Over the last 20 years, my work has focused on evoking Midwestern farm life. Working with a mechanical engineer and a project coordinator, I have developed techniques to transform my memories of the mechanized Wisconsin farm of my youth into foundry-based glass sculpture.
War and Leaves: Sculpture by Lin Emery by D. Eric Bookhardt, GAMBIT WEEKLY It all started with a spoon. Years ago, a silver spoon poised precariously on the rim of…
Douglas Bourgeois is one of the most talented and poetic artists in Louisiana, or anywhere else. Paintings like those on view at Arthur Roger Gallery through April 24-hypnotically complicated, obsessively busy oils, peopled with pop-culture icons-are the bricks from which Bourgeois’ reputation is built.
Dale Chihuly’s stunning installation of large-scale sculptural works at L.A. Louver showed how simplicity can triumph in the hands of a master. Chihuly amassed hundreds of simple hand-blown units of various organic shapes into protean configurations of breathtaking beauty, mystery and even majesty.
As a child in Tacoma, Washington, Dale Chihuly cherished a photo of the blue and yellow stained-glass windows of the Matisse Chapel in France. He also remembers being more attracted to a piece of sparkling glass on a beach than to the waves, sand, or shells.
Last April, one month before she died at the age of 96, the state of Louisiana designated its native daughter, sculptor Clyde Connell, a “legend.” According to the program notes for the Eighth Annual Louisiana Legends Award Banquet, “The person she is, the objects she creates, the moral beliefs she shares and the land she lives on integrate into one common strong impact on the individual seeing her work or visiting with her in her studio.”
Robert Colescott at Crown Point Press by Kathan Brown Robert Colescott is standing in the Crown Point Press studio in front of an almost-finished ambitious four-panel etching, answering questions from…
Now mounted in a sumptuous exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, “Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings” first went up at the Venice Biennale a year and a half ago. The work of UA professor emeritus Colescott, these extravagantly colored, politically charged narrative paintings were the U.S. entry in the 1997 international art fair. Colescott was the first American painter since Jasper Johns in 1988 to be thus honored, and the first ever African-American artist to represent the U.S. with a solo show.
For close to 10 years now, James Barsness has been making a name for himself as a creator of highly detailed, unusually complex and often frankly sexual art. His often tongue-in-cheek portrayals of physical appetite, merged with a masterful appreciation of materials, which here included ballpoint pen and acrylic on paper collaged onto canvas, make him an artist of accomplished idiosyncrasy.
Anything goes in today’s art world – and frequently the first thing to go are the distinctions between painting, sculpture, architecture and other traditional disciplines. The resulting cross-breeds are tagged with the vague label of “installation art”, and encompass works whose only shared purpose is the attempt to create a total, theatrical environment from the sanitized spaces of the contemporary gallery.