Skip to content

Log Out

×

Allegorical Strays: The Art and Craft of James Mellick

By Karen L. Mulder Essay

AS YOU ARE A SAVVY and a dedicated reader, here for your delectation is a quick quiz in the pestering style of the SAT analogy, but more akin in spirit to Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. If critics from the pre-modern period considered craft to be the opposite of art (craft vs.…

Read More

Things Come Alive: The Art of Olga Lah

By William Dyrness Essay

OLGA LAH DID NOT start out wanting to wrap buildings in electrician’s tape, fill huge spaces with billows of crumpled paper, or line galleries with great swathes of plastic bottle caps. She did not set out to be an artist at all—let alone one catching the attention of the art world in Los Angeles and even…

Read More

Carnal Beauties: The Art of Allison Luce

By Linda Stratford Essay

CERAMICIST ALLISON LUCE makes biomorphic portraits that seem almost excessively beautiful. Each piece revels in its physicality, its undeniable materiality, in its earthy substance—clay—and organic forms. Her four-part Serpent Tree series serves as an apt introduction to her work. In Primoris Ortus, for example, assemblages of swelling, vegetative curves stand alongside works suggestive of eroded rock…

Read More

Mirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process

By Katie Kresser Essay

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 More

Objects Worth Keeping

By Mary McCleary Essay

The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…

Read More

From Culture War to Culture Care

By Makoto Fujimura Essay

The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…

Read More

Far as the Curse is Found: The Art of Scott Kolbo

By Cameron J. Anderson Essay

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 More

Hanging Gardens: The Drawings of Gala Bent

By Hannah Faith Notess Essay

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 More

Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Natalie Settles

By Mary Kenagy Mitchell Interview

Artist Natalie Settles, featured in Image issue 85, has long been fascinated by the biological sciences. She makes drawings and installation art that mix highly detailed botanical and zoological imagery with highly stylized forms, like Victorian decorative motifs. Her installation works are interactive; they use a gallery space to create an ecosystem in which the viewer…

Read More

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required