Brauer Museum of Art

Here are brief biographies for our judges for this year’s Secondary School Showcase. We at the Brauer Museum are pleased to work with such accomplished artists.

Predominantly a landscape painter for more than twenty years, Ron Wennekes has gathered material for his work from every place that he has had the privilege to experience or imagine. The discipline of working from life for years has facilitated his working from within the realm of imagination and memory.

Searching for the abstract in nature, Ron works intuitively even when working on location. “I look at my work as abstractions sublimated by imagery, just as there is an abstract energetic or spiritual anatomy underlying everything we see in our world.”

Based in Beverly Shores, Wennekes has exhibited his art in the broader Chicago area since 1980. His work has been juried into national and international exhibitions and won numerous awards.

Ron studied painting at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Oxbow school in Saugutuck, Michigan. He studied sculpture at the NaGuib School of Sculpture in Beverly Shores, Indiana, formerly an affiliate of Louis University. He has worked as a commercial sculptor in the Chicago area and is an accomplished illustrator as well.

Living and working in a community nestled in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore some fifty miles outside of Chicago lends Valerie Taglieri the opportunity to observe cycles in nature interfaced with the presence of man. Valerie takes these observations and translates them into images that hover between the abstract and the representational. Whether it is in her paintings or installations, her imagery reveals this dual space of the real and non-real, the tangible and intangible.

“My work is of sacred moments where time stands still and the exterior becomes interior; a frozen moment in time where space for beauty exists.”

Valerie considers herself a colorist using painting techniques of broken color and glazing. Glazing is an old master’s technique where many layers of thin oil paint are applied to a surface creating an effect of color as light.

As an artist, Valerie has exhibited her work for more than twenty years. She has had solo exhibitions in Chicago, New York City and Minneapolis. Her work is in numerous corporate and private collections.

She received a BFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she also received an Art Teaching Certification for grades K-12. Valerie received her MFA from Columbia College, Chicago.

A statement from this year’s Secondary School Showcase judges:

“We would like to congratulate every student that submitted work for the 2008 Secondary School Showcase. It was an honor and our privilege to view the many fine pieces of art. It was a difficult task editing down to a manageable and displayable number. We edited as much as we could and ended up with 82 works of art.

Our objective was to not be critics in our choices but to create an exhibition showing the diversity of ideas and craftsmanship from a very talented body of students. Without exception, we saw the merit in every entry.

When it came down to choosing the work, we had to look at the strengths of every piece and determine which ones spoke the loudest to us. Others were not selected because their images were not clear enough for us to ascertain the works’ finer details.

Because of the high quality of every entry, we emphatically encourage all entrants to continue making their art.

Our best,

Ron Wennekes and Valerie Taglieri”