Articles
Golden Artist Programs
Nice Work if You Can Get It When I noticed that several painters who are Vasari21 members had certification from Golden Artist Colors—a company that specializes in acrylic paints, mediums, and grounds and has officially been around since 1950—I was curious about what...
Elisa D’Arrigo
Elisa D’Arrigo may be the only artist working in clay who can claim to have found early inspiration in “Dennis the Menace.” In one sequence from the hugely popular comic strip from the 1950s and ‘60s, Dennis’s parents are on vacation in Mexico and pay a visit to a...
James Austin Murray
James Austin Murray’s recent six- by six-foot paintings are made using the most basic of means: ivory black oil paint, a canvas and wood-panel support, and wallpaper brushes—up to nine affixed to a long handle. But the surface effects are far from simple, and indeed...
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...
Alison Berry
Alison Berry’s recent paintings resemble maps of unknown and fantastical places, enchanted worlds that incorporate beasts both ancient and modern, floor plans for eccentric structures, buildings that look lifted from Quattrocento paintings, lush trees and plants—along...
The Cooks, the Turkey, and the Formidable Formalist Critic
A brief memoir of catering, art-history classes, and friendship For part of my junior year in college I lived off campus with one of my best friends, Kate, a woman thirteen years older than myself, and in many ways a kind of big-sister to me (since I had none). Kate...
Virginia Katz
“Landscape is something I’ve always gravitated toward,” says Virginia Katz, whose work for the past 15 years or so in one way or another incorporates a fascination with wind, water, and land. Though born in Brooklyn, she spent most of her childhood in upstate New...
Beverly Rautenberg
As a child, Beverly Rautenberg suffered from upper respiratory problems that plagued her from the age of three till she started high school. For most of the year, she was kept at home, in a suburb of Chicago, and as an only child found those early years difficult and...
Confessions of a Cranky Critic
Yes, I have been living under a rock. And I'm proud of it. When I read, a few days ago, that Helen Marten had been named the 2016 winner of the Turner Prize, Britain’s biggest accolade in contemporary art, I drew a big fat blank. “Helen who?” was my response. And...
Jane Barthes
In Jane Barthes’ first incarnation as an artist, she was both the heroine and the creator of a comic strip about a frustrated 18-year-old girl living in London. The main character, Mona, had a fairy godmother who would whisk her off to different adventures. “She’d go...
Selling on Saatchi
How to make the online art service work for you By Susan Washington Saatchi Art, which bills itself as a free “online art advisory,” is perhaps the most successful site on the Internet for online art sales, with Rebecca Wilson (formerly a director of Saatchi Gallery...
A.J. Dungan
“For me, art was always about color before I was good enough ever to attempt a drawing or painting,” says A.J. Dungan. “When I went to the hardware store with my dad, I was mesmerized by the paint samples.” Dungan has served a long apprenticeship with color, beginning...
On the Importance of Being Nice
A few parables for our times About five years ago, soon after I moved to Taos, NM, from New York, I went on a press trip to Los Angeles to check out some of the art in “Pacific Standard Time,” an extravaganza celebrating L.A. as a creative force for the past five or...
Dabbling in Dura-Lar
Your fearless correspondent takes another class It’s always seemed to me that a big part of the fun of art-making lies in the endless amounts of seductive stuff to play with—paints and brushes, pencils and charcoal and pastels, clay and plaster and all kinds of goo,...
Annell Livingston
At first blush, Annell Livingston’s tightly gridded abstractions might appear to be successors to the Op Art frenzy of the 1960s, but on closer scrutiny her gently rippling canvases are not so much interested in playing visual tricks as in conveying the passage of...
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