#artistic-realism

#artistic-realism

"I knew nothing about photography. I ended up making 40,000 goddamn slides."

I wanted to be a great artist, not in the slang use of 'great,' but fantastic—reaching the soul of other people. This ambition drove Pat Steir throughout her life.

Much of Instagram's video content is organized around transformation-the virtual magic of the before-and-after and clips that show cause and effect. A person makes pasta from scratch in 20 seconds via edits that compress time-intensive labor.

The stellar collection of 30-plus Venice paintings from the artist's 10-week visit in 1908 is smartly framed by additional materials. Visitors get exposed to historic photographs of the city, as well as of the Monet couple visiting, and are provided with lots of quotations from the artist about his approach to art, process and subject.

To call the oil paintings of Eyvind Earle "landscapes" is accurate but very sorely wanting. For more than seventy years, Earle turned his unique refracting eye on what he called the "stupendous infinity of nature," interpreting what he saw through a long lens shaped by a very particular kind of mythopoeia.

John Yau once remarked to Jasper Johns that the materials he uses - newsprint, hot wax, bedsheets - must be a conservator's nightmare. 'Yes,' Johns responded. 'It's falling apart, just like me.'

Yale came to me and said there isn't an overarching book about the history of printmaking; they wanted it to be about the printed image. There are a lot of books about printing-about the history of journalism or the history of books, the printing press and the printed word-but not so much about the printed image and its processes. So that was my challenge.

The work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning wound up as part of a secret CIA program during the height of the Cold War, aimed at promoting American ideals abroad.

When I was a kid, I was painting, as a few of my classmates were, because my teacher was a painter. We were making paintings and different things as well - silkscreens for dances or basketball games, mobiles ... It was around 1963, so a lot of different types of artistic endeavours were happening, which played into what he was teaching us. That was kind of where I started.

The British artist Andy Goldsworthy moved to Penpont, a village in southwest Scotland, in 1986, when he was thirty. The area's initial appeal was twofold. Property was cheap, which meant that Goldsworthy and his wife at the time, Judith Gregson, could acquire an unrenovated stone building that had likely once stored grain. This structure could serve as a workspace and, for a while, as a rough-and-ready home.

In the 1880s Seurat was the leader of the avant-garde group of painters who used pointillist dots of pure colour to create their pictures. The eye blends Seurat's colours harmoniously, giving his paintings a luminosity and vigour.

Mornings are best for concentrated work. In the winter, I turn on the heat at 8am and get started around 10am. Summer, I start around 9am. I have two areas in the studio for projects. The large, heavy wood sculptures are carved in the front section of the studio, closest to the roll-up wide door. Smaller sculptures are placed on a hydraulic workbench. Before I start, I focus, connect with the Source, and ask for guidance.

I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.

An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.

As the administration continues its attacks on culture, the president is targeting a building near the National Mall with several remarkable New Deal-era murals about social security, which remain as relevant as the day they were painted. Reporter Aaron Short brings us inside the fight to save this gem of a building, which a new petition describes as a "Sistine Chapel" of artworks centering working-class communities that the government abandoned during the Great Depression (and continues to neglect today).

Six months before his momentous first trip to the United States, Joan Miró sent a letter to his New York City gallerist, Pierre Matisse. Writing from repressive Francoist Spain in the austere aftermath of the Second World War, the Catalan artist was searching for new frontiers. "In the future world, America, with its energy and vitality, must play a leading role," he told Matisse." I have to be in New York to be in direct, personal contact with your country; my work will benefit from that shock."

Georges Seurat was a French post-Impressionist best known for a technique later dubbed pointillism: painting not with expressive brushstrokes, but by patiently placing thousands of tiny dots onto the surface. Rather than mixing colours on a palette, Seurat relied on the viewer's eye to do the work. The dots optically blend at a distance, creating the colour and light he intended.