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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

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...

Vasari21 Goes to the Movies: Part Two

Photo credits: bottom of page Why watch a documentary about an artist? We have biographies and museum and gallery shows and catalogues and other ways of entering the lives and minds of the more memorable figures in the visual arts. Yet a documentary can offer an...

The Business of Art Business Coaching, Part One

When you need more than a little help from your friends, seek out a coach I’m not sure when or why I started thinking about the business of art coaching, though I was a guest for one of Paul Klein’s webinars more than a year ago. After I mastered Instagram this...

The Educated Eye, Part One

Why is an art critic’s judgment better than yours—or maybe not? A few months back I did a stupid thing on Facebook and opined that I did not think Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor was very good (check out the hands and drapery), and that I found her pose in a...

In the Beginning (Nonbiblical Version)

By Ed Haddaway In many ways my lifetime has been spent in what was our backyard. Far from being chained like our first collie, Lassie (in the1950s there was no other possible dog anyone, anywhere, could have), I have roamed freely for these past 68 years. In fact,...

Selling on Instagram

Eight Tips to Sharpen Your Marketing Skills A few years back, a report in the online edition of Vogue predicted that “Instagram’s arguably positive democratization of high art will see the end of many an art dealer’s career.” Well, I very much doubt that because...

Josef Albers: Beyond Light and Shade

Most of Josef Albers’s paintings are very unusual and far more complex than they initially appear; they are not about Op art, color theory, or Minimalism. They are about paying attention. Just as his famous book on color theory…

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part One

The Red Queen from Filippucci's "Chess Series" By Sandra Filippucci I’m about to enter a new and revolutionary digital art market. A traditionally trained artist of the Boomer generation, I've been working with technology since the mid-1980s in both my own work and...

Destructive Impulses

Even the most famous artists torch, shred, and otherwise annihilate works that don't seem up to snuff In 1967, Agnes Martin began seeking out her earlier works with the intention of destroying everything she could find. That was about ten years after she had decided...

Girl, Unexpectedly Interrupted

In which I try to have a romance with an older man, a real artist. But Mother knows better. During my last semester in college, I worked part time at the university store (fondly known as the “screw store” for its inflated prices on stuff like toothpaste and shampoo)....

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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