Writing: Appreciations

Crossing to Safety

Christopher Gallego’s Tenth Avenue drawing series I could give all to Time except – exceptWhat I myself have held. But why declareThe things forbidden that while the Customs sleptI have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,And what I would not […]

Read Essay

A Whole Harvest of Invention

Lennart Anderson: A RetrospectiveThe New York Studio School, October 18 – November 28, 2021 I distinctly remember my high school painting teacher, Francis Cunningham, criticizing a student’s still-life painting, and the question came down to choice of objects. He said […]

Read Essay

Edwin Dickinson’s Painting “Gas Tank”

Walking through the landscape, your eyes unconsciously register the broad visual characteristics of the day: the color harmonies proffered by the weather and the season, and the general note of the vegetation. It also notes the big relationship of the […]

Read Essay

The Portrait “Ralph” by Diego Catalán Amilivia

The model sits within the frame with the formality and elegance of a Pollaiuolo. They both have elegantly coiffed headdresses—each, very much of its time. Ralph’s massive, spongey dreadlocks place him as the latest in a line of men going […]

Read Essay

In Memoriam: Anthony (Bud) Panzera, 1941–2020

  In the painting, a single ocean wave rolls gently towards the shore. It is a murky greenish-blue, as if it arose out of the misty background of a Leonardo. The wave is briny and heavily laden with sand as […]

Read Essay

The Screaming Child

A drawing like this involves seeing, reacting, and remembering. With the pen in continual movement, the drawing embodies a seamless coordination of hand, eye, mind, and heart.

Read Essay

The Other Costa Vavagiakis

Renowned for his figures, an artist turns to the geometric bodies of cities and nighttime shadows.

Download PDF

Robin Smith: The Human Presence

Exceptionally modest, reserved to a fault and largely unknown outside her immediate circle, Robin Smith is, nonetheless, one of the best portrait/figure painters working today.

Download PDF

I Only Have Eyes for You

We have all had the experience of going to an exhibition and having one painting stand out so completely in your mind, that you remember little, if anything else, about what you have seen.

Read Essay

Rivals in Rome

The 16th-century Italian drawings in a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York City, are beautiful working drawings that point toward grand final creations far beyond the edges of the paper and reveal the competing influences of Raphael and Michelangelo.

Read EssayDownload PDF