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UNDER THE RADAR

A spotlight for members.

Cindy Blakeslee

Recent Feature

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Talk about “Surrealism” in conversation with artists and art lovers you are most likely to think of works by Dalí, Magritte, Tanguy, Ernst, or possibly Paul Delvaux. Mention “American Surrealism,” and the terrain gets tricky. Didn’t Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and...

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Recent Feature

L.A. Confidential

L.A. Confidential

The first in a series of reports on the art world.  In May, it seemed like we were almost entirely out of the woods with Covid-19, and then along came the Delta variant and the post-pandemic euphoria rapidly dissipated. Still, as long-time observers of the Los Angeles...

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From the Vasari21 Archives

Absolutely, Positively My Last Post About Instagram

Why does Patti Smith feel a need to post on Instagram? Is it important to her to have nearly 600,000 followers? When she uploads a photo, does she read all the comments (which can be as many as 2,000, last I checked)? Does she ever respond? She’s already a star—what...

Fantasy Curating: Perfectly Imperfect

By Jina Brenneman Post-disciplinary, Neo Craft, Sloppy Craft, and the Hyper Pot are all descriptors that attempt to classify the seismic shift in contemporary ceramics. Artificial in nature, these technicolor works drip with irregularities, gloppy blobs, and bulges...

What Is a Drawing? Part Seven

One evening in the fall of 1940, at the peak of the German blitzkrieg in Britain, Henry Moore took cover during an air raid in the Belsize Park underground station in London. There he encountered dozens of others who had also scurried belowground to seek shelter from...

A Tribute to Jake Berthot (1939-2015)

I met Jake Berthot in 1992 while I was in my junior year at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I had already discovered his work and fallen in love with it. So much so that I tried copying everything I saw that I liked…

Reflecting on Vermeer

For years I’ve looked at different works by countless artists. I’ve looked at different objects from all different periods of time—ancient, Renaissance, modern, post-war, contemporary, along with the efforts of teachers, friends, and…

Return to Sender

Before you fire off an email to a gallery, do your homework. And don’t get your hopes up too high. Out of idle curiosity, I recently asked a dealer friend about how many email submissions or inquiries she receives per week. I don’t precisely remember the answer, but...

Art Dealers Face Down the Pandemic

The fallout for small businesses—restaurants, shops, law offices, movie theaters, nail salons, you name it—during the global devastation wrought by Covid19 has been dire. And many art galleries, those not in the Gagosian or Pace stratosphere, qualify as small...

What Is a Drawing? Part Two

Since I am the sort of person who damn near weeps when she sees a great Degas pastel (like Waiting, 1882, above), it’s not surprising that drawings are perhaps the medium closest to my heart. I love the spontaneity, the economy of means, and the sense that one is as...

My Mother, My Self

Lessons and inspiration from an artist mom By Patricia Moss-Vreeland In all my years of training as an artist, both at the University of the Arts and Tyler School of Art, I can recall many gifted and inspiring teachers, but none gave me quite so solid a sense of...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Helen Lundeberg

By Jane Barthes  As an artist originally from Europe—and one whose own path did not begin with abstraction—I confess I possessed a rather rudimentary knowledge of geometric abstraction, particularly American hard-edge abstraction. It was at Art Expo in Chicago in 2015...

Archived Feature

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

 By Lee Albert Hill As a painter myself I am drawn to the work of other painters first and foremost.  Especially those who demonstrate a dedication to a lush, hands-on, painterly approach and an emphasis on refined craft and detail.  For this curation I have chosen...

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Archived Feature

Suggestions for Summer Reading

Suggestions for Summer Reading

Get a jump on the season with a beach-bag full of memoirs Perhaps because I’ve been working on one of my own (“Rotten Romance,” dispatched via Substack every Sunday), memoirs have been much on my mind. For purely recreational reading, I often prefer first-person...

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Archived Feature

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

It’s a brave artist who attempts to say something new about landscape. The genre has been around since ancient times, when frescoes of Arcadian vistas adorned the walls of upscale villas, and its popularity has waxed and waned according to the talents and interests of...

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Archived Under the Radar

Marietta Patricia Leis

Marietta Patricia Leis

Like many little girls, Marietta Patricia Leis first set her sights on becoming a ballerina. “At the age of seven I was entranced with wanting to be a ballet dancer,” she says. As a child in suburban East Orange, NJ, she studied dance every day after school, and...

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Archived Under the Radar

Susan English

Susan English

When Susan English was three or four years old, she lived in Belgium with her family for a couple of years. Years later she still remembers a babysitter named Hele placing a candle inside a child’s play igloo. “It made a big impression on me,” English says. “The light...

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 Archived Podcast

Alice Robb: Why We Dream

Alice Robb: Why We Dream

In the summer of 2011, science writer Alice Robb discovered a book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, which promised readers that they could control the plots of their dreams.

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