Mirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process
By Essay Issue 80
Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated…. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. —Mark Rothko, 1947 OUR ENCOUNTER with reality is endlessly generative. Both Subject and Object, the contemplative and the contemplated, are replete with a beautiful, orderly complexity. The authentic artwork—glittering, effulgent with metaphysical…
Read MoreFar as the Curse is Found: The Art of Scott Kolbo
By Essay Issue 80
The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque. —Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners SOME MONTHS AGO, while traveling, I walked full-force into the sloping ceiling of the unfamiliar guest room where I was staying. The blow to…
Read MoreHanging Gardens: The Drawings of Gala Bent
By Essay Issue 82
GALA BENT WAS ONCE a landscape painter who lived in Indiana, born and raised in the Midwest. Her paintings, acrylic on paper, featured dark, heavy, and flat horizontal spaces. But she used to dream about mountains. That is, until she found herself surrounded by them. When she and her husband, fellow artist Zack Bent, moved…
Read More111th Street Jesus: The Art and Faith of Muralist Kent Twitchell
By Essay Issue 82
KENT TWITCHELL has painted Jesus on the sides of buildings in Los Angeles four times. One of those Jesuses (until it was whitewashed recently by a new property owner) was on the exterior of a liquor store at Vermont Avenue and 111th Street, in a gang-patrolled part of south Los Angeles known by city homicide detectives…
Read MoreEcologies of Knowing
By Essay Issue 85
Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…
Read MoreLearning to Live on the Spiral Jetty
By Essay Issue 84
IN JULY OF 2014 I went to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Utah desert, about two hours by car from Salt Lake City. Massive, remote, and seemingly useless, Spiral Jetty has the feel of a lost work—one so far out of sight as to be out of mind: most of us don’t even…
Read MoreThe Visual Jewishness of Mark Podwal
By Visual Art Issue 84
“For me, drawing is a form of prayer. Drawing and painting are how I express my Jewishness. I never took an art lesson, and I’m totally self-taught. I believe I’ve been blessed. And somehow a path that was not leading to my becoming an artist led me to where I was not planning on going.”
Read MoreNoah Buchanan and the Renewal of Mystery
By Essay Issue 81
IT WAS THE FIRST FULL DAY of the fall semester at the New York Academy of Art, and California artist Noah Buchanan was riding the Number 2 subway to lower Manhattan’s Tribeca district where he would disembark five blocks south of the school. The Brazilian beat of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints thrummed on…
Read MorePlates from a Forgotten Book: The Paintings of Kim Alexander
By Essay Issue 81
IT IS A RARE mild September afternoon in Dallas when Kim Alexander sits me down. We are at her kitchen table, mere yards from her studio, which has spilled out of one spare bedroom into that familiar mid-mod home space, the den. In the regional vernacular for which we Texans are known but which we…
Read MoreKaren Laub-Novak: A Catholic Expressionist in the Era of Vatican II
By Essay Issue 83
IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…
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