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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

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

There were times, when he was younger, that Bob Richardson felt a pull toward art. As a teenager in South Orange, NJ, he attended the Art Students League in New York, where he took drawing classes with a painter named Tom Fogarty, who taught him that “line has...

Fantasy Curating: Fantastical Threads

By Adria Arch Lately, I have been especially drawn to both two- and three-dimensional artwork that uses fabrics and fibers. The vibrant colors and patterns, sculptural shapes, and thumbing-the-nose at the traditional stone-and-steel crowd are all part of what I find...

Me, Myself, and I

Adventures in self-portraiture Self-portraiture enjoys a long and illustrious lineage, probably reaching its peak in Western art with Rembrandt, who not only reveled in chronicling his changing fortunes—from ambitious youth to successful dandy to impoverished...

Instagram for Artists

Getting the Most from Your Posts When a friend urged me to start posting on Instagram a few months ago, I immediately balked. I was already uploading a Vasari21 Pic of the Day to Facebook, pinning stuff to Pinterest, sending out weekly bulletins and updates, and...

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…

The Fine Art of Recycling: Part Two

In looking over the images from Part One of this post, and from those below, it occurred to me how often art made from found objects and random detritus has a childlike quality about it, even though the trained eye knows there’s a sophisticated vision behind the...

Another Opening, Another Show

The opening, duration, and end of a gallery or museum show can be cause for anxiety, depression, obsession, elation, relief, and any number of other emotional reactions that occur when you…

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...

So You Want to Be in Pictures?

If you catch a set decorator's eye, it just might happen As readers know, I have developed a peculiar fascination with the art featured in shows on the big and small screens—who chooses this work? where do they find the art? what are the guiding factors behind the...

Artist’s Block and How To Beat It

Feeling stymied? In a slump? Disconnected from your work? You’re not alone. We’re all familiar with writer’s block from the many cinematic clichés. The author sits at his typewriter or word processor, smoking and drinking and muttering profanities. The author fills a...

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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