Contributed by Heather Bause Rubinstein / I left New York in January of 2020 and sublet my studio with plans to return in April. I repeat this pattern of coming and going every spring term to teach in Houston alongside my spouse, art critic and poet Raphael Rubinstein. As before, […]
Artist’s Notebook
Ideas and Influences: Louise Belcourt
New York-based painter Louise Belcourt recently returned from a quiet summer in the country, where she completed new work, which is on view through December 12 at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. The series comprises collages on paper made with painted gouache shapes, infusing the curvy hard-edge simplicity of Matisse […]
Anywhere Out of the World: Chagall and me
Contributed by Susan Bee / The early paintings of Marc Chagall are a recent inspiration. It�s a strange turn. For years I thought I disliked his work, especially the late paintings: too saccharine and repetitious. But I became enamored by his early efforts when I saw Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The […]
What good is abstract painting now?
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Without any bombs exploding or even a single shot fired, the world we knew before COVID has gone poof. Sure, buildings are intact; trees, grass and flowers still grow; the sky is blue; people walk on streets and drive cars. What’s disappeared, for who knows […]
Radical reorientation: Leaving New York
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Joy Garnett, an artist I met via her formidable art blog NEWSgrist (“where spin is art”) in the early art blogging days, has just left Brooklyn. On social media I discovered that she has packed up her studio and apartment and moved to the high […]
Quick study: The quiet city
Contributed by Sharon Butler / How’s everyone doing out there? The streets of New York have calmed down in the past few weeks, with far fewer sirens, although the neighbors still hang out the windows to make a racket at 7pm, celebrating the quietly heroic medical personnel and other essential […]
The political power of art
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In a typically penetrating New York Times column earlier this month, David Leonhardt pointed out that one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt�s many insights was the need to showcase as well as merely extend government largesse in order to impress upon its beneficiaries the ongoing value of the […]
When do artists leave the country?
Contributed by Sharon Butler / On Wednesday, MarketWatch, a financial blog published by the Dow Jones company, ran a provocative piece suggesting that the time might be approaching for Americans to begin planning an exit strategy from Trumplandia. To cut to the chase, Brett Arends, one of their financial columnists […]
Peter Dudek returns from the Berkshires
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Peter Dudek spent his summer up in the Berkshires where he and his brother oversee Bascom Lodge, an old-fashioned hikers’ inn on the top of Mount Greylock. For the past few years Dudek has been hosting a small residency program–readers may recall I spent time […]
Storage or dumpster? Organizing the archives
Readers who have been following Two Coats of Paint since the beginning know that for ten years I taught at a state university in Connecticut and kept my studio in the attic of an old Victorian house in downtown Mystic. In 2010 I moved back to New York and, after […]