Lavetta Rhinehart Two for 1 Still Life 36 x 36 oil $8500.00	Lavetta Rhinehart Porcelain 24 x 30 oil $6500.00	Lavetta Rhinehart Poetry 8 x 10 oil on board $1500.00
Lavetta Rhinehart Piano Lesson 8 x 10 oil on board $1500.00	Lavetta Rhinehart My Red Hat 8 x 10 oil on board $1500.00	Lavetta Rhinehart Masquerade 8 x 10 oil on board $1500.00
Lavetta Rhinehart Red, White, and Blue 24 x 36 oil on canvas $4000.00	Lavetta Rhinehart We Three 12 x 24 oil on board $4000.00	Lavetta Rhinehart Greetings 12 x 16 oil on board $2000.00
Charles Rhinehart Buffalo River 44 x 60 oil on canvas $31,000.00	Charles Rhinehart Mount Sophris 36 x 48 oil on canvas $20,000.00	Charles Rhinehart Solitude

Rhinehart Biography

Lavetta Rhinehart’s goal is to express who she is by her own style and creative principals. Her work has been exhibited in many galleries in the USA and is collected both nationally and internationally. Ever since childhood, Lavetta Rhinehart has known she was meant to be an artist.  She took on extra art projects and invented reasons to paint all through her school days in south, central Missouri.  As a young married woman with children, she again took up oil painting on her own.  She studied the known painters and enjoyed the impressionists and copied the techniques and color arrangements of some of the masters.  However, she never made a direct copy of their paintings, as it was pointed out to her in the third grade that “it is impossible to make a better copy than the original”.

Early on she was drawn to modern and abstract art, but could not understand the governing laws behind it.  Lavetta felt it was too ambiguous to seriously attempt, although she felt it was a superior way of true self-expression.  Rhinehart says she knows now that the same rules and laws that apply to realism apply to modern and abstract art.  A master in abstract art must first learn to paint realism. During this time Lavetta found some success as she sold her own paintings to friends that commissioned small works.  However, she felt that she wanted to know more.  She wanted to learn something about art for certain; about the rules and laws that governed, about the theory of light and dark, of color theory and brush handling.     She says, “I sought a teacher, at long last, and found M. Charles Rhinehart, none better!  I took a landscape class with Charles and fell instantly in love with the rules, the theories, and the teacher.  And I studied hard the rules, the theories, and the teacher and I learned them all very well.” 

Now in retrospect, she knows that her life and her career have been greatly enhanced by her marriage of 27 years to that same noted landscape painter, M. Charles Rhinehart.  The Rhinehart's have travel and painted together since 1975, leaving their native Missouri for a trip to the Grand Canyon and Arizona.  For the remainder of the 1970’s the Rhineharts' explored and painted the West, including Wyoming and Utah while making trips back to the boot heel of Missouri to open a studio and a gallery and to teach.  During the recession of the late 1970’s the Rinehart's decided to settle down into a quieter life and moved to a small town on the Missouri/ Arkansas border.  It was during this time they were introduced to the Knox Galleries and began what has become a 22 year relationship. 

In the early 1980’s the Rhineharts' put their belongings into storage to travel extensively and sketch and paint the Rocky Mountains and the San Juan Mountains.  Following this they returned to south, central Missouri and purchased the first of their five commercial buildings.  This compound of architectural reconstructions, allows them to live in a loft apartment, with a studio downstairs and a gallery/ workshop in the building east of that.  To this day, this area remains the Rhineharts’ home. Throughout the last two decades, traveling, sketching ideas and returning home to paint has been the Rinehart's’ way of life.  They have frequently gone on river painting trips that include the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, Buffalo, Arkansas, Green, Snake and Colorado rivers.  Other sketching travels include trips to Yosemite National Park, the Great Sand Dunes, Texas’s Big Bend National Park, the Great Lakes area and Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison to name a few. 

In her travels with her husband, Lavetta Rhinehart has viewed a seemingly endless landscape of faces and has committed to memory, and recorded with pencil, the hills and valleys of cheekbone, nose, eyebrow, chin, hairline, eye, ear, neck, much as you would tree, rock, mountain, canyon and river valleys. Lavetta Rhinehart has experimented with many techniques and subjects, including landscape, floral, seascape, interiors, but she always returns to her predominate subject matter, the female face and form.  She says, “The female presence, as a subject of my work, is intended to be a celebration of women as the symbol of the creative nature within our known universe.  When I paint the female figure, I do so as a female expressing experiences of female-ness, not femininity.”  Her fascination with this subject is limitless, because of her constant source of new material.  New faces are encountered always with the same questions.  Who is this person?  What is behind her eyes?  For the eyes are the one place that thoughts and experiences cannot hide.

“The works of Booth, Bonnard, Vuillard, Whistler, Sargent, Vermeer, Parrish and finally, Klimt and the Icons of the 14^th century have been a constant in my studies.  A blending of these is the final result of subject, technique and content with my own twist.”  Gold leafing, an ancient technique, was used by late 14^th century Icon artists.  Lavetta Rhinehart’s painting medium of oil and 22kt gold leaf incorporates this knowledge and her own skill.  The use of gold leaf is a talent in itself.  Gold leaf is fragile, thinner than tissue, measuring 3” by 3” of pure 22k gold.  The leaves are produced by hammering the gold into thin sheets.  The pains-taking application requires planning and an understanding of the method of application.  The gold cannot be handled without breaking up and floating away, or sticking to almost any surface.  “Gold is the symbol of transcendent love, a concept of ultimate union beyond carnality and flesh.” [Laura Payne]

 “I don’t usually like to ‘tell all’ about a painting.  I’d rather the viewer interpret some of his own nature into the painting to allow it to be a more personal exchange.  I suppose this is because I am a very intimate person.  For me to explain each piece of art that I produce would be a seeming attempt to justify or validate it.  I paint and let the result be the justification, the pleasure that I glean and the appreciation of the audience the validation.”  She continues work with the female expression through theme, form and face to convey a timeless, universal feeling of what it is to be in the physical and emotional spirit of the female being.

77 W. Bridge Street  New Hope PA 18938 (215) 862-5272 - Open Tues. - Sat. 10 - 5pm, Sun. 12 - 5pm, and by appointment 

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