Mortenson credits his father and grandfather as being two of his earliest role models in art making. “They were both prolific draftsmen and enjoyed painting whenever time would allow for it. Between the two of them, they created a lot of art, they made me want to create art.” Henceforth, Mortenson began his artistic journey and attended Southern Virginia University on a wrestling scholarship. After receiving his undergraduate degree in art, he returned to his family home in Utah to study life drawing and painting with Boston School Painter, Patrick Devonas and classical realist, William Whitaker. In 2006 he moved to New York to further his education in classical technique with Jacob Collins at Water Street Atelier at the Grand Central Academy of Art. After completing the four-year program at GCA Mortenson spent two additional years studying side by side with Collins in his private studio.

Gregory Mortenson has gallery representation in California, Maine, Massachusetts and Tennessee and has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs throughout the United States. In 2015 he celebrated his first solo exhibition; Zion’s Children. He teaches portrait drawing and painting at Grand Central Atelier in New York City and offers a summer course at the Center for Academic Study and Naturalistic Painting in Springville, UT, He currently lives and works in New York while maintaining a studio in his hometown of St. George Utah.

Jon was born in California and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. He earned his undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Arizona State University, where he graduated with honors in 2011. The following year he moved to New York City to study drawing and painting under Jacob Collins at the Grand Central Atelier. He graduated in 2016, and is currently a resident artist at GCA in Long Island City, New York. In 2017 Jon was awarded the Alma Schapiro Prize, a biannual affiliated fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. During his residency in Rome he studied the techniques of the great figurative artists of the classical tradition, as well as the lexicon of visual language which they used to translate an idea or narrative into a pictoral representation. Jon’s work is exhibited at Eleventh Street Arts in New York and is in private collections across the country.

David Baird (b. 1986, USA) is an oil painter and draftsman focused primarily on figurative work. While inspired by subject matter familiar to art history, his work is equally motivated by the translation of perception into painting, a process by which the sensuality of experience is in constant tension with the materiality of paint.

Benefitting from extensive exposure to some of Europe’s greatest works of art, the artist has traveled broadly. He has attended classes throughout the US and Europe, including Ryder Studio School (NM, USA), the Art Students League (NYC, USA), Studio Escalier (FR), and the Jerusalem Studio School (Jerusalem, IL). In 2019, the artist was awarded the Avigdor Arikha Masterclass Scholarship to continue his studies in Italy.

He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the inaugural exhibition Memento Vivere in 2021, celebrating the reopening of the historic Lyme Academy in Lyme, CT. In 2022, he won first prize in the New York Figurative Show at the prestigious Salmagundi Club in New York, NY, and was subsequently invited to exhibit in the first ever annual Hartley Invitational at the same institution in 2022 and 2023.

The artist conducts workshops around the US and Europe. Since 2015 he has been visiting faculty at Studio Escalier, a contemporary classical art center based in France. In 2024 he joined the esteemed faculty at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Lyme, CT, where he currently lives and works.