Tag: The Madonna

Solo Shows

Donna Moylan’s egalitarian eclecticism

Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / “Recent Paintings,” Donna Moylan’s first exhibition at Bookstein Projects, collects works finished over the last year in her Kinderhook studio. In our email conversation, Moylan said that “sometimes paintings take years, as if they had to go off and think.” In addition to making paintings that carry time in the process of their production, she forgoes committing to a serial style, allowing her paintings to differ drastically from one to the next. “When I started doing that, in the nineteen-eighties,” she wrote, “I understood that what I wanted was to equalize, or make equivalent, many different styles of painting, and to refer to different cultures or eras with specificity but without differentiation or emphasis, without focusing on ‘styles.’” She has achieved this goal with considerable aplomb.

Icon painting

Early narratives: Nessebar, Bulgaria / Portrait of an icon painter

Contributed by Joya Stevenson / Like an icon, which shines forth the divine presence, so the village of Nessebar provides a window into a lost and magical world. Here, in southern Bulgaria on the Black Sea, not far from Istanbul (once Constantinople), Nessebar housed a cluster of some 40 churches dating from the 5th century to the 16th century CE, of which 15 have now been reconstituted from their archaeological remains. Some churches look like mini-fortresses with towers, decorated by concave arches and four-leafed flowers; others are plain, like rectangular houses. Inside, they are teeming with art. On the walls are frescoes illustrating gospel scenes. At the main apse in front of the altar, the Mother of God (theotokos), rather than Christ, is commonly found.