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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

Jane Guthridge Makes an Installation

When Jeff and Stacy Robinson began to envision an installation that would fill a three-story atrium in their airy house in Denver, CO, they turned to Jane Guthridge. The collectors knew Guthridge’s work from exhibitions at the Space Gallery and were impressed with the...

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,...

Absolutely, Positively My Last Post About Instagram

Why does Patti Smith feel a need to post on Instagram? Is it important to her to have nearly 600,000 followers? When she uploads a photo, does she read all the comments (which can be as many as 2,000, last I checked)? Does she ever respond? She’s already a star—what...

Me, Myself, and I

Adventures in self-portraiture Self-portraiture enjoys a long and illustrious lineage, probably reaching its peak in Western art with Rembrandt, who not only reveled in chronicling his changing fortunes—from ambitious youth to successful dandy to impoverished...

The Cooks, the Turkey, and the Formidable Formalist Critic

A brief memoir of catering, art-history classes, and friendship For part of my junior year in college I lived off campus with one of my best friends, Kate, a woman thirteen years older than myself, and in many ways a kind of big-sister to me (since I had none). Kate...

Plein-Air Painting Today

Thirteen Who Head for the Open Air...in Spite of the Challenges Artists in significant numbers first took to the great outdoors to work in natural surroundings and more accurately transcribe the effects of light nearly 200 years ago, following the example of landscape...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Helen Lundeberg

By Jane Barthes  As an artist originally from Europe—and one whose own path did not begin with abstraction—I confess I possessed a rather rudimentary knowledge of geometric abstraction, particularly American hard-edge abstraction. It was at Art Expo in Chicago in 2015...

When Lee Krasner Met Piet Mondrian

Can you picture the austere Dutch modernist dancing barefoot? “Critic Clement Greenberg would describe Mondrian’s work as ‘passion mastered and cooled,’ and that described the artist as well. He had set up his studio in a Victorian house with curved arches, but in...

The Secret of Venus

Seeing Mona Kuhn’s subtly erotic nudes in the slide show that accompanies our podcast with her this week (and especially the photo titled Morgane from 2010) made me think of a book proposal…

Dabbling in Dura-Lar

Your fearless correspondent takes another class It’s always seemed to me that a big part of the fun of art-making lies in the endless amounts of seductive stuff to play with—paints and brushes, pencils and charcoal and pastels, clay and plaster and all kinds of goo,...

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,...

read more

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