Two painters posit banal architectural environments as metaphoric expressions of thoughts and emotions at George Billis Gallery. Each of the eight oil paintings comprising Alex Roulette's show, "Memory Moving Sideways," features one or more people dwarfed by...
Dear Reader, The death of painting has been declared with either enthusiasm or dejection so many times, as has its corollary, the “improbable” resurrection of the medium, that the tandem seems now like a market gyration—either a panicked sell-off or a spate of giddy...
Yunhee Min’s work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last summer follows an earlier body of work similar in style, “Movements” at her New York gallery in 2016. Both of them mark a strong new direction for her painting. The new series, entitled the “Wilde...
Vera Arutyunyan coats her canvases with pigment and passion. For much of her 25-year artistic career, the Armenian-born artist’s bold abstract oil paintings have been expressions of her complex emotions as an immigrant building a new life in the United States. Growing...
On an old oak-lined Pasadena avenue, I’m standing before an imposing wrought-iron gate to a stately Tudor mansion. In dappled afternoon sunlight twinkling beneath breezy treetops, this mysterious setting feels like the beginning of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Sprawling...
The paintings of Lenz Geerk are unprepossessing and quietly sublime, his figures poised inside singular moments of divine inscrutability as they consider the world around them, whether it be a dying flower or the pointed edge of a table. This sense of veiled mystery...
In her Culver City studio on a late summer afternoon, encaustic painter, printmaker and educator Pamela Smith Hudson revealed the origins of her vocation as a “materials artist” dedicated to exploring the potentials of paint, clay, print and wax: “My dad was a cement...
Van Gogh’s Mulberry Tree (1889) was a key work in my conversion to appreciating the pleasures of modern art. When I first saw it as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s, it was still in the collection of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San...
What does it mean to fall from grace? To really fall, from great heights, perhaps at first thinking you’re flying and only realizing too late that this was an illusion, probably induced by the drugs. That would explain why the world out there appears so eerie, so pink...
Congratulations to our winner Osceola Refetoff and our finalists. Refetoff's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery. His image is also printed in our November/December issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists from our...
AI WEIWEI IN LA We haven’t seen much of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in these parts since LACMA presented his installation “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Head” in 2012. This fall he returned with a well-orchestrated splash—with three high-profile exhibitions opening in LA, all...
The first week of October was Ai Weiwei week in Los Angeles—a triple-header of shows including the Marciano Foundation, the opening show of former MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch’s new Hollywood gallery, and at the recent UTA gallery in Beverly Hills. First stop was the...
NOTE: Ultimately, the correct response to each of these prompts is one or more paintings. 1. How is a painting different from the screen of your phone? 2 Does the image in a painting end at the edge of the canvas, or continue to infinity? 3. What is a painting? Give...
Writing “It’s beautiful but…” means you’re stupid. Other fields don’t put up with this shit. “Delicious” is no joke: in the 17th century the Dutch and Portuguese went to war over it (Spice War: 1602 to 1663, ended with the Treaty of the Hague). No matter how...
Chances are that if you show a civilian a 500-year-old painting, they won’t be able to name the painter, unless it’s Bosch. His name is even listed as an adjective (“Boschian”) in online slang dictionaries. For somebody who produced fewer than 30 paintings in his...
Charles Rappleye died on Saturday, September 15, at his home in Echo Park at the age of 62. He battled with cancer for nearly seven years. Charlie had a rich career as an award-winning investigative journalist and an author of four nonfiction historical biographies....
“A new thing, a spring later, a different maker” are the words moving-image artist Nathaniel Dorsky uses to position Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle), 2018, his newest work which investigates light and objecthood. The film, which premiered at the 2018 Toronto...