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UNDER THE RADAR

A spotlight for members.

Cindy Blakeslee

Recent Feature

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Four

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Four

Many say it’s all a bubble. I don’t agree because the world is sick producing extremes of weather and behavior, people are struggling and if creators can find a way to express themselves or promote a worthy cause AND make money then It is not going away anytime soon

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Recent Feature

The Educated Eye Part Two

The Educated Eye Part Two

I opened up an intriguing cauldron of worms when I asked a bevy of art writers (call them critics, journalists, or simply reviewers) on what it means to have an “eye.” Why did they consider their judgments superior to those of the average museumgoer or art lover? The...

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From the Vasari21 Archives

A Tribute to Jake Berthot (1939-2015)

I met Jake Berthot in 1992 while I was in my junior year at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I had already discovered his work and fallen in love with it. So much so that I tried copying everything I saw that I liked…

Advise and Select

Artists reveal their secrets for smart editing and smooth studio visits Not too long ago, I paid a call on an artist who shall remain nameless, whose studio was such a shambles I was itching to get out of there within ten minutes. It seemed there were works from every...

More Residencies off the Beaten Path

Headquartered in a historic mansion in the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Marble House Project accepts about 52 artists a year for individual 23-day residencies (there are also 17-day stays for artists with families, and this year the organization is launching a...

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....

Vasari21 Goes to the Movies

The new and already widely praised documentary about Eva Hesse, the subject of our podcast this week with director Marcie Begleiter, brought to mind the many films about artists made down through the years and inspired a mini-marathon of in-home screenings these last...

Studio Visits Revisited

In the fall of 2013, I published a story in ARTnews called “Show and Tell: The Dos and Don’ts of Studio Visits,” which went the art-world equivalent of viral—that is to say, scores, possibly hundreds, of people shared on Facebook because…

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

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...

Confessions of a Closet Painter

Coming to Grips with “Makee-Doo” I suppose it all begins with the “Sandy Becker Show,” which Boomers may remember watching on little black-and-white TVs in the 1950s and ‘60s. The genial host of this children’s variety program regularly showed drawings sent in by his...

Assess the Excess

Suggestions for storing, selling, tossing, or giving away unwanted old work One of the saddest days of my life was the day I carted all my youthful paintings from my parents’ summer house to the dump in Montauk, NY, after selling the property in 2003. These included a...

Selling on Saatchi

How to make the online art service work for you By Susan Washington Saatchi Art, which bills itself as a free “online art advisory,” is perhaps the most successful site on the Internet for online art sales, with Rebecca Wilson (formerly a director of Saatchi Gallery...

Archived Feature

Fantasy Curating: The Contemporary Portrait

Fantasy Curating: The Contemporary Portrait

By Kate Petley Contemporary portraiture is so diverse that creating a comprehensive list of artists is futile. I selected these particular works for their power, humor, cleverness, rawness, and beauty. Reflecting a broad interpretation of what qualifies as a portrait,...

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Archived Feature

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

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...

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Archived Feature

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

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...

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Archived Under the Radar

Jeannie Motherwell

Jeannie Motherwell

First off, let’s get the famous forebears out of the way. Yes, Jeannie Motherwell is the daughter of that Motherwell, Robert, one of the titans of mid-20th-century American art. And the stepdaughter of Helen Frankenthaler, no less famous in the annals of art history...

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Archived Under the Radar

Paul O’Connor

Paul O’Connor

Paul O’Connor first fell in love with photography when he joined the navy at the tender age of 17. “My dad gave me a camera, an Olympus, and I started taking pictures—especially of clouds out at sea," he recalls. Those big billowing skies would prove equally...

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 Archived Podcast