Connecting Artists

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Welcome to Vasari21. A community for working artists, a place to connect, find information, read about the new and the unknown, listen to podcasts, and learn about how the art world really works.

UNDER THE RADAR

Gudrun Mertes-Frady

A spotlight for members.

This Week's Artist

Recent Podcast

Mary Gabriel: The Women of Abstract Expressionism

1 Comment

Mary Gabriel The Women of Abstract Expressionism If you were lucky enough to catch the round-up at the Denver Art Museum two years...

Assess the Excess

7 Comments

Suggestions for storing, selling, tossing, or giving away unwanted old work One of the saddest days of my life was the day I carted all my youthful paintings from my parents’ summer house to the dump in Montauk, NY, after selling the property in 2003. These included a...

Artists and Critics: Part One

by Ann Landi | November 11, 2015 | Features | 6 Comments

Sometimes the best way to respond to a bad review is to take a long walk Photo credits: bottom of page About ten days after the September 2015 opening of Will Ryman’s…

Ripe for Rediscovery: Maggi Hambling

by Ann Landi | September 10, 2017 | Features | 3 Comments

By Jane Barthes Maggi Hambling’s paintings and sculpture are not entirely new to me, but many outside the U.K. probably have little knowledge of this quintessentially British artist. I discovered Hambling’s work in the early 1990s, five years before I left London,...

Aesthetic Couture and the Great Art Fraud

by Ann Landi | November 12, 2015 | Artist Essays | 4 Comments

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character Polonius offers the following life advice to his son Laertes: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow…

Signs of the Times

by Ann Landi | December 26, 2017 | Features | 1 Comment

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...

Open Studios: Part Two

by Ann Landi | June 19, 2017 | Features | 10 Comments

Make it a social event “I went through a depressing period when I thought I was all alone in my part of the world,” says Diane Di Bernardino Sanborn, who lives in Scottsdale, AZ, and makes largely abstract work. “There are no galleries in my area for contemporary art....

Me, Myself, and I

by Ann Landi | July 16, 2017 | Features | 3 Comments

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...

Artist and Critics: Part 4

by Ann Landi | January 14, 2016 | Features | 2 Comments

There was a time, not so long ago, when physical assaults were almost a routine art-world ritual, between artists and critics, artists and artists, and occasionally even critics and critics. The titanic 20th-century art czar…

Walt and Louise Rosett

by Ann Landi | February 27, 2017 | Collector Spotlight | 5 Comments

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...

So You Want to Be in Pictures?

by Ann Landi | March 5, 2018 | Features | 0 Comments

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...

Say It with Flowers: Part One

by Ann Landi | August 13, 2018 | Features | 4 Comments

Blooms, posies, blossom, and gardens will never go out of style About a year ago, somewhere on social media, I made the rather stupid observation that I thought flowers had become nonstarters as subjects for artists since the heyday of Georgia O’Keeffe. Elisabeth...

Archived Feature

What Is a Drawing? Part Three

Apr 17, 2018 | Features | 1 Comment

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...

Encaustic: An Overview

Jul 15, 2018 | Features | 4 Comments

In three days in Provincetown, MA, this June, our intrepid reporter hit the ground running and offers a succinct guide to some of the many ways this seductive medium is in use among artists By Anna Wagner-Ott The art of encaustic has been around for centuries: it was...

Archived Feature

Fantasy Curating: Big Things Have Small Beginnings

May 28, 2018 | Features | 1 Comment

By Ed Grant "Big Things Have Small Beginnings" So many of the things around us are small, or at least start off small. Stalactites form one drop at a time. Viruses and bacteria evolve new ways around our defenses to become full-blown pandemics. Slime mold is used to...

Archived Under the Radar

Tm Gratkowski

Oct 15, 2017 | Under the Radar | 1 Comment

As a kid growing up in Chicago, Tm Gratkowski believed he was destined to become a hockey player. “I was on skates at age three and playing hockey by the time I was five,” he says. “We grew up on the lake, and I would put on my skates at the house and walk down to the...