, he received his Masters Fine Arts in painting from the Academy of Art University where he is currently an instructor. Active for many years as both an artist and a teacher, Zhaoming has works exhibited in museums and private collections around the world.

Recent national and international publications have highlighted his vibrant career and technique. He has been featured in major domestic art magazines such as Artist-on-Art, Fine Art Today, Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Collector, Southwest Art, Art Talk, Art of West and Plein Air Magazine. International publications include Arte Y Libertad (Spain), Art of Watercolor (China), Pratique des Arts (French) and International Artist Magazine (international). He has published 10 books of
his painting and drawing and was featured in 3 instructional DVDs.

Major awards and honors have been given to Zhaoming Wu. These organizations include the International Artist’s Magazine, Oil Painters of America and the National Oil and Acrylic Painter’s Society, among others. For 6 consecutive years, he was a juror of an international art contest at the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, Spain.

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Elizabeth Zanzinger is an award-winning painter with an enthusiastic international following. She developed her artistic voice through her studies at the Aristides Atelier and Gage Academy of Fine Art in Seattle. Zanzinger finished her education with a fellowship award (Grand Prize, 2nd Annual Utrecht Art Competition) at the Grand Central Academy, New York City, in 2012. Since then she has completed a number of commissioned portraits of accomplished individuals, including former Chief Justice, Ronald M. George, of the California Supreme Court. She has served as an honored faculty member for the Portrait Society of America Conference in Washington DC

Zanzinger’s paintings echo the traditional skills gained from a disciplined classical training, although the work often celebrates non-traditional subjects. Through expert paintings from life and rhythmic compositions she imbues mundane subjects with a sense of beauty and wonder. Using strong drawing abilities, skilled brushwork, and luminous color she has combined approaches from multiple influences to create her own unique approach to painting. Her work is often loaded with detail, and yet her brushwork can be loose to give breath and movement to the images.

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