Fade to Black: Recent Work by Duncan Simcoe
By Visual Art Issue 115
Simcoe instinctively recognized tar paper’s potential as the medium he was seeking. It had a texture receptive to crayon and brush; its lusterless, inky finish conveyed an aura of mystery; and you could simply tack it onto a gallery wall for display.
Read MoreCindy Jackson’s Bevy of Boisterous Bodies
By Essay Issue 92
CONTEMPORARY FIGURATIVE ART may owe more to the golden age of comic books than many art watchers are prepared to admit. Beyond the ironic appropriation of comics by late art-world A-lister Roy Lichtenstein or au courant nihilistic punkster Raymond Pettibon, illustrated narrative has a much longer pedigree. Earlier in the twentieth century, the angular and…
Read MoreVanishing into the Work: The Franciscan Labors of James Munce
By Essay Issue 54
I think that I am primarily a storyteller. My function as a visual artist is to create a two-dimensional formal structure that will best contain the story being told. I am always trying to create a sense of space that has somehow been altered or transformed by an event. —James Munce THE LACONIC, SPARTAN PROSE above…
Read MoreGuy Kinnear: Male Call
By Essay Issue 63
IN THE MID-1980s, just shy of my fortieth birthday, I found myself out of work and divorced. It was a crash landing of all my aspirations, and crawling from the wreckage of two traumas, I was grieved, confused, desperate—cut off from the world I thought I understood. In the fragile years that followed, I tried…
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 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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