Artist’s Notebook

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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Artist's Notebook

Sweet Art Alabama 

Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Hitting the road to Alabama for Sharon’s solo show “March” at the Sarah Moody Gallery at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in late March, we knew from ongoing contact with gallery director and art professor William Dooley and his assistant Vicki Rial that a deftly curated presentation in a beautiful space and a warm reception from the Art Department were in store. The students and gallery patrons who attended Sharon’s artist’s talk were inquisitive, smart, and welcoming. What we did not expect was the prevalence of so many talented people in the wider art community spanning Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, which we discovered is rich with deeply engaged artists, curators, and gallerists.

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Artist's Notebook

Stockholm exchange

Contributed by Kasper Nihlmark / During a two-week trip to New York City from my native Sweden, I had the chance to catch a glimpse of the city’s art scene firsthand. As a sculptor, I was predisposed to wander about sculpture parks and museums. The Pratt Institute’s Sculpture Park, which stretches across its campus in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, showcases more than 70 works and a wide range of techniques and materials. Notwithstanding its broadly educational purpose, each piece is well-chosen and nicely integrated with the rest. Among the most striking is Nova Mihai Popa’s Ecstasy, a joyful composition of positive and negative shape. 

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Artist's Notebook

The Exhibit: Just another gig

Contributed by Adam Simon / I only watched parts of The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist – the six-episode MTV/Smithsonian Channel reality show in which seven artists compete for an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and $100k in prize money. Not having an MTV account, my viewing was repeatedly interrupted by ads, and I bailed after watching a few episodes. I was sorry to bail in a way because there were things I liked about The Exhibit. The artists were impressive as thinking, creative individuals and I was taken with how supportive they appeared of each other, remarkable given the stakes. If there were times of cutthroat competition, they were carefully edited out, happened off camera, or just weren’t in the bits that I saw. I’m guessing the comradery I witnessed was genuine. That said, there is a striking degree to which The Exhibit, as a reality TV show, resembles any other reality TV show, whether it’s American Idol, The Apprentice, or Top Chef. A quick scan shows over 400 reality TV shows listed on Wikipedia, dating back to my favorite, the British Up series in 1964.] 

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Artist's Notebook

The Off-Season

Contributed by Sharon Butler / There’s no sweeter time to visit a seaside town than during the springtime off-season, before the tourists jam the streets, take all the parking spots, and hog the waterfront picnic benches. One beautiful morning last week, I dropped everything and drove out to the East End of Long Island to smell the salt air and feel the sea breeze on my face. Enroute, I stopped at three terrific venues.

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Artist's Notebook

Beautiful games: Football, art, beauty, spectacle 

Contributed by Astrid Dick / On December 18th, 2022, Argentina, my country of origin, won the FIFA World Cup in Qatar against France, my country of residence. It was perhaps the most epic and thrilling final in this international tournament’s history. Two months later, Argentina’s victory is still slowly settling in my mind. As time passes, I realize more than ever how football – or fútbol, soccer, calcio, etc – at its highest level is a collective practice that parallels the practice of art, where the individual and the team refine and adapt their senses and skill, where gestures leave their imprint in memory, and where a decisive move can determine the outcome.

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