In this day and age when religious extremism threatens us both at home and abroad, it is both proper and necessary to be reminded that, at their benevolent hearts, most of the world’s religions say pretty much the same thing about the human condition. All religions are manifestations of a human will to believe in […]
Edgar Allen Beem
Frankly, I had no idea what to expect when I drove down to Portsmouth yesterday to check out the Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art. I had only heard about it a week before from one of the 35 artists in Sacred and Profane: Eye of the Beholder, the museum’s current (through April 24) exhibition. I […]
Yankee
Divide and Conquer
Fred Lynch is one of my favorite painters. He is a painter’s painter, rigorously disciplined about his work and primarily intent upon pleasing himself. In the catalogue of his 2005 Form & Counterform 20-year retrospective at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, Lynch wrote as succinct an artist’s statement as I have ever read: […]
At first glance, Jill Hoy and Eric Hopkins: Elemental Rhythms seems an odd pairing, not because the artists have so little in common but because they have so much. The occasion of their joint exhibition at the Thos. Moser Cabinetmaker gallery in Freeport, Maine (January 28 to March 31) provides an opportunity to consider their […]
John Haberle once painted a $10 bill with such verisimilitude that a critic of his day insisted it was real currency affixed to the canvas. That painting, “U.S.A (The Chicago Bill Picture), ca. 1889,” is one of some 20 paintings and drawings currently assembled as John Haberle: American Master of Illusion at the New Britain […]
Yankee
Practicing What They Preach
When I was in public school in the early 1960s, art education was a redoubt of nonconformists. And that seemed to me a good thing. In a school system where everything was about the system – rank, class, grades, discipline, standards, dress codes – art class was about freedom and individuality. Our male art teacher […]
Yankee
Out of This World
For 20 years the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, mounted annual exhibitions that took the pulse of new art in New England. In 2010, the museum is cutting back its eagerly awaited launching pad show to every two years, but the first DeCordova Biennial (January 23 to April 11) looks to be […]
The audience for art is small. The readership for art writing is even smaller. But at the risk of driving what few faithful readers Just Looking has to another art blog, I am devoting this final posting of 2009 to an interesting dialogue that has been taking place between Boston Phoenix art critic Greg Cook […]
Maine is not only white with snow this time of year, racially it is also one of the whitest states in the nation with close to 98% of its residents identifying themselves as Caucasian. So any opportunity for exposure to cultural diversity is both welcome and needed in the Pine Tree State. The conjunction of […]
Traditionally, the visual arts have been object-oriented, involving the creation of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Increasingly over the last quarter of the 20th century and accelerating here in the early years of the 21st, the leading edge of creativity has become the art of installation, the creation of environments and the staging of events. […]
Yankee
My Christmas Wish List
In truth, there is nothing I want for nor anything I want for Christmas this year other than to have my three daughters home for the holidays, but a few days ago I found myself wandering around Portland on errands and stopped in at a couple of art galleries. I would have stopped at more, […]
Drawing is the most immediate and intimate of art forms, at once direct and often tentative or preparatory. Modernist master Paul Klee called it “taking a line for a walk.” Traditionally drawing has tended to be a linear pursuit in graphite or pen and ink, but in the prevailing pluralistic aesthetic of the 21st century […]