Articles
So You Want To Learn How To Draw?
In which a writer and critic goes back to class Please note that this story is reprinted from the ARTnews issue of October, 1995. But 20 years later, the New York Studio School "drawing marathons" still continue along the same lines, under the expert guidance of the...
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...
Millicent Young
When Millicent Young was growing up in Manhattan, in a progressive and intellectual family who lived on the Upper West Side, “art was considered as important as being polite to people on the street and doing my homework,” she recalls. Her mother, a student of Margaret...
The Woman Who Lives Inside Bonnard’s World
When painter Leslie Parke was a small child, she would head downstairs early in the morning and open one of her parents’ art books, squatting on the floor and pressing her face into the color reproductions of Fifty Centuries of Art. Her goal was not so much to study...
Millicent Young on Ed Kashi
Reflections on a Famed Photojournalist's Images of Syria What I see first is beauty---saturated colors, an abstraction of forms in the picture plane, vertiginous compositions that plunge me from the immediacy of where I stand in the gallery into another realm. This is...
Ripe for Rediscovery: Dorothy Hood
A Major Abstract Artist of the 20th Century Begins To Get Her Due I first stumbled upon the paintings of Dorothy Hood about five years ago, in the home of collector and artist Dora Dillistone. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I was completely blown away....
Robert Straight
Among Robert Straight’s fondest memories of growing up in Amarillo, TX, in the 1950s were the times his mother, a nurse and a seamstress, took him shopping for fabrics. “That made a big impression,” he says, “looking at all those patterns and colors and designs….” And...
Ripe for Rediscovery: Thomas Child
Rare photos from the 1870s give a glimpse into an ancient civilization on the brink of change Her face framed by an ornate tasseled headdress, the bride looks eager and expectant and maybe a little scared. Her groom seems more confident, certainly more relaxed. You...
Girl, Unexpectedly Interrupted
In which I try to have a romance with an older man, a real artist. But Mother knows better. During my last semester in college, I worked part time at the university store (fondly known as the “screw store” for its inflated prices on stuff like toothpaste and shampoo)....
Art and Meditation
Slowing down, filtering out the noise, and allowing the mind to empty out can offer a tremendous boon to the creative process. Meditation has for years enjoyed a reputation for its restorative powers and its abilities to sharpen the senses (as well as provide deep...
The Tie That Binds…Or Not: Part Two
More about relationships between dealers and artists As we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the connection between an artist and her dealer is often as fraught with difficulties and potential for misunderstandings as even the best of marriages. And as methods and...
August Muth
When August Muth was five or six years old, he would take his drawings, spread them out on the gravel in the driveway of his family’s house in Albuquerque, NM, and sell them to passers-by for three cents each. “I always had a lot of entrepreneurial spirit,” he...
La Belle Amie Française
How an extraordinary French artist saved ma derrière after I lost my passport in Paris It is almost a decade since my last real vacation (I’m not counting press trips—they can be fun but are generally brief and frenetic, and have lately tapered off along with the...
The Tie That Binds….Or Not
What do dealers owe their artists? And what do artists say they aren’t getting? The artist-dealer relationship is one of the most complicated, intimate, and loosely defined of all arrangements between an individual and a business. It can be “like a marriage in its...
William Norton
“My work is all about shadows and voids,” says William Norton, a tall, rangy, bearded man in his early 60s, whose seven-foot-high “drawings” on plexiglass panels were inspired by trips on the subway to and from his job at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “These are...
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