Artist’s Notebook

Artist's Notebook Gallery shows

Rodin and food

Contributed by Peter Dudek / I was on my way to ISAW – NYU’s Institute of Studies in the Ancient World – when an email from The New Yorker appeared on my iPhone. They had just published a story entitled “Love is a Mental Hospital.” A terribly precise and painful title for structurally confining relationships; often by one’s own choosing. Have we not all been there? And what about life as an artist? Is that not also an entanglement of rapture, love, hate, and malaise? Believing I understood the situation deeply, I wondered if reading the story was necessary. But could there not be a different take, a new perspective? Why not? I returned to the email and, of course, the title was not “Love is a Mental Hospital” but rather “Love in a Mental Hospital.” A story about…

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Artist's Notebook

Sharon’s Substack / April 1, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Reading Gary Garrels’ remembrance of Brice Marden in Artforum in 2023, I encountered a Rothko quote to the effect that paintings are about basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. I was not inclined to think about my work in that way, so I spent some time reading about basic human emotions, which, in my placid New England family, were generally dismissed without much examination….

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Artist's Notebook Opinion

Jennifer Bartlett’s demons 

Contributed by Patrick Neal / During the late 1980s and ‘90s, the painter Jennifer Bartlett produced four major series examining the classical elements of fire, air, earth, and water. The first three bodies of work, Fire Paintings, Air: 24 Hours, and Earth Paintings and Drawings, were exhibited at Paula Cooper’s Soho gallery, and Water, the last, at Gagosian in Los Angeles in 1997. In perusing images, it’s easy to find straightforward examples of fire, air, and water, but earth proves more elusive. What emerge instead are compositions of domestic scenes with strange people centered around homes, vacations, and holidays suggesting an underlying storyline. In Bartlett’s work, human presence is usually manifested through symbolic motifs or psychological traces, which makes the figures and narratives in the Earth paintings all the more intriguing. 

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Artist's Notebook

Sharon’s Substack / December 4, 2025

Contributed by Sharon Butler / A few days after the final 2025 Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist left, I packed a bag and tagged along with the editor on a short trip to Dublin. He had a non-art-related conference, and I so I walked around the city, admiring countless wool tweeds and hand-knit sweaters, checking out art, and catching up with friends. When we got back, he wrote about Stephanie Deady’s painting show at Kevin Kananvaugh, and I tackled Alan Butler’s mind-spinning data-driven spectacle at Green on Red.

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Artist's Notebook Remembrance

Absence: The highest form of presence

Contributed by Paul Behnke / My wife Garner Behnke, who suffered from debilitating illness and took her own life two years ago this December, was a passionate, funny, intelligent, and talented woman whom I love and miss very much. She wrote wonderful poetry and short stories. She loved her dog Gyp beyond measure. She believed in me and my work and never minded if I woke her in the middle of the night to come and see a just-finished painting, which I was almost always unduly excited about.

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Artist's Notebook Out of Town

On the road: Remote and unexpected in the USA, 2025

Contributed by Kathryn Myers / Having retired after 40 years of teaching in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut, I set out in my camper van in late December on the first of what I hope will be a series of annual winter road trips. On this inaugural journey, I decided to avoid larger cities and major highways, heading first to Arizona and California and then taking a month to meander home along the south and east coasts.

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Artist's Notebook

Jack Whitten: A force for upending

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Walk with me, backwards through time. See Jack Whitten painstakingly remove over two thousand tiles of hardened acrylic paint from his canvas. Watch as he assembles them into a large, flat plane, carefully unslices them from tiny squares, and then unsplatters and unpours the black and white paint. We’ve reached that final moment, in 1990, when the idea for The Messenger (for Art Blakey) is alive only in the artist’s mind. It is a fireball that has hurtled through years of searching, experimenting, suffering, loving, being lost, being overlooked, being angry — and now is ready to take hold….

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Artist's Notebook

Inside Peter Dudek’s studio

We’re up in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The floor of Dudek’s studio is covered wall-to-wall with objects. One can ascertain individual sculptures, or perhaps parts of sculptures that might become sculptures one day. I ask if this is how it always is.

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