“…a space opened up behind that paper, a space—who knows how wide—between the paper and the wall, inaccessible but hinted at by the tear. It occurred to me that this photograph was…” Frederick Sommer, “Max Ernst, 1946.” 1946. Gelatin silver print. © Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation. Image courtesy of Bowdoin College Museum of Art, […]

…there’s also no question that locking Mr. Dial’s work into the “outsider” narrative diminishes it, turning it into artifact instead of art–-into evidence of his struggle against the often brutal and at least unforgiving injustice he was met with daily. Thornton Dial, “Tiger Likes The Lady To Stand By.” 22 x 30 inches; mixed media […]

Abstract painting requires a huge amount of faith in oneself. The process is mysterious and almost impossible to teach, as each artist needs to find his/her own way. If one can approach each painting having the love and trust that things will be all right, that an image will come eventually, we will make the […]

Like we said in Part II of our Annual Recap, what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, meditative works that brought us back to the pleasures of long looking. Here’s a shortlist of the galleries and museums we felt did right by riding the counter-current, giving us intimately scaled […]

Happily, the best of 2013 was not the biggest. Happily, because art–and the market that seems to drive it–has trended toward the big: the big wall-power painting and print, the gigantor sculpture; and the big spaces and names that can accommodate. But what stayed with us most from 2013 was mostly small and mostly quiet, […]

Because it’s really that place which is unreachable … at which the poem becomes ours… A personal note. For all of the what seemed, between 2001 and 2007, the ugliest of hate feuds, I turned to four poets—not for solace, but for connection. I was in Jerusalem then, a city that too often gives as […]

Each painting emerges from recollections of places seen and imagined, music and conversations heard, emotions, expectations and anticipation — all of it gets transferred onto the surface through color and structure. Painting is pulling stuff out of mental storage and adding to the supply at the same time. REW/FF: New Work by Emilia Dubicki 30 […]

I’ve been home from Italy since the beginning of September, so these images, these residues, are distillations of memory that can only come with time. Unlike working directly in nature, maybe what monotypes offered me, from the beginning, was a way of reflecting on an aspect that…is absolutely impossible to approach or to understand sitting […]

The degree to which the painter is transformed by their process is the degree by which the viewer can be transformed by, or enabled to “enter,” the painting. It’s not a finite record or exchange, but in the face of that genuine and meaningful articulation of transformation, the viewer does feel it, does “know it.” […]

© Magdalena Solé. From After the Water Receded. “The storms are getting worse–more frequent and more intense. And the science that says so blames climate change and points a finger at us.” That was the umph line in my comment back on October 16. A lot has happened since, storm-wise, and all of it bad. […]