Untitled, Bronx Multi-Colored Storefront (Image courtesy the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia) Sunlight does peculiar things in the city. It overwhelms surfaces in ways it can’t when there’s more organic matter around to soak up the glare or scatter it into chaotic shadows. The portfolio of Cuban-American painter Emilio Sanchez contains […]
Mercedes Helnwein’s “The Beautiful Person” provokes and questions observers at Second Street Gallery. (Courtesy the artist) What are you looking at? A stern portrait’s half-lidded stare seems to ask this the moment anyone walks through the door at Second Street Gallery. And in artist Mercedes Helnwein’s show “The Beautiful Person,” it’s a question well worth […]
Tickets to view “The Last Supper” sell out two months in advance. Visitors are permitted to view Leonardo da Vinci’s master work after a multi-step decontamination process and then only for 15 minutes. If there’s ever a case for viewing artwork remotely, the deteriorating 514-year-old refectory wall fresco in Milan makes it. “Leonardo Live”—something of […]
Watercolors are unruly. Each wet stroke wants to bleed into its own erratic shoreline from the brush’s edge as the pigment sinks to varying depths in the paper.
Art sounds a lot like remodeling. Hammers clunk. Power tools grind. People duck into the next room to help lift things.
Art often gives us a chance to root around in someone else’s heart, but rarely does it challenge us to examine our own. Rosamond Casey’s interactive game “Catch the Baby” is featured at Chroma Projects through November 26, along with paintings by Lindsay Heider Diamond. “Catch the Baby,” a two-player game at the center of […]
Most people with English rattling around their heads give little thought to what their language looks like. Typeface and handwriting vanish quickly behind the meaning of the words they form. It’s a playful change of pace, then, to study the work of Noriko Maeda, whose Japanese calligraphy, on view through September at Warm Springs Gallery, […]
Featuring dead birds, underwater towns, and ranch hands dining in the pastel dusk, Matt Kleberg’s paintings, now hanging at JohnSarahJohn, seem to conceal rich tales just beneath the thin layers of oil. Look closely at the finch outlined by the cream and brown stripes of “Right Now But Not Yet,” and you’ll see the base layers of paint from an earlier version of the ranch piece hung beside it.
In a culture awash with pointless crap to look at, still-life painting has never been more relevant.
McCarthy studied anything he could get his hands on—exhibits, criticism, artist biographies—that might help him use color to draw out the secrets of a shadowy tree line or a fiery lake at dusk.