About the artist:

Native New York artist Daniel Bennett Schwartz has been creating his view of contemporary life through traditional realism for half a century. He began this journey at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village where at the age of eight, he attended Saturday afternoon art classes. After graduating from the famed High School of Music and Art, he studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League, and in 1949, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has taught at the Parsons School of Design and has conducted a private workshop in painting for forty years. Throughout his distinguished career, Schwartz has had a steady stream of solo and group exhibitions as well as awards. His oils, watercolors, and sculpture have been shown in prestigious New York City galleries, across the country, and in Asia. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian. Dan was a legendary artist-reporter. He met and drew the personalities of "The New Wave" cinema in Paris; he lived with and chronicled the life of Mississippi river pilots; he witnessed and documented the My Lai massacre trial for Life; he created a bronze sculpture for the National Football League that has been awarded annually for the past 38 years; he joined a cast of actors to document the making of a TV drama for CBS. Schwartz created original artwork for Genocide, an Oscar-winning film documentary. In 1980 he was sent to Southeast Asia as Artist-in-Residence for the Mobil Corporation, bringing back 100 drawings and watercolors. In the following year he was commissioned to create a series of bus stop posters for the acclaimed PBS series, Masterpiece Theater. Daniel Schwartz won a record eleven Society of Illustrators Gold Medals. Portrait of the Artist, Running, published by Ruder Finn Press in April 2005, details the artist's fifteen-year struggle to complete a single, major painting. The artist can evoke the viewer's nostalgia, experience and memory; his powers of projection, his susceptibility to what is–for the viewer–magic. That magic, through the manipulation of paint or pencil, becomes an evocation, the quintessence of the thing, not merely the thing itself. The viewer fills in between the lines, as it were, and sometimes there can emerge a wonderful empathy. - Daniel Bennett Schwartz