PLEIN AIR: Art Made Outdoors
“En plein air”: ORIGIN from French, meaning ‘in the open air’ This term in the painter’s glossary denotes art made outdoors, and/or images traditionally about what one sees outdoors. Launching the artistic process outside of the sheltering studio is a liberating adventure. The act of creation is accompanied by a test of your stamina and […]
Fotofolio: Suz Fleming
“Impermanence” Suz’s statement: I started Impermanence several years ago and continue to work with this series. Without specifically addressing my Japanese heritage, these images are informed by Japanese art and ideas: haiku, Buddhism, and Ikebana. I have long been inspired by poetry, in general, and haiku, in particular. These short poems are often about nature, […]
Pulling Off All the Old Masks Just to See the Flowers Bloom Again Tres Taylor at Caza Sikes Gallery
This show at the Caza Sikes gallery in Oakley consists of eight large works meant to be viewed in a specific order, as the central subject in each, a monk, makes a journey of self-discovery. Tres Taylor, a biochemist and now a self-taught artist living in Alabama, prepared a statement for his show about the […]
The Clay Alliance
Several small arts organizations in the Greater Cincinnati area fly under the radar. Clay Alliance is one of them. Studio San Giuseppe at Mount St. Joseph University presents the Clay Alliance 20th Anniversary Exhibition from November 5 – December 7. This is a juried exhibition showcasing quality work of 35 members and a timeline of […]
Q&A: Sophie Lindsey and the art of minute-but-meaningful social intervention
In many ways, Sophie Lindsey’s artistic practice can be compared to finding a penny face-up on the sidewalk. It happens in the context of your daily routine and makes you feel something — maybe happy or lucky. It breaks the routine just enough to let you step back and appreciate a moment in an otherwise […]
Film Review: "The Price of Everything" Paints a Valuable Group Portrait of Art Market Players
“The Price of Everything,” a 98-minute documentary directed by Nathaniel Kahn, tenders a panoptic window on the contemporary art market’s upper echelon via a carefully orchestrated sequence of interview segments with a wide array of prominent art world influentials. Seeming particularly timely in light of the $90.3 m Hockney auction record set just three days […]
“Four Soldiers” by Hubert Mingaerelli
I was wandering around in Joseph Beth Booksellers a few weeks ago, and a caption by English novelist Hillary Mantel, whose books on King Henry VIII and Cromwell have fascinated me, to date, and saw this quote on a book cover : “A small miracle of a book, perfectly imagined and perfectly achieved”. That novel […]
“Washington Black” by Esi Edugyan
“Washington Black”, a new and much praised novel by the African-Canadian author Esi Edugyan, is a real romp of an epic. It centers around a slave boy named Washington Black, who lives as a young boy on a sugar cane plantation in Barbados, owned by an English white family, transitioning from a father newly dead to […]
“Early Work” by Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin’s debut novel, “Early Work”, show us a very young writer of amazing talent. The novel’s about a group of young/would-be writers, all of whom seem to have been made precious by various writing/MFA in creative writing programs, which are growing enormously around America these days, seeming to subsidize English departments everywhere. A group […]
“A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl” by Jean Thompson
The often underrated or undernoticed Jean Thompson’s back with another of her superb family sagas, this one called “A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl”, and it’s splendid. Thompson, who lives in Illinois, has been writing family sagas about people who live in the Upper Midwest, in cities of, oh, 100,000 people or so; […]