Guest Contributor Barbara Campbell Thomas / Journeying to Italy in order to bask in the perfectly toned muscular glow of High Renaissance art is a well-worn artist narrative. But while visiting Italy this past June, I bypassed the usual cast of characters entirely, taking in Florence mostly while dragging my […]
Artist’s Notebook
Joshua Sevits: Ten Images
Guest contributor Joshua Sevits / After paying what seemed like highway robbery for admission to the Armory Show and a bizarro salmon sandwich with coffee (black), I found some amazing paintings that are definitely worth sharing. Better late than never, right? For the ten pieces I selected, the unifying factor […]
Artist’s house for sale: Mystic, Connecticut
UPDATE (Dec. 23): We have a contract on the house, but there’s a contingency clause–we agreed to give the buyers time to sell their house–so we can still entertain other offers! When I was a full-time faculty member at a nearby university, we bought this beautiful historic house at […]
Studio update: Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program
I’ll be working in Long Island City for the next few months and then heading back to DUMBO, where I’ve been invited to participate in the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program. Two Trees, a major real estate developer in DUMBO, announced last June that they were planning to […]
Colleagues: Judith Schaechter and Eileen Neff
Two of my talented colleagues at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts have solo shows in Chelsea this month. At Claire Oliver, Judith Schaechter presents beautiful but disturbing stained glass lightboxes and kiln-cast glass sculptures about sex and death, and at Bruce Silverstein, Eileen Neff explores perception, mirroring, and memory […]
Ideas and Influences: Helen O’Leary
Helen O’Leary grew up in rural Ireland in the the 60s and 70s, where her mother’s philosophy was “if you can’t make it, you can’t have it.” In her 2010 Guggenheim application she wrote that this spirit of creativity and “making do” carries over into her work: Throughout my career, […]
Looking back: Precisionism, Part I
Contributed by Sharon Butler /Back in the 1920s during the early days of industrialization, the Precisionists were drawn to the welded geometric forms of steel mills, bridges, water towers, smoke stacks, factory complexes, and coal mines.
Dear Tamara, and other letters about art
This month, Raphael Rubinstein is the guest editor of the Rail’s ArtSeen section. Citing letters from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, and the letters that Samuel Beckett wrote to Georges Duthuit about Bram van Velde’s paintings, Rubinstein asked contributors to write a letter. “Perhaps the most important difference […]
How long does it take Brice Marden to make a painting?
In this 2009 conversation with Harry Cooper, curator at National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, that was recorded at Brice Marden’s (Manhattan) studio, Marden discusses drawing with sticks, being a guard at the Jewish Museum during Jasper Johns’s retrospective, his early marriage to Pauline Baez (Joan’s older sister), being […]
Recto or Verso: What kind of artist are you?
Barnett Newman, Two Edges, 1948, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Museum of Modern Art, gift of Annalee Newman (by exchange). Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS) Mark Rothko, No. 1 (Untitled), 1948, oil on canvas, 8 feet 10 3/8 inches x 9 feet 9 1/4 inches. […]