painting | The Smart Set

Circle of Angels

David M. Rubin — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

A foreshortened dove soars to us, wings outstretched. The pure white bird has dipped down to clear the trees, or perhaps has just condensed from cloud. Moving or frozen in space, the bird is perfectly centered above a hand holding a clamshell, gently pouring water. It is the embodiment of the Holy Spirit and is […]

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Asking What’s Real and What’s Not

Marek Makowski — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 15:48:24 +0000

When I discovered her work, I was searching for a different Madeleine Gross. The days of lockdown wearied me; I lay in bed, at night or during the afternoon or morning (time was unbroken and the same), swiping to find how others had changed. I sought one of my many now-anonymous former coworkers from a […]

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Georgia O’Keeffe and ROYGBIV

Kelsey Dufresne — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 13:44:08 +0000

“Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my effort to create an equivalent with paint color for the world — life as I see it.” Georgia O’Keeffe, 1937 Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, skulls, and landscapes […]

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Chucho Bedoya’s “Chucherías” Exhibit at Bogotá’s Galeria Fenix

Jeremy Ray Jewell — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 12:30:00 +0000

As you walk uphill from Bogotá’s iconic Colpatria Tower and through the Parque de la Independencia, you have only a few blocks before you meet the Cerros Orientales . . . the Eastern Hills. There the Adean city’s center abruptly ends in the shadow of Monserrate Mountain, a pilgrimage site since pre-Hispanic times. This plateau […]

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Spot Makers

John Capista — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:30:00 +0000

When Marcel Duchamp exhibited his Nude Descending a Staircase at New York’s famous Armory Show in 1913, the New York Times called the painting “an explosion in a shingle factory.” At the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, Harvard professor and literary critic Irving Babbitt described it as a book that could only have been written “in an advanced stage of psychic disintegration.”  When confronted with something new, unusual, or different, critics […]

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Portrait by an Artist

John Skoyles — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 14:38:22 +0000

As Museum-goers and gallery-goers, and even as humble pageturners of plates in art books, we’ve all admired portraits by great painters. In some cases, we’re struck by the likeness; in others, the soulfulness of the subject. We see the artist’s view of the model, but not the model’s view of the artist. How many of us have had the chance to take […]

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Writing with a Brush

Colin Fleming — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 11:30:12 +0000

We almost always assume that a writer is most influenced by other writers. They’ve read piles of books, they’ve decided that their skills best synch up with what a given number of other authors were doing, and they take a bit here, take a bit there, mix that in with their own sensibilities, and voila, […]

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Happy Accidents

Stephanie Haun — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 11:30:48 +0000

I always looked forward to Saturday mornings as a child. The good cartoons were always on between the hours of nine and noon, and I never really had to change the channels to find what I wanted. I was fortunate to grow up with cable television, but, as with most kids, it could have been […]

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Mother/Painter

Stephen Akey — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 12:24:26 +0000

No one would dream of painting such a picture now. A pubescent girl, half-draped in a Greek tunic and preparing for a bath in a reedy pool, covers her breast and turns her head as if surprised by an intruder. And though the pose may be based on classical precedents of “Susanna and the Elders,” […]

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Masters and Madonnas

Charles Molesworth — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 12:30:58 +0000

In the fall 2017 season, the National Gallery in London mounted a show entitled “Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael around 1500.” Here were three of the greatest artists of any period, with several masterpieces on display, and each work breathtaking and all tied nimbly together. The point was to illustrate a moderate argument — namely that Michelangelo […]

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