Connecting Artists

The brick-and-mortar establishment is challenged on a number of fronts. What does that mean for galleries? And for artists? As reported a few weeks ago, mid-level brick-and-mortar galleries face a multitude of pressures, so much so that the mainstream press is...

Far from disappearing from an artist's regular practice, as many critics have complained, the possibilities for drawing have only expanded in the last century, limited only by the imaginations of their creators. Picasso made drawings with a small electric light in a...

It used to be that the favored genre for fiction about art and artists was the pseudo-biography, like Irving Stone’s Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy. Or if you were in search of lighter fare, you turned to a glamorous art-world setting…

Toward the end of my interview with curator Tricia Paik of the Indianapolis Museum of Art a few weeks back, we briefly touched on the subject of artist websites—what works and what doesn’t. Developing a good one, up-to-date and easily navigable…

A dedicated teacher looks back on three decades in the classroom In December of this year, I will retire from teaching painting, a job I’ve loved for 30 years. Although I am looking forward to a new phase in my life, I will miss this role. I’ve had a good run and feel...

The answer these days is far from simple. The late, great, often cantankerous art critic Robert Hughes more than once bemoaned the apparent decline in standards for draftsmanship.  “In the 45 years that I’ve been writing criticism there has been a tragic depreciation...

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...

In times like these it’s tempting to fantasize what life might have been like in another century, another culture, among a coterie of friends and acquaintances who had things on their minds other than the pandemic and insane politicians. I’ve occasionally wondered...

The very model of a modern-day generous, informative, and informed community More than two decades ago, when Barbara Ellmann was a young mother in the Tribeca neighborhood in New York, she began to experience those feelings of isolation that can afflict stay-at-home...

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...