Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, May 13, 2024
Please join us: The 2024 iteration of Dumbo Open Studios, takes place this weekend! Painter and Two Coats publisher Sharon Butler will have some new paintings on view at the Two Coats of Paint Project Space (20 Jay Street #308), and she has also organized “BIG TOP,” an exhibition of 13 talented young artists she met while teaching in the University of Connecticut’s MFA Program.
UConn’s MFA Studio Art program is a fully funded three-year graduate program which supports a broad range of art making including painting/drawing, photography/video, printmaking, and sculpture/ceramics with an international faculty and superior and generous facilities in a rural environment centrally located in Southern New England for easy day trips to New York, Boston, Providence, Hartford, and New Haven. The program culminates with an exhibition in a NYC gallery. and a thesis exhibition in UConn’s William Benton Museum of Art. The deadline for submitting the application is January 15, 2024.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “Poem Unlimited” a group show at The Alexey Von Schlippe Gallery at the University of Connecticut Avery Point, curator Kenneth Heyne has taken his inspiration from Harold Bloom’s 2003 book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. A revered Shakespeare scholar, literary critic, and professor at Yale, Bloom divides his slim volume into short chapters, each dedicated to different characters and aspects of the play. In tone and style, it is almost gossipy. Reading it made me feel as though I was joining Bloom in catching up on old friends with whom we’d lost touch. Though some have criticized the book as a disjointed compilation of fragmented ideas and unfinished thoughts, for me – admittedly no Shakespeare expert – its charm lies in its casualness.
From November 1 to 6, the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Deborah Zlotsky. An abstract painter who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, Deborah has developed an idiosyncratic syntax of contours, stripes, planes, and near-trompe l’oeil passages, which inventively probe the intersection of imagined visual language and observational translation.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / From May 4 -10, after a two-year Covid hiatus, the small Two Coats of Paint Residency Program returns with Iranian American artist Afarin Rahmanifar. Born in Tehran and based in Connecticut, Afarin explores the points where Eastern and Western culture intersect.
Contributed by Stephen Maine/ On view at the University of Connecticut’s Contemporary Art Galleries through November 29 is “Constructed,” a lively exhibition of seventeen works by five distinguished midcareer painters whose handling of color — as a kind of visual armature — is inseparable from structure. The show’s curator, Museum […]
Contributed by Neil Daigle-Orians / Walking in to Hartford’s Artspace Gallery, the viewer is immediately struck by a large, hand-painted green screen. Merging the analog with the digital, Michael Siporin Levine’s set up for Vision Test lingers outside the context of his performative projection. Looking across, we see paintings by Blake […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / As some readers may remember, I went to the University of Connecticut for my MFA degree, and until last year, I taught an MFA seminar up in Storrs. These days my schedule doesn’t allow taking those beautiful foliage tours up to Storrs each week, so […]
