Summer Studio Critique Program

Neysa Grassi (Lead Critic)

Neysa Grassi is known for her gouache, mixed media, and oil paintings whose surfaces reveal the intense physicality of her creative process. Through multiple layers of paint that have been applied, manipulated, wiped out, and covered again, she creates a tactile quality that variously evinces spontaneous energy or calculated meditation.  Grassi is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship and has had solo exhibitions at several museums, including the Pensacola Art Museum in Florida and PAFA, as well as numerous one-person exhibitions in galleries in Philadelphia and New York. Her work is included in the permanent collections of PAFA, the Berman Museum of Art, the Palmer Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Woodmere Art Museum. She is represented by Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. She is a critic in PAFA’s MFA program.

Alex Cohen

Alex Cohen’s seemingly casual arrangements of daily life objects belie careful composition.  His painting is a slow, meditative process with a critical delay between thought and sight and its translation into paint, allowing for wonderful inaccuracies to occur.  In his invented pieces, the subject is arrived at through the questioning of abstract suggestions (gestures on the canvas), while his observational subjects look for an abstract purpose within the recognized subject.  Cohen holds a Certificate from PAFA and a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania.  He resides in Newtown, PA, where he teaches painting and drawing and creates custom, hand-carved and gilded frames.  He also co-curates Art at Kings Oaks, an annual invitational group exhibition in Newtown, with theater artist Clara Weishahn. 

Christine Lafuente

Christine Lafuente holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and a Certificate in Painting and Printmaking from PAFA. While a student at PAFA, she was she was awarded a Louis S. Ware Memorial Scholarship for European Travel.   Based in Brooklyn, New York, Lafuente spends her summers painting in Maine.  She considers her paintings poetic responses to visual experience: “Returning home, to the rooftop of my studio in Brooklyn, the city spreads itself toward the New York Harbor like an expanse of stony outcroppings and rivulets. As the weather turns cold, I am in the studio, building still life arrangements that are like tiny cities floating on an enamel sea. I am conjuring up milky fogs in the space around each season’s crop of flowers: tulips, daffodils, peonies, roses, zinnias, ranunculus, lilies.”  She is represented by Gross-McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia.

View Christine Lafuente's recent PAFA lecture, The View from Here, in which she discusses how her experience sheltering-in-place in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, led to a reconnection to her Latina heritage and to a series of paintings inspired by her surroundings.

Bruce Samuelson

Bruce Samuelson is a faculty member of PAFA’s BFA and Graduate Programs. Informed by the principles of Old Master draftsmanship, Samuelson’s drawings and paintings expand beyond traditional methods of representation to arrive at elegant meditations on the human form. He has exhibited in over thirty solo exhibitions and his work is represented in numerous public and private collections including PAFA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Woodmere Art Museum. Samuelson is represented by J. Cacciola Galleries, New York and Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia.

Ying Li

Born in Beijing, China, Ying Li graduated from the Anhui Teachers University (1974-77) where she taught 1977-83. She immigrated to the United States in 1983 and received an MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, in 1987. As a painter, Li is known for her highly energetic, on-site landscapes that simultaneously describe direct visual experience and pure abstraction. Her uncompromising sense of personal vision combined with complete abandon in the possibilities of paint make her work style the epitome of painterliness. Ying Li lives and works in New York City and Haverford, PA, where she is currently the Phlyssa Koshland Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College.   She is represented by Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY, and Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.

Mickayel Thurin

Mickayel Thurin is a Haitian American artist based in Philadelphia. She received her Certificate from PAFA, BFA from UPENN, and MS from Penn State.  She creates colorful, expressive, abstracted portraits of her family, close friends, or herself in acrylic, collage and other mixed media, including embroidery.  Choosing subjects that she has painted many times and knows well allows Thurin to bypass niceties of the artist-model relationship in her work: “Preoccupation with the sitter’s perception of your painting is not helpful during the act of creating.  It’s better to be focused on the feeling of the thing, the arrangement of shapes, the colors of pigment...the elements. These paintings are my attempt at doing just that. If they end up capturing some of the sitter’s essence or personality, it is because of our familiarity and closeness rather than an effort at flattery. In short, these portraits are about the creation process of each painting, not about the models.” Thurin is represented by Gross-McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, is in the collection of Woodmere Art Museum, and is the founder of Seen Heard Connected, a nonprofit which aims to condition a kinder, more compassionate society by painting portraits and sharing the voices of those suffering from homelessness, mental health needs, and incarceration.