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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

Studio Pets

How Could We Manage Without Them? Last week I announced our first annual Studio Pet Photos competition, but they were all so adorable, it was a tough call. The grand prize, though, belongs to Mariella Bisson’s Senegal parrot and studio manager, Creature (shown above),...

Vigée the Victorious

The life of the beautiful, clever, and prodigiously gifted Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) is one of those rags-to-riches sagas irresistible to storytellers of any era. She was born in Paris to a minor portraitist and a hairdresser…

Grants and Financial Resources for Artists during Covid19

I spent about three days scouring available sources (Artnet, The Art Newspaper, the Internet) to see what sorts of funds are available for artists impacted by the Covid19 pandemic. The bad news is how little is out there, and many of the significant grants are only...

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...

Return to Sender

Before you fire off an email to a gallery, do your homework. And don’t get your hopes up too high. Out of idle curiosity, I recently asked a dealer friend about how many email submissions or inquiries she receives per week. I don’t precisely remember the answer, but...

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...

The Fine Art of Recycling: Part Two

In looking over the images from Part One of this post, and from those below, it occurred to me how often art made from found objects and random detritus has a childlike quality about it, even though the trained eye knows there’s a sophisticated vision behind the...

Art in Embassies

    Ask not what your art can do for you, but what your art can do for your country   Among the many forward-minded initiatives launched by the all-too-brief administration of President John F. Kennedy, the Art in Embassies program is one that has...

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...

The Woman Who Lives Inside Bonnard’s World

When painter Leslie Parke was a small child, she would head downstairs early in the morning and open one of her parents’ art books, squatting on the floor and pressing her face into the color reproductions of Fifty Centuries of Art. Her goal was not so much to study...

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