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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…

Ripe for Rediscovery: Pat Passlof

The last few years have witnessed a surge of interest in the women of Abstract Expressionism, a loosely affiliated group of artists who came of age in the shadow of the male titans of the movement—Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, et...

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...

Artists Behaving Badly

A recent report in the Huffington Post alleges that “narcissistic artists were determined to have higher market prices, higher estimates from auction houses, more museum shows, and more recognition from the art…

Conversations with Friends

If you could talk to any artist, dead or alive, whom would you choose? What would you ask? I know from hard-won experience that artists can be maddeningly difficult to talk to. While some—Frank Stella and Jim Dine are two who come to mind—are on good terms with the...

Painting with Big Mama

By Phillis Ideal I still see Big Mama leaning over her garden to pick a zinnia to put in her still life. Her old pink slip hung diagonally, a foot below her hiked-up stained dress, half-covered by her paint smock, which matched her white faux-fur bedroom slippers,...

Alex Meets Ada

Alex Katz first met his wife, Ada, at an opening at the Tangier Gallery in 1958. She immediately became one of his favorite models. “I’d been painting these all-over landscapes, and then I decided to paint details like eyes and noses…

Extreme Self-Marketing

It should probably come as no surprise that Jeff Koons at points in his career has hired “image consultants”—professionals who give advice on cultivating and presenting an appealing persona. The artist got his start, after all, as a…

What Is a Drawing?

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...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Mary Lee Bendolph

One of the most radical abstract artists of the last 50 years is scarcely a household name, or even well known outside a small group of collectors, connoisseurs, and art historians. But Mary Lee Bendolph is a standout in the group of quilters from Gee’s Bend, a tiny...

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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