Articles
Linda Vallejo Chooses Charles Gaines
“The Brown Dot Project (TBDP),” a series of mine from 2015, has been deeply influenced by the renowned Los Angeles-based artist Charles Gaines, whose works investigate the way rules-based procedures construct order and meaning. Gaines, born in 1944, makes drawings…
Elisabeth Condon
“I never wanted to be a flower painter. I wanted to be a tough, cool painter,” says Elisabeth Condon in her fifth-floor studio on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where she is surrounded by several large canvases that incorporate, yes, flowers…
Alex Meets Ada
Alex Katz first met his wife, Ada, at an opening at the Tangier Gallery in 1958. She immediately became one of his favorite models. “I’d been painting these all-over landscapes, and then I decided to paint details like eyes and noses…
Behold, I bring you good tidings…week after week.
As some of you may have noticed, it looks like I have a bit of a regional bias in my choices for “Under the Radar” on the site. All three subjects in these first few weeks hail from Santa Fe, NM. There’s good reason for this…
Artists and Critics: Part 3
When I first started working on staff at ARTnews, a little more than 20 years ago, I was on the brink of a divorce after several years of freelancing and corporate wifedom (at which I was not very good). The magazine represented both….
The Secret of Venus
Seeing Mona Kuhn’s subtly erotic nudes in the slide show that accompanies our podcast with her this week (and especially the photo titled Morgane from 2010) made me think of a book proposal…
Josef Albers: Beyond Light and Shade
Most of Josef Albers’s paintings are very unusual and far more complex than they initially appear; they are not about Op art, color theory, or Minimalism. They are about paying attention. Just as his famous book on color theory…
Scams and Shams in the Art World: Part One
Several years ago, I heard about a woman, a self-styled art adviser, who would invite artists to a plush hotel room and for a fee of $500 lend an hour of her time to look over portfolios and then write down…
Cheryl Gross and Marta Wapiennik Choose Each Other
Artistic collaborations are nothing new in the annals of contemporary art—think of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Gilbert and George, or even Tim Rollins and his “at-risk” students, known as the Kids of Survival. But edgy illustrator…
Jonathan Morse
For Jonathan Morse, digital prints are every bit as original as statements as a painting or drawing realized through traditional means. Yet his works, mostly abstractions made in their entirety on the…
What is the art world?
If you read the mainstream press, you might conclude that the art world consists of only a handful of high-rolling names—big collectors, megabucks art dealers, painters and sculptors and performance artists…
“How did you decide to become an artist?”
My father asked me this question during the last months of his life. As a young man he had made the decision to not pursue a life as a concert pianist, choosing a career that was both more stable and also protected the privacy of his passion…
Under the Radar-Ted Larsen
Ted Larsen For the first decade or so of his career, Santa Fe-based artist Ted Larsen had been working successfully in a style he describes as “abstracted landscape.” Then in the late 1990s came a period of profound searching and dissatisfaction. “There were a...
Annell Livingston on Joanne Mattera
Joanne’s work is about color first, “color beyond color,” color that resonates somewhere deep within me, somewhere beyond the eye. For me, it is to see color from the heart…
Frank Stella Meets Jasper Johns
“The artist who launched Minimalism was Frank Stella (b. 1936), who was still a student at Princeton when he saw Jasper Johns’s 1958 show at Leo Castelli Gallery. He liked the repetition of the flags…
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