Tag Archives: art

Rooms That Photograph Like Paintings

Posted on October 31, 2025 by JMN

“I’m going to hesitate and say it’s settled into what it’s meant to be.” (Martyn Thompson) I was taken with the handmade rooms in Martyn Thompson’s Sydney, Australia home. They’re atmospherically profiled in the photographs. Each shot has a painterly … Continue reading →

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He Wants to Get Run Over by a Song

Posted on October 21, 2025 by JMN

“We keep moving. We keep putting one foot in front of the other and wanting to be here. It takes a lot for somebody to decide they don’t want to be here… The world’s kind of painful — but God, … Continue reading →

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‘What Is an Image?’

Posted on October 19, 2025 by JMN

The only constants in his oeuvre, which takes in every traditional genre… are change, relentless curiosity and, perhaps most of all, an insistent question: What is an image? (Emily LaBarge) [Gerhard Richter’s] painting “Tisch” (1962), has the daunting catalog position … Continue reading →

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Eric Fischl and Other Eye Catchers

Posted on October 16, 2025 by JMN

[Eric Fischl] “Eric Fischl: Stories Told”Featured here are about 40 large-scale works by the figurative painter Eric Fischl, created from the late 1970s to today. The artist largely had to teach himself traditional painting styles, studying early modern artists like … Continue reading →

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A Poem Is a Sketch

Posted on October 9, 2025 by JMN

Disconcert. Defamiliarize. Distort. Disrupt. Draw, Stardust! A friend I’ll nickname Stardust, avid prose reader, has remarked that relatively few people have a taste for poetry nowadays. I surmise it’s always been so, even in this or that era when <name-your-Great-Poet> … Continue reading →

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Absurdity Muddled With Beauty: Insouciant!

Posted on September 9, 2025 by JMN

Muddling is when you gently and lovingly release aromatic oils from fruits and herbs. “I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself.” (Man Ray, 1922) In French, the title [“Violon … Continue reading →

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Untie These Hidebound Eyes, Unbind These Hogtied Hands

Posted on July 12, 2025 by JMN

Jason Farago-rhymes-with-Chicago writes a deep, reflective appreciation of Cézanne’s work, calling Cézanne the first painter he ever loved.  BC*: For six centuries, ever since some scientifically minded Florentines had developed rules of perspective that made art look more like life, … Continue reading →

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‘His Technique Can Be Potently Slapdash’

Posted on May 31, 2025 by JMN

If the images in the survey feel more like news than comment, that’s partly because we can sense the press photos Shahn used as his sources. Though his paintings themselves aren’t close to photorealistic — his technique can be potently … Continue reading →

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‘That Falls Well’: Cartoon Paean Times Three

Posted on May 26, 2025 by JMN

As a kid studying high school French, I read with delight Mark Twain’s depiction of an American’s attempt to converse with a Frenchman. Twain wickedly renders the Frenchman’s remarks in literal English, alongside his own fractured French, to comic effect. … Continue reading →

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Toyin Ojih Odutola Draws Loud

Posted on May 25, 2025 by JMN

I like how Toyin Ojih Odutola assembles faces from facets, a treatment I strive increasingly, if feebly, to approximate. I describe it to myself in personal shorthand as “envisaging”: implementing visage as a sort of ‘scape rather than anatomical likeness … Continue reading →

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