Month after month, JoAnne Artman Gallery exhibits new work in our front gallery spaces by our featured artists in a thoughtful and thematic way.  However, each month many of our viewers are enthralled by the “Back Room” in our gallery which is why we have decided to unlock our hidden treasures and feature our “Back Room” artists including Valerio D’Ospina, Peregrine Heathcote, America Martin, and Anja Van Herle!

Emilio Valerio D’ Ospina was born in Taranto September 9, 1980. On July 14, 1999 he received an artistic diploma from Liceo Artistico Statale “Lisippo” in Taranto, where he was first introduced to the world of art. In November of the same year he moved to Florence to further his artistic studies. There he enrolled in his first painting course under the instruction of Professor R.Giovannelli in the Accademia di Belle Arti. He also began to work in an antique‐painting restoration studio under the restorer Maurizio Bazzini, who gave him insight to the “character” of old paintings. On February 25, 2005, after preparing an experimental thesis in the study of “fisiognomica”, Valerio graduated with a degree in Painting. At 27, Valerio traveled to America to begin teaching Classical Drawing and Painting, summer session II for the fine art department at IUP. Nevertheless, after this teaching experience, he decided to focus exclusively on painting, receiving positive feedback from private collectors from around the world. Since July 2009 Valerio is established in the USA where he lives and works. 

Peregrine Heathcote, born in London in 1973, graduated from the Florence Academy of Art in 1995 and currently lives and works in Chelsea, London. The BBC have recently filmed a documentary on Peregrine’s portrait painting which has been aired worldwide.His paintings, including commissioned portraits of prominent executives, aristocrats, and socialites, have been exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Academy, and are collected and exhibited all over the world. Peregrine Heathcote’s paintings conjure a world of intoxicating glamour and intrigue, slipping across the boundaries of time to fuse iconic pre-war design with modern conceptions of beauty and silverscreen-era romance. The images could depict a dream world—the pure artistic vision of a painter fascinated with the bygone glamour of his parents’ youth and his own childhood spent in Britain and Dubai, but also by the contemporary incarnation of glamour in an international jet-set culture. The images could be literal representations of actors on movie sets, or real-life models letting their contemporary sensibilities peek through as they pose against period backdrops. Each canvas suggests a story, prompting us to imagine the circumstances around a single crucial scene. Heathcote purposefully leaves such questions open, allowing us room to construct multiple narratives. This weaving in and out of various realities, blending the literal and metaphoric is achieved with great skill, imagination, and ingenuity.

Born in Belgium in 1969, Anja Van Herle combines a European sense of high fashion in her artwork with an American sense of wonder. Her childhood years were devoted to exploring the fundamentals of her art using crayons, pencils and watercolors. In 1987, she enrolled in Belgium’s Higher Institute for Art Education where she earned a Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting. In 2003, Anja relocated to Los Angeles, where she now concentrates on figurative paintings that are inspired by both classic and contemporary fashion while exploring issues of identity, emotion and human interrelationships. As timelessly chic as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Anja’s women are playfully sexy, and their expressions and eyes tell stories that go far beyond the simple exhibition of fine fashion. In Anja’s masterful hands, fashion becomes alive.

These artists will inspire, provoke, engage and mesmerize. With visual perceptions always changing, peek behind the stories told and you're sure to find the right artistic expression!