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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

Summer Reads: Two Feisty Women and a Bromance in Poetry and Paint

A few weeks ago my neighbor and Vasari21 member TJ Mabrey asked me why I didn’t suggest some books for the warm-weather season, when supposedly we all head for the country or the beach armed with a Kindle or a stack of paperbacks. Since I am always reading biographies...

A Sense of Place

What does it mean to be a “regional artist” today? By Millicent Young Bradley Sumrall, curator at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, posed this question in his juror’s talk for “Homeward Bound,” the Taubman Museum’s inaugural triennial for Virginia artists. I resisted...

Cultivating Your Collectors

It’s mostly a matter of commonsense and good manners. Mom would approve. If you have reached that happy stage of a career where collectors are following your progress, attending shows, and—yes, of course, actually buying work!—you want to cultivate this fan base as...

So You Want To Learn How To Draw?

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...

Leslie Parke on Lori Ellison

I am drawn to work of modest means that has a monumental impact. The master of this kind of work was Lori Ellison, who died in August 2015…

A Sculptor Turns to Urban Farming

In the fall of 2018, Jamie Hamilton went looking for a place to dispose of scraps for compost in Los Angeles, his adopted home since moving from Santa Fe, NM, two years earlier. Through an organization called LA Compost, he discovered the Solano Community Garden in...

Open Studios: Part One

The ins and outs of making your life and work a public affair When I first broached the topic of open studios to several Vasari 21 members, some said, “No way. I don’t want a lot of lookee-loos traipsing through my private spaces.” Or “I’m at the point where I have...

Susan Schwalb

It’s a rare artist who finds her medium and her methods early and then sticks with them, with little deviation, for more than four decades. But so it was for Susan Schwalb, who discovered the art of drawing with silverpoint in 1973 and never looked back. She was...

Fantasy Curating: Big Things Have Small Beginnings

By Ed Grant "Big Things Have Small Beginnings" So many of the things around us are small, or at least start off small. Stalactites form one drop at a time. Viruses and bacteria evolve new ways around our defenses to become full-blown pandemics. Slime mold is used to...

The Soul of the New Machines

Using the computer to translate technology into art The first time I paid serious attention to the role computers might play in contemporary art was in 2012 (a little late in the game), when I saw the Whitney Museum of American Art’s solo for Wade Guyton, then 40. The...

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