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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

Still More Residencies….

Located in the Chiang Mai province of northern Thailand, ComPeung offers residencies from two weeks to three months on spectacular grounds comprising 2.8 acres of fishing lakes, forests, and mountains as part of what the website calls the country’s “first...

Fun and Games

When is a prank a work of art? And when is it just a one-liner? During a panel on the “Art of Pranks” at a convention of the College Art Association a few years back, a participant identified as Clark Stoeckley, “Artivist,” maintained a totally impassive, even bored,...

ART AND TECHNOLOGY: The Soul of the New Machines, Part 2

Throughout the history of art there have been innovations that have entirely revolutionized the way work is made, looked at, and thought about. Painting with oils, the technique invented and perfected by Early Netherlandish artists, meant that a higher degree of...

Signs of the Times

Vasari21 members weigh in on a depressing political climate Artists have always responded to the temper of their times. War and catastrophe, social inequities and racial injustice, corrupt politicians and noble heroes often bring out the best in artists—think of...

First Encounters

The art that made artists want to be artists In almost every artist’s life there are inevitably one or more works that ignite a spark or at least plant a seed, provoking the notion that art could be a dedicated calling, or at least a subject of serious study....

So You Want To Learn How To Draw?

In which a writer and critic goes back to class Please note that this story is reprinted from the ARTnews issue of October, 1995. But 20 years later, the New York Studio School "drawing marathons" still continue along the same lines, under the expert guidance of the...

You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me: Part One

The artist known as Swoon, now in her late thirties, gained a reputation early in her career for evocative and beautifully crafted street art and for wacky performance pieces, like crashing the 2009 Venice Biennale in a boat made of…

More Residencies off the Beaten Path

Headquartered in a historic mansion in the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Marble House Project accepts about 52 artists a year for individual 23-day residencies (there are also 17-day stays for artists with families, and this year the organization is launching a...

Millicent Young on Ed Kashi

Reflections on a Famed Photojournalist's Images of Syria What I see first is beauty---saturated colors, an abstraction of forms in the picture plane, vertiginous compositions that plunge me from the immediacy of where I stand in the gallery into another realm. This is...

Walt and Louise Rosett

Walt and Louise Rosett are savvy, unpretentious, enthusiastic collectors who have filled their sprawling house in suburban Albuquerque, NM, with art since first acquiring abstract watercolors by Ron Slowinski in 1982. The sleek split-level is now packed, but in no way...

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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