Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For over twenty years, Matthew Miller rendered arduously meticulous yet mysteriously otherworldly portraits, mainly of himself as subject and almost always against a maximally opaque black background betraying no brushstrokes, evidently free of human imperfection.
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Maureen Dougherty brings her paintings to life with quiet assurance. For “The Completionists,” her current exhibition at Mendes Wood DM in Germantown, she presents portraits of solitary collectors showcasing their collections in muted yet elegant tones not unlike Luc Tuymans’, with dabs of paint nestled into shadows and on tips of asparagus. Objects such as dog figurines, serving dishes, Picasso’s ceramics, skulls, and books are dutifully balanced on horizontal bands of shelving stretching across the picture plane, providing a fixed compositional framework. Perhaps Dougherty’s years of working in abstraction cultivated the acuity and freedom in her brushstroke. Nearly every one of the nine paintings on view fills the expanse of canvas as if to suggest that we’ve zoomed in on a larger presentation, singling out this particular person with this particular array of belongings while also understanding the moment as memory.
Contributed by Peter Plagens / The first edition of the Getty-sponsored “Pacific Standard Time” slate of exhibitions in 2011 was subtitled simply “Art in L.A., 1945 – 1980,” and it aimed to elucidate Southern California’s contribution to American postwar modern art. In 2017, the second iteration was called “LA/LA,” indicating the city’s Latin American art and artists. This time around PST has declared a more specific theme, “Art and Science Collide,” reminiscent of one of those noble Rose Parade rubrics…
Contributed by Bonnie Morano / I consider myself an open book. The secret ingredient to my zesty salad dressing is cumin. Avoiding parking tickets in NYC involves a finely worded note on the windshield. But ask me how I get my oil paint to stay so shiny when dry, I hesitate….In this social media age of oversharing, does the aura of the heroic painter today rest on magic and mystery or up front transparency?
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Anyone walking out of the Vija Celmins retrospective that opened last week at SFMoMA thinking how good she is at […]
When I got to the studio this dreary grey morning, my coat and tote bags were sopping wet. Looking up from the building’s entrance on […]
From the label text at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC: American artist Gilbert Stuart was commissioned to paint this portrait after the success […]
Contributed by Rob Kaiser-Schatzlein / The four paintings I looked at in Daniel Kingery‘s Bronx studio are all medium-sized, human scale. Paint application strategies vary […]
Improvised Showboat, a curatorial project developed by artists Zachary Keeting and Lauren Britton, mounted its seventh one-night show this past weekend in my new […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / A few years ago I was at the Mattatuck Museum checking out the Connecticut Biennial, and I ran across a […]
After seeing the exhibition at Gagosian, I’ve become a huge Helen Frankenthaler fan. Curated by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / The pioneers of abstraction — the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists — emerged from firm and identifiable aesthetic roots […]
