Connecting Artists

About a decade ago, in the wake of yet another failed romance, I decided to visit the Florence Biennale, an art extravaganza that has been in the works since 1997. A fellow art journalist was going, meeting up with a curator friend from Texas…

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),...

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...

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,...

“[When I was about twelve], my father took us on a rare excursion to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. My parents worked very hard, and taking four children on a bus to…

Artists report on nocturnal inspirations and frustrations I once described Louise Bourgeois as having “a direct pipeline to her unconscious,” and that still seems a fitting description for an artist who came of age in Paris at a time when the Surrealists were the...

An artist’s life is generally isolated at the best of times, and that is the way most would have it. Unless you’re Andy Warhol running The Factory and possibly pathologically in need of company at all hours, you require solitude to do your best work. So, for some this...

In newsletters, I’ve touched on the way artists respond to catastrophe—specifically war and widespread disease—from the Middle Ages to the present. Some, like Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, may take decades for the horror of their times to percolate into their...

Several years ago, I heard about a woman, a self-styled art adviser, who would invite artists to a plush hotel room and for a fee of $500 lend an hour of her time to look over portfolios and then write down…

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...