I'm pleased to present an interview with Cathy Diamond, an NYC-based painter whose abstract paintings have evolved from a long involvement in responding to nature. Her work offers a unique narrative that draws from the fluidity and interconnectedness of shapes and sensations found in nature. "The sounds of wind and birds have always utterly entranced me." Diamond shares in this interview, "Add to this the almost cellular feeling that the scene is all in a state of growth. These connective tissues open up the space for me to become a part of this through automatic and rhythmic drawing. The machinations of the trees, insects, and birds lend themselves to metaphors for aliveness, movement, fragility, endurance, and connectivity." Jorge S. Arango wrote in a review in The Portland Press Herald, Diamond's works "are really a hybrid of drawing and painting, and their surfaces buzz, sizzle and quiver with a feverish energy. They are clearly landscapes, but abstracted in ways that capture ...
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Recent Posts
Interview with Kathleen Dunn Jacobs
I am pleased to present a new interview with Kathleen Dunn Jacobs, a distinguished artist whose multifaceted career has greatly enriched the art community. I first became acquainted with Kathleen through my helping make a website for her foundational work with the Blueway Art Alliance in Western Massachusetts and with her roles as the Marketing Director for the Concord Center for the Visual Arts and the former Director of the Currier Museum Art ...
Interview with Barbara Grossman
I am pleased to share this email interview with the painter Barbara Grossman. Last fall she gave me her delightful catalog, "Patterning Women", from her July 2023 show at the Bowery Gallery. I wanted to find out more about her background, process and thoughts about artmaking so I asked her for this interview. I would like to thank her for her thoughtful answers to my questions. Since the 1980's she has been making broadly painted artworks with a ...
Interview with Laura Vahlberg
I’ve recently been intrigued by the quiet and thoughtful work of Laura Vahlberg, an observation-based painter from Roanoke, Virginia. Her landscapes, in particular, are remarkable examples of how light and atmosphere can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Vahlberg's broad paint handling summarizes the mundane particulars of her surroundings, close looking through a lens of formal abstraction engages her compressed limited palette with ...
Interview with Marie Riccio
Last October, I had the pleasure of meeting Marie Riccio at her solo exhibition, Still Echoes, at The Painting Center and the Small Works Invitational at First Street Gallery. Riccio’s work drew my attention for the sophistication of her compositions and subtle yet powerful use of color as tone that brings an exceptional depth and nuance to her modern still-life setups of commonplace objects, transforming them into subjects of contemplation and ...
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Reviews and Events
Review of Our Kids Play Together: A Show of Paintings by Elise Schweitzer and Laura Vahlberg
Review by Elana Hagler, guest contributor Motherhood, especially in those very early years, has a way of paring life down to its essentials. Those first years are notoriously difficult for parents, and mothers in particular (who historically have borne the brunt of childcare and domestic life), who are also trying to pursue ...
STANLEY LEWIS – TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT
Guest Review by Glen Cebulash In his seminal essay of 1921, Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot provides the reader with, if not a proper definition of art, a rather stark choice. The work, whether it be a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, will inevitably fall into one of three categories: the traditional, the repetitive, ...
At a Glance
- Mariah ONeill
A while ago on Facebook, I started seeing a large number of posts of stunning portraits, landscapes, and more by many lesser-known European artists from the early to mid 20th century. Many of these artists were unfamiliar but there was a common thread of originality, intensity, and poetic vision that captivated me and inspired me to find out more about these painters. But first, I wanted to find out about this Facebook poster, Mariah ONeill. Someone with such a good eye for great paintings must also be an interesting artist to check out. I wasn’t disappointed. I was enchanted by her many expressive portrait drawings which capture some remarkable aspect of the sitter’s personality, while simultaneously celebrating the transformation from marks on paper into something visceral and alive. I wrote to her hoping to learn more. She sent me a link to her Flickr page(see here www.flickr.com/photos/mariahoneill ) and stressed that she had little in the way of formal training and was largely self-taught, mainly by copying old masterworks by Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, etc. as well as spending much of her time growing up doodling. She said she did take some classes at her local art center and took one semester at PAFA but had to drop out due to needing to take care of her mother who was dying. Later, instead of art school, she went back to school to become a psychotherapist. She has had to struggle with serious chronic illness since 2005 and currently lives in the New England area. She attributes her involvement with an online drawing group, “Julia Kay’s Portrait Party” as being a big influence as there were a lot of excellent artists […]
- Tracy Everly
I ran across Tracy Everly’s paintings on Facebook recently and was struck by the warmth and joy in her work. The clarity of light and air and the freshness of work made me think that despite the devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, we can still be awe-struck by newly revealed beauty, like seeing distant Himalayan mountains for the first time after long being hidden by industrial smog.
- Monica Bernier
I love these delightful inventions by Monica Bernier that explore new possibilities for shape and sensuous color. I particularly enjoyed her whimsical series of Desert forms and the formal compositional investigations in her Collage cutouts seen in this slideshow.
Recent Posts
Interview with Bill Scott
I'm delighted to share this email interview with Bill Scott who writes from his home in Philadelphia. I’ve long been intrigued by Bill Scott's paintings and prints and was lucky to view an exhibition of his works last year at The Pierre Hotel in NYC. He was scheduled to have a solo show this April at his gallery, Hollis Taggart in Chelsea, NYC, NY. that was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. His unapologetic celebrations of beauty, lyrical ...
Stanley Lewis Interview, Part Two
I am very fortunate and grateful for the recent invitation by Stanley Lewis to visit his studio and home in Western Mass. and talk in person. Our conversation continued and helped to follow up on the second part of our interview which was recorded previously in our phone conversation. (Link to part one of this interview) When I arrived he showed me a large oil painting on canvas, a work in progress made over this past winter, on hold now till ...
Great Reads
Interview with Gerry Bergstein
Gerry Bergstein is a well-known Boston painter and teacher who has hugely influenced many artists since the 1980s. I recently was viewing his work online and became re-enchanted by his astounding ...
A Conversation With Frank Galuszka
Interview by Jeffrey Carr The artist Frank Galuszka lives and paints in a magical place, Santa Cruz, California. I first knew him when he was a very well-known and important member of the ...
Interview with John McNamara
I'm delighted to share this interview, conducted by email, with the San Francisco-based painter John McNamara. There is much to see and think about his enigmatic subject matter, compositional ...
Interview with Martha Armstrong
Martha Armstrong was in San Diego a few weeks ago and agreed to an interview with me. We met at a mutual friend’s home where we sat out on a hillside deck overlooking a huge valley with the distant ...
Rules for Abstract Painting, BBC series
Videos
Euan Uglow Video
A video about the recent Euan Uglow exhibition: In 1974, Catherine Lampert organized the first major retrospective of Euan Uglow’s work for the Arts Council of Great Britain. Fifty years later, she curates another exhibition highlighting Uglow's pivotal pieces, marking the joint representation of his estate by Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert and Frankie ...
Elizabeth Geiger’s, Borrowed Rhythms, at the Gross McCleaf
Elizabeth Geiger is currently having an exhibition this March of her latest paintings, Borrowed Rhythms, at the Gross McCleaf in Philadelphia. This John Thorton video interviews Geiger and gives us a look at that show and discusses her new direction of Cubist-inspired still-life. ...
Robert Birmelin, John Thornton’s Video Interview and “Conversations with the Other” Exhibition
John Thornton interviews and discusses Robert Birmelin in his latest video, Robert Birmelin's Life in Art before his upcoming exhibition at the Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia (reception on Saturday, March 4) Robert Birmelin, who will turn 90 in November, is a major American artist known particularly for his paintings of New York City crowds. In ...
Studio Visits
Interview with Deborah Kahn
This past summer I met Deborah Kahn in her home in Amherst, Mass. The walk to her studio through her house went past a huge collection of paintings by many stellar artists, all competing for my attention. Once inside her studio, I was additionally overstimulated by her enormous collection of art ...
Stanley Lewis Interview, Part Two
I am very fortunate and grateful for the recent invitation by Stanley Lewis to visit his studio and home in Western Mass. and talk in person. Our conversation continued and helped to follow up on the second part of our interview which was recorded previously in our phone conversation. (Link to part ...
A STUDIO VISIT WITH JANICE NOWINSKI
by Xico Greenwald An exhibition of recent paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Janice Nowinski will open this week at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. The objects and figures in Ms. Nowinski’s paintings teeter and tilt. An active, funky geometry animates her canvases, with a warm, muted ...
Interview with John Dubrow
John Dubrow in his studio Interview with John Dubrow by Xico Greenwald John Dubrow has been making ambitious figurative paintings of New York City scenes since he moved to Brooklyn in the mid-1980s. His light-filled canvases are often years in the making—ragged, impastoed ...
The Viewfinder
Wayne Art Center celebrates the nude figure with two exhibitions
The Wayne Art Center is having two exhibitions, The Nude, Mirror of Desire showing the work of Ben Kamihira, Paul DuSold, Margaret McCann, and Scott Noel as well as the juried exhibition The Nude Figure which displays 71 artists with 86 works selected out of 242 artists and with Scott Noel and Paul DuSold as the jurors. The Wayne Art Center press release states: The Nude, Mirror of Desire ...
Interested in Writing for Painting Perceptions?
I wanted to put out a call for any painters who might be interested in writing critical essays, reviews, interviews, or op-ed pieces for Painting Perceptions. I'm particularly interested in writers who are knowledgeable with the many technical concerns of painting to write on a regular basis. This is a good way for painters who enjoy writing to reach a wider audience of fellow painters. ...
Apollo and Dionysus in the Representational Painting Family Feud
by Elana Hagler This essay explores the subconscious impulses behind aesthetic choice and offers a framework for a deeper understanding of contemporary representational painting. It is written by a painter with a readership of painters in mind, but is appropriate for anyone who wants this specific peek into the creative psyche. “Apollo and Dionysus in the Representational Painting Family Feud” ...
Thoughts on Varnishing
This is the first article for the new section on materials and technique, "Sounding Technical". The first thing I need to say is that I'm no expert about the technical aspects of painting. What I hope to offer is a non-partisan centralized source of knowledge and opinion to help in the learning and promotion of sound painting principles. Naturally there are many resources online to learn about ...