Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Saturday, May 21, 2022
Contributed by Julia Kunin / On March 1, 2022, I reconnected with my friend the Hungarian artist Anita Kroo after reading that she and her family had taken in a refugee family from Ukraine. She told me about the experience. Anita Kroo: I remember when war broke out on Thursday, February […]
Contributed by Julia Kunin / On March 19, I had the opportunity to interview the Ukrainian artist Violetta Oliinyk. She has been working with her partner, artist Taras Polataiko, in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, sending medical supplies and protective gear to the civilian soldiers of Kyiv.
Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / The first plate of Barnett Newman?s Notes, a series of etchings from 1968 that are on view at Craig Starr alongside Brice Marden’s “Suicide Notes,” contains an outlandish concentration of marks in the lower left of the central column. With this plate, as with his painting Achilles (1952), it seems as if he was pushing the limit of his own format, to see how much incident he could include without, in Donald Judd?s terminology, ?weakening? the composition.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / At the beginning of the pandemic, when Jamie Madison’s Bay Area studio was less accessible, she settled into her home studio in a rural area of Northern California and got a puppy. Behind her house lay the wild, oak-studded riparian woodland of Putah Creek, and in the front conventional orchards and farms stretched for miles.
Contributed by Julia Kunin / Like most Americans, I have been distressed by the news coming out of Ukraine. I spoke with Ukrainian Canadian artist Taras Polataiko over a week ago, and as the war escalated, I wanted to check back and see how things were going. Taras and his girlfriend Violetta Oliinyk have gone to Ukraine to take care of family, raise funds for, and organize the delivery of medicine and protective gear to Kyiv’s citizen soldiers. I learned that Violetta�s father and two brothers are now fighting, too. This interview took place on March 14, which was the nineteenth day of the war. If you would like to make a donation to their effort, please message Taras on Facebook.
Contributed by Julia Kunin / Like many Americans, I have been watching onliine and reading about the war in Ukraine with shock and sadness. Finding Ukrainian Canadian artist Taras Polataiko speaking out on social media made it more real. Taras, whom I met in 2008 at Art Omi, is back in Ukraine to help his family and raise funds for Kyiv’s civilian defense soldiers. I reached out last week to see how he is doing. �A lot of people don�t realize that we actually have been at war for the last 8 years,” Taras told me. “The word ‘war’ was not used because the Russians presented their hybrid war as ‘a civil internal conflict.'” He told me they are slowly getting used to the situation. I’ll have an update in a few days.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Whatever strategies an artist employs to express their art intellectual, psychological, or mythological it must be first and foremost visually striking. In his first solo exhibition in New York, painter Zachary Keeting clears a high bar with a stunning set of ten paintings, on view at Underdonk through March 27.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Jane Swavely has lived and worked in a loft overlooking the Bowery since the 1980s when she was an SVA student and later a studio assistant to Brice Marden. Since “Jinx,” her pre-pandemic solo show at A.I.R. gallery, Jane’s work has become more subtractive, with […]
Contributed by Russell Floersch / My dear friend, the artist Daniel Levine, died suddenly on January 20th of a heart-attack as he was taking Mona Levine, his 90-year-old mother, to a doctor’s appointment.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / Like a strobe light gifted with consciousness, Danica Lundy lets whatever she sees point a way through a painting. The six works in �Three Hole Punch� at Magenta Plains are informed by memories of soccer practice, parties, school, and more � themes that function mainly as armatures for corporeal drama and mesmerizing painting detail.
