More on: Visual Art

The term “elder statesman” may sound a bit ponderous, but how else to describe Theodore (“Ted”) Prescott’s stature and, well, indispensability? In the early 1980s, when Christian visual artists were slowly emerging from the wilderness of a defensive, disengaged attitude toward culture, Ted Prescott became a leader. His bold sculptures, employing neon, plaster, wood, and…

Good portraiture is at once as intellectual and artful as any other kind of painting, and as personal and precise as crafting custom-made shoes by hand. Undoubtedly, Catherine Prescott has the mysterious knack for getting a likeness—for accuracy and objectivity in measuring and reproducing faces and bodies, for meticulous care in assembling the whole—but there’s…

Noted artist and critic Robert Kushner has written: “The idea of forging a new kind of art, about hope, healing, redemption, refuge, while maintaining visual sophistication and intellectual integrity is a growing movement, one which finds Makoto Fujimura’s work at the vanguard.” Mako Fujimura is forging a new kind of art not just through his…

Alfonse Borysewicz makes paintings that yoke the austerity of near-abstraction with an underlying sense of beauty and grace. For many of us, his painting “Ash Wednesday,” which was the cover art for Image’s special 9/11 issue, was both a prophetic and a consoling work at a painful historical moment. Its cluster of black smudges, some…

In Erica Grimm-Vance’s paintings, the human figure swims in a sea of Being: each gesture, each pose is richly evocative of the ancient but neglected idea of the unity of body and soul. Both her exquisite rendering of the figure and her encaustic technique (employing melted wax) bring a sense of warmth and affirmation to…

It’s an overused word, but clear your mind for a minute and believe us when we say that Laura Lasworth’s paintings are haunting. In its original usage “haunt” meant to habitually frequent a place and that’s what Lasworth’s canvases do: linger in our minds, in that border country between dreaming and waking life, between faith…

Painter Melissa Weinman is at once deeply traditional and profoundly and quirkily original. All her work, whether in landscape or in representing the human figure, embodies what Joseph Conrad called the primary mission of the artist: “above all, to make yousee.” For Weinman, helping people to see better involves not only teaching them how to…

Ginger Geyer’s conceptual works in porcelain remind us that art, at root, is fundamentally about play. Play in the deepest sense. Play as fun, mischief, and the free exercise of the imagination. But like all the best forms of play, Geyer’s work has plenty of rules. In her case, they involve the limitations and demands…

According to the art critic Dore Ashton, Tobi Kahn’s art “unites our perception of the material with our memory.” This is only fitting for a man whose Jewish heritage permeates all aspects of his work. Whether in his mysterious paintings, reminiscent of biological and geographical formations, or in his sculptures of sanctuaries and sacred monumental…

Tim Lowly is a Chicago-based painter whose lyrical realism and quiet spirituality have given his work a national reputation. While he has painted myriad subjects, from everyday life on American city streets to village life in South Korea, one series of Lowly’s paintings have etched themselves on the minds of his many admirers — his…