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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

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...

Social Media: Defining Your Target Market

By Barbra Drizin  There are many bells and whistles on Facebook that most users know nothing about. A few tweaks, following the steps below, allow you to focus your social media efforts, so that your posts reach carefully tailored audiences—your "target market.” These...

When Lee Krasner Met Piet Mondrian

Can you picture the austere Dutch modernist dancing barefoot? “Critic Clement Greenberg would describe Mondrian’s work as ‘passion mastered and cooled,’ and that described the artist as well. He had set up his studio in a Victorian house with curved arches, but in...

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...

Making Book

Why and How a Catalogue Adds Cachet In an era when vivid high-quality images can be accessed in a nanosecond on almost any available screen, why bother with something as cumbersome as a hard-copy catalogue with glossy images and real pages? Because the tangible can...

Fantasy Curating: Thinking Outside the Box

By Ruth Hiller It’s probably difficult to pinpoint the very first artist to make a shaped construction, an artwork that hovers somewhere between painting and sculpture.  The possibilities for non-rectangular paintings begin as early as the 1920s with fanciful...

The Soul of the New Machines

Using the computer to translate technology into art The first time I paid serious attention to the role computers might play in contemporary art was in 2012 (a little late in the game), when I saw the Whitney Museum of American Art’s solo for Wade Guyton, then 40. The...

Frances Ashforth: Rocks Around the Clock

Frances Ashforth’s fascination with water, sky, and undulating landscapes began early. Raised in a family of artists, she spent time as a child at her grandparents’ farm in New Hampshire, along the Connecticut River Valley. She is an avid fly fisherman and in her...

What Is a Drawing? Part Nine

After eight posts about drawings, it’s challenging to come up anything new to say about the medium, but if the materials remain largely the same, the circumstances for artists everywhere have changed dramatically in the last year. Many of the members included here...

The Fine Art of Recycling: Part Two

In looking over the images from Part One of this post, and from those below, it occurred to me how often art made from found objects and random detritus has a childlike quality about it, even though the trained eye knows there’s a sophisticated vision behind the...

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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