The Stories

Ursula caught the fever for art in high school and then pursued it more aggressively at Edgecliff College where one of her teachers, Josef Albers, led her through the The Interaction of Color, a pivotal course in how to deal with color.  Others taught classical training in composition, drawing and painting.  During her early years after graduation, she painted realistic scenes but gradually over the years found her voice and heart in abstract painting.

I see all art as a degree of abstraction.  It is simply a question of where you stop on that continuum.  An artist is seeing something with the eyes but the brain and heart processes this information through life experiences and then it comes back out and manifests itself from the hands.

What inspires my work is around all the time.  It could be when I am flipping through a magazine and see a color combination or composition.  It could be driving along the road or walking in a park … my imagination never stops … sometimes it is when I wake up in the morning with paintings in my head.  I am always looking at things and constantly feeding my brain with visual information to be processed often at an unconscious level.  

I am always challenging myself to make better paintings … and asking, “why do I find this more interesting than some other image?”.  Painting is about making choices, whether intellectual or emotional.  The ideal is to have a balance between the two sides of our humanity.

Once I start a painting, I see where it will lead me.  I listen and look. The painting will tell me what it wants and I simply do it.  When I don’t listen (impose my will), it usually is not as successful as a whole.  Sometimes, if I don’t know what to do next or go blank and I have to stop.  Over the years, I have learned to just stop and come back the next day. With fresh eyes, I usually see almost immediately what to do to finish.   How do I know when it is finished?  It will feel complete to me and let me know it is finished. That’s the hardest part.

I like to explore painting in different sizes and examine the same color but pushing it in different directions—warm to cool, lighter to darker values, transparency to opacity.  It might begin with a challenge to use a color that I haven’t focused on before and make it the most interesting and arresting color I can.

Painting is like training for a marathon.  One must paint every day or at least consistently.  You show up and do the work even if you don’t feel like it.  Sometimes the most interesting things show up when you are “not in the mood” But, you always do the work!  Actually, it isn’t really work but one of the greatest pleasures in life!

I do think that there are people that will never understand or get abstract art and that is okay.  I think it has something to do with how our brains work.  It is why some are better engineers, party planners or nurses and some of us paint abstracts. We are all given different strengths and it is up to us to find them out.   We are all on a journey of figuring out who we really are and trying to grow at the same time.

Cincinnati Art Club’s President Don Schuster uses his talent to communicate the beauty in scenes that other people often overlook.

Don’s Finneytown HS teachers recognized his gift early on and provided independent study when he advanced beyond what they could offer in class. He also gladly accepted the role as the go-to guy for high school musical set design. Later attending University of Cincinnati’s DAAP college, Don pursued printmaking as his major, but also packed his schedule with enough courses in theater design to count as a minor.

After graduating Magna Cum Laude, Don worked in the printing, packaging production art and pre-press industries. Upon leaving the corporate world, Don pursued a wide variety of art-related areas of interests ranging from making stained glass windows to restoring antiques until settling in as a full-time artist, devoted mostly to oil painting.

 “I painted Boreas’ Profound Fervor after watching the movie Mr. Turner, J.M.W. Turner’s dynamic snow painting of the train moving across the railroad trestle impressed me to the point where I wanted to tackle a snow nocturn of my own. I worked from daytime photos of the other side of the U.S.S. Constitution and views of the naval yard in Boston where there had been a great blizzard. I did thumbnails, enlarged my drawing by freehand on the canvas and transformed day into night.”

The content of Don’s work is largely focused on landscapes – from cityscapes to rural environments. He seeks to document visually-striking focal features and draw the viewer into the scene – evoking feelings of being part of the locale he depicts. Many of his landscapes, such as Gregory Creek 12, are part of series about particular places around Cincinnati from multiple perspectives and over the course of changing seasons.

“My hope is that if I single out things that catch my eye, others may start noticing the extraordinary visual wonders of this region.”

“Working on drawing skills is so important and figure is one of the hardest areas to do well… That’s why Sketch Group has been so helpful in bringing back my figurative perception. I don’t want the people in my paintings to look flat, like they’ve been painted from photos.”

Don also became involved with Southwest Ohio Plein Air – SWOPA – to regularly brave challenges posed by changing light, often inclement weather and sometimes uninvited critters. Plein air work can yield subject matter for more complex studio paintings. But in the hands of an experienced plein air painter such as Don, they can stand on their own merits.

Don also regularly attends the Signature Critique, which serves as an informative and supportive vehicle for artists of varying skill levels to improve.

As a board member of the Cincinnati Art Club for six years and the Club’s current president, Don has high respect for the Club and its heritage of highly regarded artists. He also is a member of Oil Painters of America, the Art Renewal Center, the Ohio Plein Air Society, SWOPA, Fitton Art Center and Arts Alliance Painters.

Don also participates in exhibitions and has won many awards, including numerous times being featured in the Bold Brush FAV 15, being awarded the Architectural Artist of the Year at ACA 2018, and getting three Meritorious and a Finalist piece in last year’s Richeson 75- Landscape, Seascape & Architecture.  His work has been featured in Artist’s Magazine and Venue Magazine and he is represented by the Eisele Gallery of Fine Art and Bodenheimer-Mayer House Gallery.

Milton O’Dell, Signature member of the Cincinnati Art Club, died this past July.

Milton found inspiration for his work in the urban and rural environment of the greater Cincinnati area. Travels in this country and abroad fed his fascination with portraiture and the human figure.

Milton graduated from the Central Academy of Commercial Art. He held a BS in Fine Arts and a MEd from the University of Cincinnati. He studied with Paul Chidlaw, Arthur Helwig, Reginald Grooms, and Robert Fabe. Milton began his career as an illustrator for the Gibson Greeting Card Co. where he developed his love of bold brushwork techniques emphasizing the form and structure of his subjects. Milton taught in the Cincinnati Public Schools. He was regularly active in the Art Club as Sketch Group Moderator and later encouraged Paul Fisher to take these duties over. His friendship with Paul was always evident.