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...

Laura Vranes and John McIntyre

by Ann Landi | October 17, 2016 | Collector Spotlight | 2 Comments

Laura Vranes’ interests as a future collector were established early. “As a child, I went to a museum in New York,” she says. “I wish I could recall which it was, but I remember how much I loved the Andy Warhol Brillo Box in the collection. I wanted to sit on it so...

The Studios of Key West

by Ann Landi | May 5, 2019 | Features | 0 Comments

Why Not Consider a Residency in the Tropics? Key West is a town unlike any other in Florida, an island city that marks the southernmost point in the United States. A stone’s throw from Cuba, it’s the end destination of U.S. Route 1, the longest north-south road in the...

So You Want To Learn How To Draw?

by Ann Landi | October 10, 2016 | Features | 2 Comments

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...

Artist’s Block and How To Beat It

by Ann Landi | December 11, 2017 | Features | 6 Comments

Feeling stymied? In a slump? Disconnected from your work? You’re not alone. We’re all familiar with writer’s block from the many cinematic clichés. The author sits at his typewriter or word processor, smoking and drinking and muttering profanities. The author fills a...

The Death of the Gallery? Part Two

by Ann Landi | July 15, 2018 | Features | 1 Comment

The brick-and-mortar establishment is challenged on a number of fronts. What does that mean for galleries? And for artists? As reported a few weeks ago, mid-level brick-and-mortar galleries face a multitude of pressures, so much so that the mainstream press is...

Millicent Young on Ed Kashi

by Ann Landi | September 24, 2016 | Artists Choose Artists | 3 Comments

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...

Destructive Impulses

by Ann Landi | December 18, 2017 | Features | 4 Comments

Even the most famous artists torch, shred, and otherwise annihilate works that don't seem up to snuff In 1967, Agnes Martin began seeking out her earlier works with the intention of destroying everything she could find. That was about ten years after she had decided...

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

by Ann Landi | March 14, 2021 | Features | 19 Comments

There were times, when he was younger, that Bob Richardson felt a pull toward art. As a teenager in South Orange, NJ, he attended the Art Students League in New York, where he took drawing classes with a painter named Tom Fogarty, who taught him that “line has...

Four More Residencies off the Beaten Path

by Ann Landi | August 20, 2017 | Features | 0 Comments

Located on Cranberry Island off the coast of Maine, the home and studios of painters Jack Heliker and Robert LaHotan have been converted to accommodate “mid-career artists of established ability, not emerging talents,” according to the website. Three- and four-week...

Artist and Critics: Part 4

by Ann Landi | January 14, 2016 | Features | 2 Comments

There was a time, not so long ago, when physical assaults were almost a routine art-world ritual, between artists and critics, artists and artists, and occasionally even critics and critics. The titanic 20th-century art czar…

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

Laura Vranes and John McIntyre

The Studios of Key West

So You Want To Learn How To Draw?

Artist’s Block and How To Beat It

The Death of the Gallery? Part Two

Millicent Young on Ed Kashi

Destructive Impulses

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

Four More Residencies off the Beaten Path

Artist and Critics: Part 4

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