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UNDER THE RADAR
A spotlight for members.
Cindy Blakeslee
Recent Feature
L.A. Confidential
The first in a series of reports on the art world. In May, it seemed like we were almost entirely out of the woods with Covid-19, and then along came the Delta variant and the post-pandemic euphoria rapidly dissipated. Still, as long-time observers of the Los Angeles...
Recent Feature
The Immortal Mona Lisa
A new novel recalls a famous heist. I’ve just finished reading Jonathan Santlofer’s hugely entertaining thriller The Last Mona Lisa, a lively yarn that taps into our present-day fascination with all things Leonardo and takes the reader into the sometimes violent...
From the Vasari21 Archives
Archived Feature
Retail Therapy from Artists
Need an affordable but impressive gift? Got empty shelves and wall space? Artists come to the rescue.... These are tough times for everyone, but especially for artists who have lost teaching gigs, commissions, and gallery shows. Small wonder some are turning to online...
Archived Feature
What Is a Drawing? Part Nine
After eight posts about drawings, it’s challenging to come up anything new to say about the medium, but if the materials remain largely the same, the circumstances for artists everywhere have changed dramatically in the last year. Many of the members included here...
Archived Feature
Real Abstraction: Five Painters Beyond the Picture
By Peter Frank Can we see past what we see? Can we see more than we see? Can we see in a way that not only reveals what we haven’t been seeing, but has us see a whole different reality? These are the questions that abstract art, after more than a century, still poses....
Archived Under the Radar
Julie Speed
Julie Speed’s paintings offer up a magical and mysterious cosmos that defies literal interpretation. A pair of sailors and a naked woman wrestle with a hammerhead shark trapped in a net. An exuberant baby leaps from his mother’s lap as a tornado churns outside an open...
Archived Under the Radar
Judy Sigunick
Judy Signunick It’s a rare contemporary artist who dares grapple with literary masters. Cy Twombly summoned the ancient classics through a series of paintings that pay homage to the gods and heroes of Greek mythology. Frank Stella has been inspired by the 18th-century...
Archived Podcast
Eleanor Heartney: Postmodern Heretics
Eleanor Heartney is well known as a curator and critic, a long-time contributing editor of Art in America and the author of numerous books, including Art & Today, Postmodernism, and After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art…