First Love and Irresistible Impulses

First Love and Irresistible Impulses

First Love and Irresistible Impulses Or the man who licked the Vermeer My first boyfriend, in college, always smelled of Ivory soap. It was a clean, innocent scent, like baby powder or shampoo, and therefore perhaps appropriate for young love. For years after we broke...
Marc Baseman

Marc Baseman

Marc Baseman The world according to Marc Baseman is a strange, crowded, and mysterious place. In his tiny drawings—usually less than three inches on a side—a cast of odd characters and objects competes for our attention: birds and rodents, guys in business suits, a...
By the Book

By the Book

By the Book Artists Tell Us About Their Favorites The very first art books I remember reading (or perhaps just looking at with awe and wonder) were part of the series called “Metropolitan Seminars in Art,” written by the critic John Canaday. Each slender gray volume...
David Leaser

David Leaser

David Leaser Say it with flowers.   SoundCloud Facebook David Leaser’s large-scale, in-your-face blossoms owe as much to botanical illustration and 17th-century Dutch still life as they do to Andy Warhol and to new-found possibilities with digital imaging. Leaser...
Martha Russo

Martha Russo

  Martha Russo A tour of Martha Russo’s retrospective at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary art in Boulder, CO, is somewhat like a visit to admire the creepy-crawlies in a ten-year-old boy’s bedroom. There is a giant, slithery sculpture on the floor that looks a...