Category Archives: Art

Artist Profiles: American Painter Shara Hughes

Shara Hughes

Shara Hughes was born 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Shara Hughes, Hard Hats, 2021
Shara Hughes – Hard Hats – 2021

She describes her lush, vibrantly chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as “invented landscapes.” Full of gestural effect, surface tactility and possessing a fairytale mood of reverie, these paintings, as the New Yorker described them, “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.”

Shara Hughes, Soft and Strong, 2021
Shara Hughes – Soft and Strong – 2021

Bold, clashing colours and shifting perspectives manifest into dream-like landscapes that push and pull the eye across the canvas, challenging conventions of space. Rather than depicting true to life landscapes, Hughes invites us into a fantastical world offered as a portal for psychological discovery and reflection.

READ MORE

Profiles: David Hockney At The Huntington Library

Painting of a bare tree, with many small branches, in a green field with a blue sky.
David Hockney, Tree on Woldgate, 6 March, 2006

The Huntington Library (August 9, 2023) – A David Hockney in The Huntington’s venerable European art gallery? Yes, visitors can view the large and striking Tree on Woldgate, 6 March (2006), which depicts the serene Yorkshire countryside where the renowned artist grew up.

You can see fields in the distance and, in the center, a leafless tree with branches that twist and turn in an almost snakelike manner. The painting comes from a period in Hockney’s career when he created a series of plein air landscapes around his hometown.

Watercolor self-portrait of David Hockney, paintbrush in hand, looking at the viewer.
David Hockney, Self-Portrait with Red Braces, 2003

The painting hangs in conversation with John Constable’s monumental View on the Stour Near Dedham (1822). While the two works were created more than 180 years apart, their inspiration comes from the same source—childhood surroundings—and they both convey a sense of place and nostalgia.

One of the most famous British artists of the 20th century, Hockney emerged as a major contributor to the 1960s pop art movement and has had a multifaced career as a painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. He is perhaps best known for his acrylic paintings of bright swimming pools, split-level homes, and suburban California landscapes.

In 2022, The Huntington acquired its first Hockney works: 17 works on paper that include an artist book, drawings, prints, photocollages, and watercolors. These works display an intimate side of Hockney—like the self-portrait of the artist in red suspenders, bent over a table and peering over his wire-rimmed glasses, paintbrush in hand. His blue eyes, gazing straight at the viewer, create an immediate intimacy.

READ MORE

Preview: Art In America Magazine – Fall 2023

Image

Art in America Magazine (August 8, 2023) – The issue features Fall 2023: Icons – Artists who have made an impact, plus The Ruscha Effect, Cave_bureau, Pippa Garner, Marfa vs. Naoshima, Françoise Gilot, and more.

Meet Suzanne Jackson, Art in America’s Fall 2023 Cover Artist

A wide abstract painting with impressions of bodies and faces.
Suzanne Jackson: a history drawing-cracked wall, 2016–19.PHOTO TIMOTHY DOYON/COURTESY ORTUZAR PROJECTS, NEW YORK

Suzanne Jackson, whose work a history drawing-cracked wall (2016–19) features on the cover of the Fall 2023 issue of Art in America in a detail of the larger work shown here in full, told A.i.A. the backstory of her creation from her home in Savannah, Georgia. (Jackson is also the subject of a feature profile in the same issue.)

As told to A.i.A. The “history” in history drawing is the history of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing—the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life. 

Exhibition: ‘Tree & Serpent- Early Buddhist Art In India 200 BCE – 400 BCE’ (The Met)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (August 3, 2023) – A virtual tour of Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE. Featuring more than 140 objects dating from 200 BCE to 400 CE, the exhibition presents a series of evocative and interlocking themes to reveal both the pre-Buddhist origins of figurative sculpture in India and the early narrative traditions that were central to this formative moment in early Indian art.

Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE

July 21st–November 13th, 2023

With major loans from a dozen lenders across India, as well as from the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, it transports visitors into the world of early Buddhist imagery that gave expression to this new religion as it grew from a core set of ethical teachings into one of the world’s great religions. Objects associated with Indo-Roman exchange reveal India’s place in early global trade.

The exhibition showcases objects in various media, including limestone sculptures, gold, silver, bronze, rock crystal, and ivory. Highlights include spectacular sculptures from southern India—newly discovered and never before publicly exhibited masterpieces—that add to the world canon of early Buddhist art. On view: July 21st–November 13th, 2023

Profiles: Photographer John Fielder In Colorado

CBS Sunday Morning (July 22, 2023) – Photographer John Fielder took a leap of faith that kickstarted his career. From department store worker to nature photographer, John shares how he lives and views life, Fielder, recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, looks back on his life with CBS News’ Barry Peterson.

John Fielder has been capturing the beauty of Colorado for 40 years. From majestic sunrises over the Rockies to colorful Colorado wildflowers  bordering alpine lakes, his photos portray Colorado in all its glory.

John Fielder is Colorado’s Premier Photographer

Art Exhibitions: ‘Manabu Ikeda – Flowers From The Wreckage’ (Canada, 2023)

art in whistler

Manabu Ikeda:
Flowers from the Wreckage

June 24 – October 9, 2023

Audain Art Museum, Whistler, British Columbia, Canada (July 22, 2023) – Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage features Ikeda’s meticulously detailed pen-and-ink drawings that are filled with astonishing images.

This Japanese artist seeks inspiration from his surroundings to bring attention and awe to viewers, as a way of sending warnings about the painful reality of environmental disasters. Central to his practice are metaphors of grief and the undeniable aspects of life that are often beyond society’s control, including the fundamental forces of Mother Nature. Ikeda’s drawings also reveal human resilience and the ability to rise above devastating situations when it appears impossible.

Curated by Kiriko Watanabe, the Audain Art Museum’s Gail & Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator, this is Ikeda’s first solo retrospective in North America showcasing over sixty works from national and international collections. Flowers from the Wreckage includes Foretoken (2008), Meltdown (2013) and Rebirth (2013-16), a selection of Ikeda’s large-scale drawings that relate to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake; the most devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power disaster in the country’s recorded history.

Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage will be on display in the AAM’s Tom and Teresa Gautreau Galleries from June 24 to October 9, 2023. A full colour exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Kiriko Watanabe and comments by Manabu Ikeda will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop.

Manabu Ikeda, “Territory,” 2004
Manabu Ikeda, “Territory,” 2004

pen and acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board, 17″ x 23″ (Takahashi Ryutaro Collection, courtesy the Audain Art Museum, Whistler, B.C.)

Manabu Ikeda Studio Gallery

A studio has been set up in the Museum’s architecturally stunning Upper Galleries, where visitors have the opportunity to observe the process of Ikeda drawing his latest work and interact with him during open studio hours.

Manabu will be in studio on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, from 3:00pm to 4:30pm until August 30. Museum guests are encouraged to come and witness the Artist’s incredible talent and learn more about his techniques. The studio will be open for viewing Thursday through Monday until September 4.

Arts & Culture: A Profile Of Native American Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

CBS Sunday Morning (July 16, 2023) – Over the last five decades, artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has had nearly 100 shows, and in 2020 a painting of hers was the first by a Native American to join the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Now the 83-year-old is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City – the museum’s first retrospective ever of an Indigenous artist. Correspondent Serena Altschul reports on a moment that’s been described as long overdue.

“Landscape is Always Full of Movement”

Two horses surrounded by large swathes of blue, brown, and white.


For the Survival of Future Generations

A canvas entirely covered in shapes, patterns, and saturated colors. Human and animal forms are visible amongst the highly pigmented color.


A Post-Colonial World

Thick red paint with news print showing through and the figure of a snowman over the top.

Museum Reviews: Cézanne And Van Gogh’s Influence On The Rise Of Modern Art

The National Gallery (July 6, 2023) – The exhibition, ‘After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art’, celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and follows the influences they had on younger generations of French artists, on their peers and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.

Explore a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries.

International Art: Apollo Magazine – July/Aug 2023

July/August 2023 | Apollo Magazine

Apollo Magazine – July/August 2023 issue: At the new National Portrait Gallery, The unswerving art of Ellsworth Kelly, A Futurist family home in Rome, and more…

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Art Newspaper (June 29, 2023): In the final episode of this season, James Goodwin, a specialist on the art market and its history, tells us about what high inflation and interest rates mean for the art market and what lies ahead.

As Spain heads to the polls in July, we talk to Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Madrid. What could the election mean for the controversial Spanish laws of Historical Memory and Democratic Memory relating to the Civil War of 1936 to 1939 and the period of Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship?

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a project by the Swedish duo Goldin + Senneby. The work, called Quantitative Melencolia, involves recreating the lost plate for Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I. It is part of the exhibition Economics: The Blockbuster, which opens this week at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, UK.

Economics the Blockbuster: It’s not Business as Usual, Whitworth Art Gallery, until 22 October. The Manchester International Festival, until 16 July.