Connecting Artists

A Serious Site for Serious Artists

Welcome to Vasari21. A community for working artists, a place to connect, find information, read about the new and the unknown, listen to podcasts, and learn about how the art world really works.

UNDER THE RADAR

Grace DeGennaro

A spotlight for members.

This Week's Artist

Recent Podcast

Judith Stein on the Elusive Megadealer Dick Bellamy

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The 1960s saw a huge explosion of talent in the New York art world—Conceptualism, Pop, Op, Minimalism, Happenings, and Land Art all had their origins during this tumultuous decade…

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

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Talk about “Surrealism” in conversation with artists and art lovers you are most likely to think of works by Dalí, Magritte, Tanguy, Ernst, or possibly Paul Delvaux. Mention “American Surrealism,” and the terrain gets tricky. Didn’t Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Maggi Hambling

by Ann Landi | September 10, 2017 | Features | 3 Comments

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,...

What Is a Drawing? Part Four

by Ann Landi | February 4, 2019 | Features | 0 Comments

Earlier in the week, I tried to imagine what kind of responses I would have gotten had I posed that question to one of the great masters of the Renaissance. “Signora,” I can hear Maestro Buonarrotti explaining, con pazienza, “a drawing can be many things. A quick...

Signs of the Times: Part Two

by Ann Landi | January 22, 2018 | Features | 4 Comments

More reactions to the ugly zeitgeist We’ve now had a full year to take stock of the current administration in Washington and, as Melissa Stern points out, “Every day brings a new outrage, a new affront to common decency, an erosion of our democracy.” Some artists see...

Artists Respond to the Pandemic Part 3

by Ann Landi | June 28, 2020 | Features | 1 Comment

We are now rounding out the fourth month of the Covid-19 pandemic, a worldwide catastrophe that, as of now, shows no signs of fully abating, especially in the United States and a few other countries that have been slow to realize the serious need of playing it safe....

Me, Myself, and I Part 2

by Ann Landi | August 13, 2017 | Features | 2 Comments

Self-portraits have always served artists in a variety of ways. Art historians have suggested that Jan van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban (1433), with its inscription “Als ich kann”—meaning, “this is what I can do”—is both a self-portrait and a kind of calling card to...

What Is a Drawing?

by Ann Landi | October 10, 2016 | Features | 13 Comments

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...

First Encounters

by Millicent Young | January 14, 2019 | Features | 4 Comments

The art that made artists want to be artists In almost every artist’s life there are inevitably one or more works that ignite a spark or at least plant a seed, provoking the notion that art could be a dedicated calling, or at least a subject of serious study....

When Lee Krasner Met Piet Mondrian

by Ann Landi | August 26, 2018 | Did You Know? | 2 Comments

Can you picture the austere Dutch modernist dancing barefoot? “Critic Clement Greenberg would describe Mondrian’s work as ‘passion mastered and cooled,’ and that described the artist as well. He had set up his studio in a Victorian house with curved arches, but in...

Girl, Unexpectedly Interrupted

by Ann Landi | September 16, 2016 | Features | 15 Comments

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)....

How To Explain Pictures to a Difficult Date

by Ann Landi | January 13, 2016 | Features | 19 Comments

I live in a tiny town in northern New Mexico, one where the chances of meeting an available man of a certain age are, shall we say, extremely limited. So when you do encounter one who owns a car, has a college degree, and doesn’t chew tobacco, your hopes can get sort of…

Archived Feature

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

Feb 28, 2021 | Features | 2 Comments

By Lee Albert Hill As a painter myself I am drawn to the work of other painters first and foremost. Especially those who demonstrate a dedication to a lush, hands-on, painterly approach and an emphasis on refined craft and detail. For this curation I have chosen...

The Monuments Contest: Part Two

Oct 3, 2020 | Features | 0 Comments

Compared with the duration of empires past—like those of ancient Rome or Great Britain—the U.S. occupies a relatively tiny span of time, a little more 234 years as the great democratic experiment, if we date the founding of the country to 1776. And so our monuments...

Archived Feature

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

Apr 18, 2021 | Features | 1 Comment

It’s a brave artist who attempts to say something new about landscape. The genre has been around since ancient times, when frescoes of Arcadian vistas adorned the walls of upscale villas, and its popularity has waxed and waned according to the talents and interests of...

Archived Under the Radar

Marietta Patricia Leis

Aug 26, 2018 | Under the Radar | 4 Comments

Like many little girls, Marietta Patricia Leis first set her sights on becoming a ballerina. “At the age of seven I was entranced with wanting to be a ballet dancer,” she says. As a child in suburban East Orange, NJ, she studied dance every day after school, and...

Archived Under the Radar

Susan English

Apr 8, 2019 | Under the Radar | 1 Comment

When Susan English was three or four years old, she lived in Belgium with her family for a couple of years. Years later she still remembers a babysitter named Hele placing a candle inside a child’s play igloo. “It made a big impression on me,” English says. “The light...

Liliana Bloch: Texas Strong

Nov 24, 2018 | Vasari21 Radio | 1 Comment

Gallerist Liliana Bloch has had one of the more unusual routes for an art dealer. In 1999, she fled war-torn El Salvador to forge a new life for herself in Dallas, TX…

Connecting Artists

A Serious Site for Serious Artists

UNDER THE RADAR

Grace DeGennaro

Recent Podcast

Judith Stein on the Elusive Megadealer Dick Bellamy

Recent Feature

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

From the Vasari21 Archives

Ripe for Rediscovery: Maggi Hambling

What Is a Drawing? Part Four

Signs of the Times: Part Two

Artists Respond to the Pandemic Part 3

Me, Myself, and I Part 2

What Is a Drawing?

First Encounters

When Lee Krasner Met Piet Mondrian

Girl, Unexpectedly Interrupted

How To Explain Pictures to a Difficult Date

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

Archived Feature

The Monuments Contest: Part Two

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

Marietta Patricia Leis

Susan English

Archived Podcast

Liliana Bloch: Texas Strong