"Sometimes We're Ivy and Sometimes We're Oak"
"History does not tells me nothing that does not vex nor weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. It is very tiresome." - Jane Austen,...
View ArticleJean-Baptiste Leroux: A Green Thought In A Green Shade
To those of us who love spring best of all the seasons, we cherish it for the reemergence of the sensual world. Le jardin (French for ornamental garden) and le potager (French for vegetable garden)...
View ArticleOdilon Redon: Green And Pleasant Woodland Floor
"What is it that makes April and May the most pleasant months of the year? It is the verdure of the fields, which prompts the small birds to sing and to praise Spoung and its delightful gay green...
View ArticleCharmaine Watkiss: Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well
"I learned to make my mind large, as the world is large, so that there is room for paradoxes." - Maxine Hong KingstonCharmaine Watkiss iis a British artist whose parents emigrated from Jamaica. She...
View ArticleClose To The Eyes, Close To The Heart
This stunning photograph by Nils-Udo highlights the fragility of nature's beauty through an image of bindweed flowers reflected in a tranquil stream.The Caring Gallery is the first charity art gallery...
View ArticleGabriel Orozco: A Porcupine Eats A Tortilla
It sounds like the beginning of a shaggy dog story, A Porcupine Eats a Tortilla. This cutest member of the rodent family munches on a tortilla, secure in the knowledge that those sharp spines will...
View ArticleRaoul Dufy: The Picture Stares Back
It's time to take Raoul Dufy more seriously than we usually do. We take the measure of the ills of this world by comparing them to the pleasures and happiness that are the stuff of Dufy's art. It was...
View ArticleRediscovering Praxilla of Sikyon
"Most lovely of the things I have loved and lost; the sunlight,"next, bright stars, the moon,ripe gourds, the fruit of apple trees, the pears." - Praxilla, circa 441 BCE Anyone who has...
View ArticleWinslow Homer: Summer Night
It may surprise us today but during his lifetime Winslow Homer's work received a mixed reception. Potter Palmer, an early collector of Impressionist art from Chicago, turned down Homer's offer to sell...
View ArticlePaula Rego: The Dance
I can' prove it but I think Paul Rego saw Winslow Homer's Summer Evening although she said that the idea for the painting came from her husband. Rego's paintings are full of her fascination with such...
View ArticleJune 7, 1916: Charles Burchfield And A Hot Day In Ohio
We can intuit from looking at Poplar Walk (dated June 7, 1916) an extremely hot day. It is no accident that the sidewalks are painted in a vivid orange, radiating heat even stronger than the yellow...
View ArticleLouise Bourgeois: Material Girl
"Material is only material. It is there to serve you and give you the best it can. If you are not satisfied, if you want more, you go to another material." Louise Bourgeois, New York, April 11,...
View ArticleLeon Dabo: A Late Romantic - I
For Paul Cezanne Mont Sainte-Victoire was a magic mountain. Though not one of the tallest mountains around, it dominated the skyline over his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Monet had water lilies;...
View ArticleLeon Dabo: A Late Romantic - Part II
When Leon Dabo was an aspiring artist in Paris Japomisme had taken the city by storm. Paintings, ceramic, posters, showed the French infatuation with all things Japanese. Artful arrangements were a...
View ArticleFairfield Porter: The French Connection
"Order seems to come from searching for disorder, and awkwardness to come from searching for harmony or likeness, or the following of a system. The truest order is what you already find there, or that...
View ArticleJennifer Bartlett: The Air At Five In The Evening
"Bartlett is an artist in the Renaissance tradition, equally engaged in philosophy, naturalism, and aesthetics, constantly questioning herself and the world with her favorite mantra, 'what if'?" -...
View ArticleRaoul Dufy: The Case For Beauty
"A well painted turnip is more significant than a poorly painted Madonna." - Max LiebermannNot many artists are so distinctive that an adjective is coined in their honor but here is one: "Dufyesque."...
View ArticleMatthew Cusick: The Course Of Empire In Our Time
The Mixmaster, as it is known in Forth Worth, overshadows a past history of old trading posts and railroad depots, As part of the NAFTA superhighway it is also a participant in American foreign...
View ArticleBob Thompson's Antique Figures
"The stars are scattered in the skyirrespective of our needfor swans and lyres and charioteersOur dreams are foolishand our constellationsfictionsthat wouldn't fool a child. We reach them anyhowas if...
View ArticleStella Polaris: Helen Frankenthaler
There was always more subject matter in abstract painting than artists were willing to admit at the time. The title may have been an allusion to a work by the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire....
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