Blue Leah #4, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011, previously shown in the solo show "Blue Leah," Dacia Gallery, New York

In this fourth in the minimalist "Blue Leah" series, I did something I can rarely stand to do - turned the model away from the viewer. Her posture, and...

It is since July of last year that I've been worrying about how to paint the 7-foot-by-9-foot Inanna #1: Inanna and the Me of Life properly. Maybe you remember -- I talked about it a lot. I finished the figures in the underdrawing, and it hung...

Let me share with you a doubt. My doubt is that visual art has all that much of an impact on history.

I have written many of the essays you've been reading as if art had something to say, and as if it were important. And I believe, more or...

Hands #1, oil on canvas, 24"x24", 2011, previously shown at Saatchi: Gallery Mess, London.

I am very interested in how our work changes our hands, and am planning a series of paintings of the hands of people working in different fields. Here, the hands of a dancer have become defined...

Blue Leah #2, oil on canvas, 24"x36", 2011, previously shown in the solo show "Blue Leah," Dacia Gallery, New York
This is one of a series of paintings in which I attempted to eliminate every part of painting but the figure. In the end it seemed to me...

Fedele Spadafora is a New York artist who is in the home stretch of that anxious journey which characterizes the development of the technically-trained painter: he is just about done making pictures in homage to his skills, and has nearly made his skills the servants of a vision.

Spadafora's work...

I have been thinking about Jazz-minh Moore's paintings for some time now, and in discussing her current solo show, "All Our Grandmothers," at Claire Oliver Gallery, I must also depend on work from her 2012 solo, "Is That All There Is," at Lyons Wier Gallery.

Moore is painting figures in...

If you're in New York and at all interested in photography, do yourself a favor and check out this show. Peanut Underground directors Lee Wells and Katie Peyton have assembled a dazzling survey of a century of picture-taking. In the square footage of nothing more than a small railroad apartment,...

I haven't been back to Chicago since 1996.

Among the things I've missed was the creation of Millennium Park, and with it, of the Bean, a 100-ton stainless steal colossus completed years behind schedule in 2006. Who could be so hard of heart that they would go to Chicago...

INCARNATION

To sensibly discuss Aleah Chapin's new solo show at Flowers Gallery, we should start closer to the beginning of the story. So let's back up a bit.

The Torre de la Parada, outside Madrid, 1636 A.D.

Peter Paul Rubens hangs a commissioned pair of Greek-philosopher paintings on the wall...

Lauren Levato is a Chicago artist who previously specialized in bugs.

She had been working toward making the emotional and intellectual resonances she...

In October, my first solo show of paintings, Blue Leah, opened at Dacia Gallery in Manhattan. The Huffington Post's Priscilla Frank was kind enough to review it here.

All of the paintings in the show depicted a single model, Leah, with whom I worked for several...

Consider this painting, which I think is a very good painting. It is by British artist and scientist Malcolm Ludvigsen:

What makes this one good?

Let me explain in a roundabout way. I...

Painter Ryan Bradley has co-curated, with Jenny Mushkin-Goldman, "The Space Between," a group show devoted to a fertile formal premise: the foregrounded use of negative space in figurative art. As it happens, all of the work in the show interprets negative space as white area, generally of complex shape.

That...

PART I: STRAYLIGHT

Not so long ago - as late as 1988, in fact - we had a prophet walking among us. His name was William Gibson, and in his breathtaking Sprawl trilogy, he forecast the near future of technology and its social and cultural uses and impacts. For science...

One of the many (many!) ways to divvy up contemporary artists is into those who make work recognizably contemporary -- abstract, conceptual, minimalist, expressionist, what have you -- and those who simply don't. This latter group is carrying right on with the project of mimesis (strict imitation of the appearance...

I think we can all agree that it's been a rough five years. The warm economy of the 00's bottomed out. The fierce partisan battles of that first decade settled into a kind of sullen mutual indifference. Many of us have lost our jobs, or failed to move forward in...

Cara DeAngelis has curated a show devoted to a network of linked themes: domestication, wildness, people, animals and environmental disorders. Like most such curatorial mission statements, this proposal serves better as a loose organizing principle than as an analytic key. To my eye, the pieces Ms. DeAngelis has selected align...

I've known about New York painter Karen Kaapcke in a diffuse way for some years now. I first thought specifically about her work last year. I was painting a portrait of the back of a head at the time, and this recalled to me her remarkable back-of-head portraits.

MEA CULPA

There is a factor affecting everything I have done in the past couple of years, which I didn't want to share with you until it was finished, and about the sharing of which I retain some doubts even now. But since the question of art is as much...