Retrospective | Doyle Chappell
Opening Party — July 18th 4pm-6pm
On Display through September 15th
DOYLE CHAPPELL is a mixed media artist who has specialized in large scale portraits throughout his career. Chappell paints in a distinctive contemporary style, creating colorful works that evoke a sense of life and energy through a fearless use of color. Chappell often incorporates found objects into both his portraits and abstract works, imbuing the paintings with a talismanic sense of presence and memory.
From the beginning of his art studies at the University of Texas, Chappell preferred painting people to other subjects. His sensitive depictions of friends and family members embody universal, intangible qualities that motivate and define each individual. Admirers of Chappell’s portraits have observed that his paintings seem to reflect a kind of inner spirit that expresses much more than surface appearance. He finds all ages to have special beauty.
While having focused on portraiture in oils throughout most of his career, Chappell currently works mainly in acrylic, as that medium most suites his spontaneous, painterly brushwork and heavy, textural layering of colors. Chappell’s portraits are included in many private collections. While some of his favorite paintings are of “just plain folks”, he has also been commissioned to represent such well known subjects as Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of President Lyndon Johnson and wife of Virginia Senator Charles Robb with her children, Senator and Mrs. Warren Magnuson, and actress Daryl Hannah.
Spring 2026
Ready to Transform | Teresa James
Teresa James is an accomplished printmaker and artist and has specialized in intaglio printmaking throughout her professional career. She has spent the past few years perfecting the integration of drawing, photography, computer-generated imagery, and 19th-century photographic processes. These prints represents the culmination of her experiments, merging these disparate elements to create large-scale cyanotypes that invite the viewer into a parallel realm of the unseen.
James’ works have long explored spiritual or religious themes, taking their inspiration from such various sources as Catholic iconography, the Italian Renaissance, Mexican Surrealism, and American folk art. In this latest series, she lifts the veil that obscures our double existence in the temporal and metaphysical worlds. Everyday people and animals—many of them James’s friends and their pets—are revealed as agents in the eternal battle of good and evil, their heroic spirits armored or winged. Behind these works lie other invisible struggles: the artist’s painstaking labor to balance the generative forces of nature, man, and machine, and the soul’s resolve to manifest optimism and grace in the face of life’s trials. At their core, these are portraits of faith, bathed in a celestial blue.
“My imagery is spiritual and surreal” says Teresa. “I am inspired by the idea of an unseen world existing all around us of which we are not typically aware. I am interested in the themes of purity and innocence, which is why I draw children and animals -I feel they are the closest things to angels on earth. In some work, I make reference to a constant battle between good and evil. The armored dogs that I depict are a reference to this narrative. I believe there is a thin veil between the living on earth and what has gone before us. I want the viewer to feel they are a part of this world and atmosphere that I have created.”
Teresa James has been an artist and printmaker in Chicago for the past 25 years. In 1991, while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, she was approached by artist Tony Fitzpatrick to assist with his studio, Big Cat Press, and soon became the workshop’s master printer. In 2002, she left Big Cat to establish her own print atelier, White Wings Press. Her prints and drawings have been exhibited widely throughout North America and internationally, and her works are in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art, Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.
Winter 2025
Song of Songs | Ellen Holtzblatt
“In this solo exhibition, curated by Dan Addington, my paintings and drawings explore the profound connections between the physical and spiritual world. In my art I seek empathetic understanding of self and other. Landscape becomes an allegory for psychological states, emotion, evolution and decay. Through figures, earth, and sky, I explore the power and vulnerability of mind, soul, and the passage of time.
The titles for many of the portraits of my mother come from the biblical text, Song of Songs. This poetry is explicitly sensual and metaphorically spiritual, describing the intensity of the relationship between lovers. Although there is a societal disconnect between the language of sexual longing and the physicality of an elderly woman, I choose to title works of my mother from this text to convey the truth that love and the need for human contact and touch are universal and not limited by age.”
