The eight artists at the exhibit Timeless Vision: Earth, Sea and Sky are modern proponents of an American tradition, responding to the natural world — to the night, to the sky, to the eternities found at Earth’s wild margins — with subtle, contemporary spirituality. Much of the work at Timeless Vision: Earth, Sea, and Sky at CSU reads (at least at first) […]
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I was surprised by Louis B. Burroughs’ works on canvas, after seeing photographs of a few of them in catalogs and on the painter’s website. I knew they were big, but it’s hard to imagine the impact of a large painting in real space. Several mural-like compositions, each ten and twelve feet long, were displayed down one side of the […]
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A sculptor works not only to shape a chunk of stone, but also to soften the terrible hardness of the world, downshifting the deeps of time and space toward human understanding. Chappelle Letman Jr., an African American artist born in Brooklyn, New York, who became totally blind when he was 41 years old, went on in the remaining three decades […]
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“hush” is a tender syllable, beginning as an exhalation and ending with an onomatopoeic sound, like lips closing for a kiss. Yet like so many sentimental things, the word can also cast a somber shadow, hinting that all breathing will finally stop. When ceramicist Kimberly Chapman uses it as the title of her current show at the McDonough Museum in […]
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Elsewhere on the digital pages of CAN, Brittany M. Hudak and Michael Gill have written fine-grained and big-picture analyses of the year in Northeast Ohio art. Hudak remembered the year in a series of particular exhibits; Gill contextualized local developments within larger trends in the artworld. This post, then, is calibrated towards the medium scale—events which made a great immediate […]
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The core of Stranger Beings is a mind-bending selection of dozens of eccentric works gleaned, in sober fact, from the widely known collection of the Richard and Alita Rogers Family Foundation. Known also as the Hieronymus collection (so-called after Hieronymus Bosch, Renaissance master of the grotesque), the eclectic mix of art objects has been an ongoing labor of love for […]
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“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live; they burn, they are not lit from outside.” Egon Schiele “The Get Up #2”, a recent painting on Yupo paper by Cleveland-based artist Darius Steward, shows a young boy dressed in T shirt and jeans as he rises from the floor, propped on hands and one knee. The image […]
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In a lush series of paintings depicting larger than life-size nude figures, Lauren McKenzie Noel explores the sensuous boundaries and psychological range of self portraiture. Nothing says “modern” with quite the same conviction as the self portrait, which in the centuries of Western art since Rembrandt has repositioned the human face and body in respect to history. In a self […]
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The best visual artists tend to tilt the status quo of perception, making us see a little differently. The worker in this age-old exchange between mind and matter renews human understanding, finding form anew, feeling the vertigo and vibrato of the edges of things, like a beachcomber on the shore of changing consciousness, as change and sameness wash by turn […]
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The dark paintings of MANDEM have an almost cinematic power, combining traditional and digital techniques in seamless layers to create personae that bleed across emotional and historical frontiers. Beginning in earnest more than a decade ago the tightly knit group made up by Maize Arendsee and Moco Steinman-Arendsee, (joined after a few years by their younger cohort Kitsuko) have evolved […]
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