Given the prices that art brings these days, and the reverence paid to art (sometimes exceeded by the reverence paid to the pursuit and purchase of art), the art world needs satirists like John Waters.
In a manner of speaking, Simon Gunning has become our John Constable — two hundred years later, celebrating the singularity of the place where he chooses to live. Of course, in lieu of the Englishman’s idyllic sparkling fields and famously studied skies, Gunning, an Australian transplant, focuses on our local waterways.
Simon Gunning’s oil paintings at Arthur Roger Gallery are the best depictions of Louisiana’s watery coastal landscape ever made — ever. Better than Meeker, Clague, Buck, Heldner, Coulon, Millet or anyone else who ever tried to capture that impenetrable muddy water and endless vista on canvas.
In a tour de force of portraits, wildlife and landscape studies, flower paintings and swamp scenes, David Bates shows us images of despair and reaffirmation that flow from nature’s unsentimental cycles of pain and joy, life and death.
One month after my rapid exodus from New Orleans, I return to a city dead. Yet there are familiar sights in the maze of debris: I see the work of Leonardo Drew in the matted rolls of wet housing insulation, Cy Twombly scratches in the enamel of wind-tossed cars, Keith Sonnier configurations in the twisted neon signs knotted with plastic bags, a Richard Serra monument in the mammoth, rusted, severed barge at an intersection . . . and on and on the story goes.
Jesús Moroles is internationally renowned as one of the greatest sculptors working with granite today. Through a process called ‘tearing’ Moroles transforms each block of hard stone into a delicately refined expression of the interaction between man and nature.
New Orleans artist Jacqueline Bishop and her husband came through the ordeal of Hurricane Katrina sadder and wiser, uncertain about the future of the city they love.
James Drake at SITE Santa Fe BY ARDEN REED Charcoal is James Drake’s instrument the way the piano was Glenn Gould’s or the clarinet Benny Goodman’s: they’re made for each…
Are we trespassing? Jacqueline Bishop thinks we are, but not in the usual sense of the word. A well-traveled, widely exhibited artist who teaches an Art and Ecology course at Loyola, Bishop has something subtler yet more fundamental in mind — a sense that, in our race to remake the world in our own techno image, we have become ever more estranged from our origins in nature, and so, in some sense, from ourselves.
Beset by overbuilding, subsidence and erosion, the Louisiana coastline is disappearing at an alarming rate: a total of more than 900,000 acres has been lost since the 1930s, according to the Louisiana Coastal Area Final Study Report released in November 2004. It was a coincidence, but not a negligible one, that Allison Stewart’s show of new paintings was on view the same month.