RETROSPECTIVE ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF JOSEPH SHEPPARD
JULY 12 to OCTOBER 11, 2025
Cumberland, Maryland
RETROSPECTIVE ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF JOSEPH SHEPPARD
JULY 12 to OCTOBER 11, 2025
Cumberland, Maryland
"A reincarnation of the Renaissance artists ..." La Nazione Magazine, Florence, Italy.
Joseph Sheppard, born in Owings Mills, Maryland, is a celebrated realist painter and sculptor known for his classical technique and expressive realism. A graduate of MICA and Guggenheim Fellow, he taught painting and anatomy there from 1960 to 1975. His public commissions include Baltimore’s Brooks Robinson bronze, the Pope John Paul II Monument, and the Holocaust Memorial, along with murals for the Baltimore Police Department and National Aquarium.
The Ferleman Gallery is honored to host a landmark retrospective celebrating the life and work of Joseph Sheppard, showcasing his enduring legacy as one of America’s foremost realist painters and sculptors.
Ferleman Gallery is pleased to announce Echoes of Light, a solo exhibition by painter Wendell Myers. This timely presentation of thirty-two works arrives at a moment when collective uncertainty and division underscore the need for visual clarity and quietude. Through luminous explorations of color, form, and nature, Myers invites a return to sensorial presence and contemplative stillness.
In a period marked by political tumult and social fracture, Echoes of Light offers more than aesthetic pleasure—it functions as a visual refuge, a meditative space in which the natural world speaks in chromatic whispers and radiant gestures. Trees shimmer in defiance of despair, skies stretch toward hope, and flowers bloom with unapologetic vitality. Myers' paintings articulate a counterpoint to chaos, restoring attention to beauty, resilience, and the subtle harmonies of lived experience.
Highlights include Garnet Hill (2025), a commanding topography of deep reds and shadowed greens that suggests both internal and external landscapes of reckoning, and Pink and Yellow Flowers (2025), where compressed spatial relationships become metaphors for constraint, adaptation, and renewal.
Wendel Myers, a former potter and passionate jazz enthusiast, brings a deep appreciation for spontaneity, improvisation, and the beauty of unexpected outcomes to his painting. Inspired by the dynamic interplay of color and form, his process mirrors the essence of jazz—listening, reacting, and creating simultaneously. Much like working with clay and glazes in a kiln, where elements can be influenced but never fully controlled, his approach to painting embraces spontaneity and discovery. His abstract landscapes are rich with personal history, reflecting memories of places he has lived and traveled—from the vast great plains and serene lake country of his youth to the rugged Carolina mountains, sweeping seascapes, the desert Southwest, and the timeless landscapes of Europe.
Abstract Meditations on Memory and Place
Echoes of Light explores the evocative interplay of color, texture, and form, reflecting Wendell Myers’ immersive engagement with the natural and atmospheric nuances of the French countryside.
Chromatic Dialogues: Intersections of Red and Form
Pink and Yellow Flowers
Titled Pink and Yellow Flowers, this exuberant painting merges gestural abstraction with floral motifs, featuring vibrant pink, yellow, and white blooms erupting from a vivid green vessel against a saturated fuchsia background. Energetic splatters and expressive brushwork activate the canvas, creating a dynamic interplay between spontaneity and form. The high-chroma palette and layered textures evoke a post-minimalist sensibility, transforming the traditional still life into an immersive, affect-driven composition that privileges the materiality and movement of paint over strict representation.
Flowers in Purple Pot
Flowers in Purple Pot, is a radiant composition that channels a joyful vitality through its interplay of bold color and kinetic brushwork. Bursting from a rounded lavender vessel, clusters of crimson, lemon-yellow, and blush-pink blossoms pulse with energy against a vivid tangerine background. Myers employs dynamic splashes, drips, and layered pigment to blur the boundaries between representation and abstraction, conjuring a sense of spontaneous movement. Eschewing traditional still life conventions, the work leans into visual exuberance and chromatic intensity, offering an immersive, sensory experience grounded in color, rhythm, and expressive immediacy.
Blue Vase on Green Table
This composition radiates playful energy, with splashes of vibrant red, green, and pink foliage emerging from a cobalt blue vase atop a tranquil green table. The layered textures and expressive splatters create a dynamic interplay of controlled precision and spontaneous movement, evoking a celebratory ode to color, form, and the joy of creation.
Interview with Chuck Fischer & Mark Lester
The Form & Function Exhibit featured an interview with Dr. Thomas Ferleman, Chuck Fischer, and Mark Lester, exploring the balance of beauty and utility in their work. Fischer shared insights on his sculptural designs, while Lester highlighted the tactile artistry of his pottery, inspiring audiences with their creative
CHUCK FISCHER
Dimensional Harmonies: The Intuitive Forms of Chuck Fischer
Chuck Fischer’s work operates at the nexus of spatial form and conceptual narrative, where each piece unfolds as an exploration of material transformation and visual syntax. His practice engages with layered forms and textures, merging intuitive design with a meticulous attention to detail. Through a dynamic interplay of structure, color, and medium, Fischer's creations transcend their physicality, inviting viewers into a realm of aesthetic resonance and interpretive fluidity.
Rooted in a dialogue between traditional craft and innovative expression, Fischer’s art redefines the boundaries of two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. His compositions pulse with rhythmic geometries and interwoven planes, cultivating a balance between chaos and order, spontaneity and precision. This synthesis underscores his ability to evoke both immediacy and timelessness, rendering his works as immersive environments that challenge and expand the parameters of contemporary artistic discourse.
MARK LESTER
Transcendent Vessels: The Functional Artistry of Mark Lester
Sculptural form by Mark Lester blur the boundaries between aesthetic expression and utility, embodying the essence of functional art. Its earthy, textured surface contrasts with the smooth, convex lenses embedded throughout, creating a compelling interplay between raw materiality and polished refinement. These reflective elements not only distort and capture light, engaging the viewer’s perception, but also hint at the object's dual existence as both a contemplative artwork and a functional piece.
The work’s contours evoke themes of containment and transformation, suggesting a purposeful design that transcends pure decoration. Lester’s piece invites interaction, serving not only as a meditation on the interplay of light, shadow, and texture but also as a functional object within the everyday. This duality underscores its place at the intersection of utility and artistry, demonstrating Lester’s ability to imbue practical forms with conceptual depth and sculptural elegance.
Experience the Ferleman Gallery
Mark Lester
Chuck Fischer
Chuck Fischer
This sculptural relief by Mark Lester explores the tension between creation and fragmentation, offering a meditative study on the themes of accumulation, repetition, and deconstruction. The work features an array of white ceramic forms resembling abstracted vessels, their uniformity disrupted by fractured and incomplete shapes. Each element within the composition maintains a tactile intimacy, showcasing the organic irregularities of hand-formed clay.
Chuck Fischer
Chuck Fischer
Chuck Fischer
This work by Chuck Fischer embodies a dynamic fusion of dimensionality and narrative, utilizing fabric-like folds and angular structural elements to create a layered, sculptural painting. The piece is dominated by a richly draped crimson "curtain," evoking the fluidity and drama of textiles while rendered with precise, painterly technique. Below, fragmented wooden frames extend outward in a deconstructed rhythm, exposing inner compositions of smaller, framed elements.
Watch the interview Rebecca Ferleman did with Kim Klabe
Klabe's artistic journey, evolving from representational art to mixed media, now focuses on exploring the beauty and struggles of women through layered, textured works that convey resilience, vulnerability, and emotional depth.
Different Paths
Different Paths presents a solitary female figure, her profile imbued with quiet introspection, gazing off into an ambiguous distance as though contemplating the divergent paths before her. The textured layers of muted tones, contrasted with scribbled text and the intricate patterning of her hat, evoke a narrative of choices, identity, and the passage of time, inviting the viewer to reflect on the personal and existential decisions that shape one's journey.
Presence
Presence captures a woman whose striking, steady gaze evokes a sense of quiet power and introspection, set against a backdrop of deep shadows and abstract text. The layered textures, intricate paper fragments forming her collar, and bold tonal contrasts heighten the tension between strength and vulnerability, inviting the viewer to contemplate her complex emotional depth and the silent narrative written across her face and surroundings.
Different State
This mixed-media composition presents a haunting interplay of human emotion and symbolism. The monochromatic face gazes outward with wide, expressive eyes—suggesting a moment of inner contemplation or withheld emotion, as one hand gently covers the mouth. Her expression oscillates between vulnerability and quiet strength. The text, partially obscured but legible in places—"Shut your mouth"—implies an undercurrent of repression or muted voice. The Klabe creates a tactile dialogue between fragility and defiance, employing rough textures, blurred words, and visual fragments that invite the viewer to engage with themes of silence, voice, and the complexity of identity. This tension between speech and silence, between what is said and left unsaid, forms the emotional core of the work, encouraging introspection on both personal and collective experiences of restraint.
Explore the works of Kim Klabe
For years, she was confined by the belief that only through representational art could she gain acceptance in the art world, where an ocean must resemble an ocean, and a tree must mimic its real-world counterpart—her work, she felt, had to be worthy of adorning a domestic space to be deemed legitimate.
This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary artistic journey of Hilmar Udo Fister Gottesthal, whose career spans over five decades and traverses Austria, Turkey, Greece, and the United States. Renowned for his captivating abstract expressionism, Gottesthal weaves dynamic compositions that explore the intricate interplay of movement, light, and form. His work is distinguished by a masterful command of color and geometry, crafting a visual dialogue that effortlessly transitions between structure and fluidity, order and chaos. This collection invites viewers into a world where the boundaries of abstraction are pushed, offering profound insights into the balance of the seen and the felt.
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