Featured artist
David Mayernik
Illinois, USA
- Sell original works
- Take commissions/assignments
- Offer workshops/classes
- Take commissions/assignments
- Offer workshops/classes
Specialty Categories
Painting/Drawing - Landscape
Mugello En Plein Air
summertime in the Mugello, north of Florence oil on canvas board |
Cecilia Metella from the Villa of Maxentius
oil on canvas board |
Porta S. Donato, Lucca
watercolor and gouache |
Painting/Drawing - Architecture
Acqua Paola, Rome
watercolor |
Capriccio Veneziano: Chiesa
imaginary Venetian landscape painting |
Arch of Drusus
oil on canvas board |
Painting/Drawing - Figurative/People
Rio Plata, Fountain of the Four Rivers
on site sanguine and white chalk on rives toned paper sketch |
Watercolor figures
10 minute watercolors of the figure |
Bust of Lenin (Delsol)
two-hour portrait session at the Palette & Chisel, Chicago oil on canvas |
Artist Statement
I practice the range of work that the Old Masters did: in the field, in the studio, in situ. And I work in the major media of the Old Masters: buon fresco, oil, watercolor & ink, sanguine pencil & trois crayons.
Practicing a variety of arts is mutually reinforcing: design informs my drawing and drawing my design, the human figure shapes my understanding of architecture and my architecture is designed to incorporate the human figure. Renaissance artists believed the same, and practiced it. The adventurous spirit of the Renaissance tradition, especially as it manifested itself in the Baroque, orients my constant study and practice.
An essential companion to that formal aspect is the role of poetics or rhetoric, the idea that art is meant to speak—to convey stories and ideas that have occupied the human imagination for millennia. Making art speak—through gesture, composition, symbols and devices, idealization, even brushstroke—is what sponsors the energy in my forms.
Bio
David Mayernik is the winner of the Gabriel Prize for research in France, the Steedman Competition Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, and the International Competition for the Minnesota State Capitol Grounds (with then partner Thomas N. Rajkovich). His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, London, Innsbruck, Rome, and Padova and published in various magazines, such as American Artist and Fine Art Connoisseur. He is the author of The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture (Routledge, UK) and Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy, (Basic books), along with numerous articles and book chapters.
For four seasons he painted period-informed Baroque opera stage sets for the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago. In 2013 he won the competition to paint the annual palio for his adopted home of Lucca in Tuscany. He studied fresco painting in Italy with renowned restorer Leonetto Tintori and has painted frescoes for the American Academy in Rome, churches in the Mugello and Ticino, and several buildings on the TASIS campus in Switzerland—where he has been the campus architect since 1996.
An Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR) and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (FRSA). In the Fall of 2022, he was a resident at the Cini Foundation in Venice and a fellow in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria.
I practice the range of work that the Old Masters did: in the field, in the studio, in situ. And I work in the major media of the Old Masters: buon fresco, oil, watercolor & ink, sanguine pencil & trois crayons.
Practicing a variety of arts is mutually reinforcing: design informs my drawing and drawing my design, the human figure shapes my understanding of architecture and my architecture is designed to incorporate the human figure. Renaissance artists believed the same, and practiced it. The adventurous spirit of the Renaissance tradition, especially as it manifested itself in the Baroque, orients my constant study and practice.
An essential companion to that formal aspect is the role of poetics or rhetoric, the idea that art is meant to speak—to convey stories and ideas that have occupied the human imagination for millennia. Making art speak—through gesture, composition, symbols and devices, idealization, even brushstroke—is what sponsors the energy in my forms.
Bio
David Mayernik is the winner of the Gabriel Prize for research in France, the Steedman Competition Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, and the International Competition for the Minnesota State Capitol Grounds (with then partner Thomas N. Rajkovich). His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, London, Innsbruck, Rome, and Padova and published in various magazines, such as American Artist and Fine Art Connoisseur. He is the author of The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture (Routledge, UK) and Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy, (Basic books), along with numerous articles and book chapters.
For four seasons he painted period-informed Baroque opera stage sets for the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago. In 2013 he won the competition to paint the annual palio for his adopted home of Lucca in Tuscany. He studied fresco painting in Italy with renowned restorer Leonetto Tintori and has painted frescoes for the American Academy in Rome, churches in the Mugello and Ticino, and several buildings on the TASIS campus in Switzerland—where he has been the campus architect since 1996.
An Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR) and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (FRSA). In the Fall of 2022, he was a resident at the Cini Foundation in Venice and a fellow in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria.
