Radiance in Abundance at Brazee
The Brazee Studios Art gallery, tucked away in the suburb of Oakley, is currently featuring the well paired work of painter M. Katherine Hurley and sculptress Margot Gotoff. Hurley’s big sky motifs in dramatic color dominate the main room. The viewer’s vantage points are varied: sometimes earthbound sometimes mid-flight, atmospherically enveloped in the cloud cover. […]
M. Katherine Hurley: Nationally Acclaimed Landscape Artist
M. Katherine Hurley grew up in Gates Mills, a small, rural community, 40 miles east of Cleveland. While her first love was horses, she later focused on landscapes. They both became sanctuaries for her when life grew challenging. She found comfort and beauty in solitary places. Hurley’s interest in art comes from her family. Her […]
Justin Van Hoy’s Legacy Lives on at Slow Culture
Shortly after the release of Justin Van Hoy’s 2012 curatorial publication Milk & Honey: Contemporary Art in California, his life came to an untimely end. At just 31, the accomplished artist lost what had been his second battle with cancer. While Van Hoy had found success at a relatively early age due to his prodigious […]
Jennifer Gunlock Continues to Communicate the Complexities of Ecological Imbalance through Her Practice
Los-Angeles based artist Jennifer Gunlock has often looked to nature for inspiration. While her work seems abstractionist, it also embodies elements that link her to surrealism: Gunlock has an uncanny ability to interweave elements of the urban world with tree-like formations that, together, produce futuristic landscapes. Intrigued by the camouflaged cell phone tower, poorly fashioned after […]
Poem by Louis Zoellar Bickett
JON BALES DYING Your once handsome face had morphed into a mask of dry leather. You were hard to look at. Yet your eyes were still an improbable blue that could have sucked in the dead. I was lying next to you in your hospital bed your elbow pressed against my […]
Maxwell’s Poetry Corner
Folds of Paper A workman’s glove trampled, tattered abandoned on the sidewalk. Pointing to the sky. The index finger signals: look up. The great blue, A half moon between wires, A plane inching. Why reveal the obvious to a wandering man seeking answers? Are they there hidden like words beneath […]
H is for Hawk
English writer Helen Macdonald’s memoir H is for Hawk is one of the most brilliantly conceived and written books of the year. I passed on buying it three times, as I couldn’t decide if it might be fascinating, or boring, or some kind of gimmick (alas, one does approach so much culture with those stipulations and/or concerns […]
Artists as Activists
Saad Ghosn’s new and superb book, Artists as Activists, is now out, with a book signing and sale that just took place at Joseph Beth at Rookwood on September 19th. It’s a splendid offering, full of individual interview essays that Ghosn wrote himself from a selection of many of this region’s finest artists. Let me recommend up […]
The Sympathizers, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Dragonfish, by Vu Tran
Two recent novels, The Sympathizers, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Dragonfish, by Vu Tran, are debut novels by two Vietnamese-American men, and the books have many elements in common (besides their excellence). The ndmerican media have been assuring us since Vietnam reunited, and since Western businesspeople began to go there to seek business opportunities, that the Vietnamese, […]