Appalachia has been the smoky base flavor of my work even as I’ve lived in New York City, Florida, Hawaii, and Arizona. Living now in my family hometown in Bristol, Tennessee, I look to my roots directly. I am troubled by the artistic gentrification that would rob me of a heritage. Because I’ve come to think that a voice […]

“There has been nothing new in art since 1915” was something that I blurted out to an art professor 21 years ago at a party. It turned out to be an awkward conversation stopper, and obviously untrue in terms of art history. I was only trying to get across that the seeds of most of […]

Water, for me, is a place to research. Primordial water is the birthplace of works of art. Everything originated from small organisms that float in the waters, which were once transformed, not only in our imagination, into fantastic beings, like seductive sirens. Tenuous forms come to life through light, and suggest shapes through their absence. In my works—works built with […]

Sam Henry: I first heard about your work in a critique class at School of Visual Arts. One student started talking about Nan Goldin and the teacher mentioned you. He tried to be brief by describing your work as “pictures of the photographer’s mom with her lovers.” There were a few muffled gasps to go […]

Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) has come increasingly to be seen as one of the most important and innovative figures in 20th-century British art. The exhibition at Tate St Ives (October 9, 2010-January 8, 2011) is the first thorough retrospective for almost 40 years, focusing upon the technical qualities of his work and emphasizing his innovation and […]

Elisha Ben Yitzhak is a multifaceted artist who works in a variety of media, from oils to acrylic, drawing to watercolor. He is a virtuoso artist who has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, in venues as diverse as Zimbabwe and Switzerland, including London’s celebrated Tate Gallery. This past September, he was featured in
a group […]

Fifteen years ago, just a few months shy of his 20th birthday, Ahmed Alsoudani defaced a mural of Saddam Hussein in his Baghdad neighborhood. Alsoudani, who grew up in Baghdad, fills his paintings with vivid colors and graphic imagery depicting his feelings about war in Iraq. It was a youthful prank. Politics wasn’t part of […]

The thing to do when looking at a city is try to not look closely or sharply at the city. Look blurrily and let the shapes mass. Sometimes you’ll get the opportunity to be above the city while at the same time remaining within the city. You will be on the rooftop of a building […]

I started working with light so that I could take the spatial and color concerns of my painting into a different realm. By developing a vocabulary of various lighting technologies, reflective materials, and structures, I’ve created works that fully activate their surrounding areas. I focus on both object and space, exploiting walls and other surfaces, […]

I am compelled to explore the bounded, yet infinite depth of the picture plane. I find the territory within the second dimension to be paradoxical, especially since paint is just a physical substance without form. The same set of physical forces that holds paint to the canvas also binds us to the planet, and gives […]