Disrupted Realism: Reimagining the Figure at the Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia In Martin Campos’ painting Montaña fragmentary figures overlap and coalesce into an environment conjured from paint. Both engaging and frustrating the image seems provisional, suspended somewhere between the artist’s conflicting urges to create and destroy. Campos apparently knows the human…

During the many hours that Debra Burchett-Lere, Excutive Director of the Sam Francis Foundation, has spent studying the Sam Francis Papers she has made some discoveries. Among them is the trove of letters that artist Walasse Ting (1929–2010) sent to Sam during their long friendship. Realizing that this correspondence was…

A review of Nathan Oliveira: Muse at Pamela Walsh Gallery in Palo Alto, California. “We had a joke at Yaddo,” recalls artist Imi Hwangbo, “that you don’t want to go to studio and find a note from the muse: I was here. Where were you?” Hwangbo, now a professor at…

June 26, 2020 Dear Jean-Michel, Sorry to disturb your rest. Although your work offers instructions on how to repel ghosts, I am seeking yours out to provide some news and updates. Since you left this world in 1988 there have been some developments that I think you would want to…

Nuances in Abstract Painting at the Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia Can you remember the days when abstract art was widely misunderstood, ridiculed, and even feared by most Americans? I can. While visiting a museum in college I once watched an irate mother drag her kids away from a Robert Motherwell painting…

_______________________________________________________________ “All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.” - Hunter S. Thompson _______________________________________________________________ If you want to freak out painter Scott Jones, here is what you need to do. Just wait for Scott in front of one of his canvases at an opening — sipping…

While staying at home during the COVID-19 crisis, I have been entertaining myself by altering digital images of art masterpieces using Photoshop software. The images below are my attempts to insert the theme of social distancing into paintings by Impressionist and Baroque masters. Below each of my altered images is a link that will take you to Wikipedia where you can see digital images of the original works of art. — John Seed

Brenda Goodman’s new show in Los Angeles is really two shows. The central space of The Landing Gallery—where the artist, her partner Linda Dunne and art dealer Gerard O’Brien chatted at a table left from opening night while I viewed Goodman’s paintings—holds the core of the exhibition. There is a…

You likely already know the full story of the Art Basel banana by now. Kudos is sadly due to trickster Maurizio Cattelan for creating an attention getting Instagrammable metaphor/meme that raked in a nice pile of cash. …