An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 9, 2026
Contributed by Elizabeth Scheer / I first discovered the Rescue Center while walking idly on the Upper West Side. I rang the bell and then stood in the atrium. A person came to the door and wrote my name on a clipboard. “You’ll be added to our mailing list,” they said. I cannot recall if that individual was a man or a woman. Gender, race and so forth were not of consequence in such a place. The humans formed, in aggregate, a giant hand filled with seeds.
Contributed by Elizabeth Scheer / Though I am no longer in the art world, my career is more lucrative and fulfilling than I could have ever imagined. I am well-known and beloved among my clientele, and I make a great deal of money. The title of my profession cannot be named, as it would not be in the best interest of either my clients or me. Everyone who knows me, however, knows I owe the triumphs of the last decade to the events I am about to relate, which catalyzed my discovery of my true talents. With that in mind, the moral of this story might be to remain open to all of life’s possibilities.
Contributed by Elizabeth Scheer / As the city transitions into solstitial warmth, two stand-out exhibitions reward the corresponding sense of emergence. Helen Frankenthaler’s “Drawing within Nature: Paintings from the 1990s,” on view at Gagosian, and Trevor Shimizu’s “Cycles” at 47 Canal are preoccupied with what the American poet Wallace Stevens described in his poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” as the discovery of “order as of a season.” Both exhibitions feature pastoral scenes that impressionistically use color, texture, and line to reveal patterns in the apparent arbitrariness of the natural elements they aim to represent.
Contributed by Liz Scheer / In his new exhibition “Sundowning“at Freight + Volume, Miles Debas utilizes a mixture of collaged and sculptural elements to create works that are at once whimsical and intellectually provocative. The press release says his hanging sculptures adhere to a “dream-like logic,” and that’s an apt statement. The bits of cloth and color are like snapped-off impressions – pieces of waking life – that cohere into a whole that implies but falls short of legibility. Describing a painting as “dream-like,” though, suggests that it is surrealist. With their floating symbols and jewel-toned colors, Debas’ constructions could certainly be so characterized. But there’s a way to read these pieces not as representations of the unconscious but rather as odes to moments of agreeable miscommunication: instances when conversation that leads nowhere in particular is nonetheless intensely satisfying.
