Articles
What Is a Drawing? Part Two
Since I am the sort of person who damn near weeps when she sees a great Degas pastel (like Waiting, 1882, above), it’s not surprising that drawings are perhaps the medium closest to my heart. I love the spontaneity, the economy of means, and the sense that one is as...
Tamar Zinn
Tamar Zinn was about twelve when she discovered the thrill of drawing. Like many artistically inclined New York City kids, she took classes at the Art Students League on West 57th Street. “There was an enormous studio divided into two sections,” she recalls. “In one...
The Business of Art Business Coaching, Part One
When you need more than a little help from your friends, seek out a coach I’m not sure when or why I started thinking about the business of art coaching, though I was a guest for one of Paul Klein’s webinars more than a year ago. After I mastered Instagram this...
It’s Not What I Expected I Would Do
An Artist Opens her New Home and Studio for ArtWalk Kingston By Millicent Young I had just landed in Kingston, NY, in early July with Niko, the dog of Perpetual Joy, and the four cats, a long chapter of life in rural Virginia completed. I was moving into my new...
Tm Gratkowski
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...
Me, Myself, and I Part 3
It’s curious to me that more women than men responded to the call for a third round-up of self-portraits on Vasari21. That’s possibly because there are more female members than male (though I can’t tell you the exact ratio), possibly because women traditionally spend...
Paula Roland
Though she now lives in Santa Fe, at a safe remove from severe tropical storms, Paula Roland knows a thing or two about hurricanes. “All my life it was ‘Hurricane’s coming! School’s out!’” she recalls of her childhood in Biloxi, MS. “You cover the windows, pile up the...
Terms of Engagement
Dealers Tell Us What They Look for in Representing Someone New What makes a gallery decide to take on a new artist? To make a long- or short-term commitment? What goes through a dealer’s head when she is looking at (or looking for) art to show, either in solo or group...
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,...
Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
Artists report on nocturnal inspirations and frustrations I once described Louise Bourgeois as having “a direct pipeline to her unconscious,” and that still seems a fitting description for an artist who came of age in Paris at a time when the Surrealists were the...
Donald Martiny
Donald Martiny’s earliest memory of being mesmerized by paint comes from kindergarten, when he lived in Schenectady, NY, and had “a teacher who was really stingy about art supplies,” he recalls. “She would give us only two jars of poster paint, and I remember being...
Confessions of a Closet Painter
Coming to Grips with “Makee-Doo” I suppose it all begins with the “Sandy Becker Show,” which Boomers may remember watching on little black-and-white TVs in the 1950s and ‘60s. The genial host of this children’s variety program regularly showed drawings sent in by his...
Judy Gelles
“Everything I do follows my life and what I’m doing with my life,” admits Judy Gelles, whose many projects, mostly in photography and video, document not only her personal and family history, but touch on the larger social issues of our times. Gelles has been around...
Ripe for Rediscovery: Maggi Hambling
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,...
Into the Woods with Dale Chihuly
By Susan Erlandson Washburn I arrived at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas—Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s inspired gift to flyover country—too late to see the Dale Chihuly exhibition in the gallery itself but in time to visit the “In the Forest” portion...
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