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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

How To Explain Pictures to a Difficult Date

I live in a tiny town in northern New Mexico, one where the chances of meeting an available man of a certain age are, shall we say, extremely limited. So when you do encounter one who owns a car, has a college degree, and doesn’t chew tobacco, your hopes can get sort of…

Scams and Shams in the Art World: Part One

Several years ago, I heard about a woman, a self-styled art adviser, who would invite artists to a plush hotel room and for a fee of $500 lend an hour of her time to look over portfolios and then write down…

Artists and Critics: Part 3

When I first started working on staff at ARTnews, a little more than 20 years ago, I was on the brink of a divorce after several years of freelancing and corporate wifedom (at which I was not very good). The magazine represented both….

Artists and Critics: Part Two

Not to sound like too much of a fogey, but there was a time when the art world abounded with publications devoted to art—Art in America, Studio International, Arts magazine, Artforum, Art News…

What Turns Critics On (and Off)

When I was regularly writing reviews for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, two great gigs that petered out for different reasons, I was occasionally conscious of having biases toward work that rang my chimes in a big way and against art that confused me or left me...

Plein-Air Painting Today

Thirteen Who Head for the Open Air...in Spite of the Challenges Artists in significant numbers first took to the great outdoors to work in natural surroundings and more accurately transcribe the effects of light nearly 200 years ago, following the example of landscape...

Studio Pets

How Could We Manage Without Them? Last week I announced our first annual Studio Pet Photos competition, but they were all so adorable, it was a tough call. The grand prize, though, belongs to Mariella Bisson’s Senegal parrot and studio manager, Creature (shown above),...

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...

The “Aha!” Moment, Part One

Artists Share Moments of Discovery A few weeks ago, before making the great trans-Taos trek from Cottam Road to Camino del Monte, I asked Vasari21 members if they had ever experienced what I call the “aha!” moment—a sudden realization that a material, a way of...

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...

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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