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You never quite know what to expect from a Nostalgia & Noise event. You could walk into the “living room” of the W Hotel lobby while Soul Train plays on a TV as you’re advised to choose from a selection of classic vinyls to paint…
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Jamisha Daniels
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Spring, summer, autumn, winter—few things are more fundamental to how we mark the passage of time. A perennial subject of both casual conversation and art-making, this cycle takes center stage in the exhibition “Kim Chong Hak: Painter of Seoraksan” at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. On the surface, it appears as a simple journey through the calendar, yet beneath lies something more—the fusion of Korean Dansaekhwa painting and American abstract expressionism. By using a familiar narrative while filtering it through a hybrid style rooted in lived experience, Hak demonstrates that meaning lies less in what you say than in how you say it.
Hak was born in Korea, where he grew up and began his artistic career. Coming of age in the 1960s meant grappling with identity and nationhood in a post-war landscape, struggles that shaped the movement known as Dansaekhwa. This abstract, non-objective practice, though not wholly representative of Hak’s influences, dominated Korean painting at the time and provides crucial context for his development.
Dansaekhwa, often translated as “monochrome painting,” is defined by physical engagement with material, deceptive simplicity, and destabilizing contrasts. Its influence emerges most clearly in Hak’s winter works. Untitled (Winter) (2017) depicts a forest stripped of its foliage, the ground blanketed in snow. Only bare trunks and branches remain, save for two birds perched on a branch in the foreground. At first glance, the canvas seems nearly all white, but closer inspection reveals a spectrum of grays—from ash to slate—layered into the surface. Thick slabs of paint have been built up and sculpted with a brush, giving the scene a dense materiality. Step back again and the landscape no longer appears void but alive with presence. What seems at first a quiet winter scene becomes instead a meditation on Dansaekhwa’s influence on Hak’s style.
In 1977, Hak moved to New York, where he encountered neo-expressionists such as Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, along with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Characterized by intuitive mark-making and non-objective compositions that cover the canvas edge to edge—so-called “all-over paintings”—this movement was embodied by figures like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Its impact is clearest in Hak’s summer paintings. Green Shades and Fragrant Plants (1998) presents a bed of flowers—sunflowers, peonies, lilies—all bursting upward from an emerald ground to fill the surface without pause. While recognizably a summer scene with its dense greenery and saturated hues, the lack of horizon or pictorial depth flattens the canvas into a single, enveloping plane. As with Untitled (Winter), the true subject is not the image itself but Hak’s painterly practice.
What is most striking is how approachable these works remain. The collision of Dansaekhwa’s rigor with Abstract Expressionism’s abandon might have produced chaotic, unruly canvases. Instead, Hak distills these competing forces into the simple frame of the seasons. Though the stylistic influences are distinct, they never overwhelm; balance and clarity prevail. The exhibition offers a dual entry point: first, the comforting familiarity of seasonal change, and second, the conceptual interplay of styles. One may view it as a lyrical stroll through the year, but these works resist categorization. They are not conventional landscapes but something far more compelling.
“Kim Chong Hak: Painter of Seoraksan” is at the High Museum of Art through November 2, 2025.
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Leia Genis
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The Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, attracting more visitors to the Louvre to view the empty space…
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The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is suing the town of Vail over its dismissal of artist Danielle SeeWalker from an artist-in-residence program, following an April complaint about SeeWalker’s past work.
The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court, states that the town violated SeeWalker’s First Amendment rights in canceling her residency over political reasons before she’d even painted a single brushstroke.
“… SeeWalker’s free speech rights under the federal and state constitutions were violated when the town of Vail abruptly canceled her residency after she expressed her personal views on the war in Gaza on her social media page,” according to an ACLU of Colorado statement.
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John Wenzel
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Since earning an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago last year, painter Luke Agada’s career has taken off. Early showings at group exhibitions spanning continents—“Collective Reflection: Contemporary African and Diasporic Expressions of a New Vanguard” at Gallery 1957 in Accra, “Unusual Suspects” at African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos and “Where The Wild Roses Grow” at Berlin’s Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery—established Agada as an artist with a knack for expressing cultural identity, ambiguity and introspection in surrealist works rendered in color palettes reminiscent of his native Lagos. His first U.S. solo exhibition at Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery in September of 2023 was followed by a standout showing at Art Basel Miami Beach, where Roberts Projects featured his work in what quickly became one of the fair’s most buzzed-about booths.
All this from someone who not terribly long ago was making and selling paintings in his spare time while pursuing a degree in veterinary medicine. But just a year into his veterinary career, the Nigerian-born, Chicago-based artist quit to focus on art full-time—a pivot that involved moving from Lagos to the U.S.
“Far from home, with little familiarity and no family nearby, I experienced a constant sense of longing and nostalgia that eventually permeated my work,” Agada told Observer. “The figures I depicted began to reflect fragments of my memories, reduced to simplified forms, shadows and lines—mere vestiges of my past. I sought ways to navigate this longing and explore how the migrant form adapts to globalized spaces.”
Agada’s style is a confluence of Surrealism and postcolonial theory, and much of his work explores the “third space” concept popularized by Homi K. Bhabha. With earthy tones, shadow and light, he depicts clashes of memory and migration in psychologically engaging landscapes where intersecting cultural identities and shifting power dynamics create tension-filled environs populated by distortions representing not individuals but states of being.
SEE ALSO: Gillian Varney On the Lumen Prize and Its Relevance After Thirteen Years
On the occasion of the opening of “Between Two Suns,” the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles now on at Roberts Projects, Observer connected with Agada to discuss his influences, how his life’s journey has shaped his work and what he hopes people will take away from the show. With his star on the rise, expect to see more of him.
The surreal distortion in your figures is uncanny—what shaped your visual vocabulary?
In the early stages of my practice, I was heavily influenced by European surrealists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte, which grounded my work in traditional figure drawing. I later became intrigued by various modernist movements, particularly the impact of modernism on American art that challenged conventional representations of the human form. This interest sparked my desire to push the boundaries of representation in my work.
Upon moving to the U.S. for my MFA at SAIC, my approach shifted significantly. Far from home, with little familiarity and no family nearby, I experienced a constant sense of longing and nostalgia that eventually permeated my work. The figures I depicted began to reflect fragments of my memories, reduced to simplified forms, shadows, and lines—mere vestiges of my past. I sought ways to navigate this longing and explore how the migrant form adapts to globalized spaces. My interest in Postcolonial theory grew during a class on the subject, as I found it deeply relatable.
Encountering the works of the New York School painters opened a new avenue for developing the visual framework of my practice. The emotions embedded in their work were palpable; they were invested in infusing meaning into forms that resonate with the entire human experience. Their unique way of freezing moments within the intermediate zones of image-making further fueled my interest. Consequently, I shifted my focus from purely orthodox surrealists to artists like Arshile Gorky and Joan Miró, who employed an automatist approach while drawing on their surrealist influences.
Who are those ghostly figures meant to be? You? An everyman?
Although I deeply connect with the emotional and psychological states of the figures in my paintings, they are not biographical assertions of myself. Rather, they are representations of states of being, some of which are tied to specific stories or events.
What should people know about your approach to painting?
My relationship with painting has gradually shifted or evolved over time. Earlier, I paid more attention solely to the representative image, which had a major focus on the well-defined identity of the subjects. However, I soon developed an interest in how the idea and approach to representation of the figure amongst modernist painters of the 20th century evolved. This made me realize that the theme of identity is not the only foundation or final form that my work can take. I saw the need to go beyond just the reconstruction of identity.
The transformative property of painting, amongst other things, contributed to my interest in the organic and biomorphic forms that sit at the border between the Representative and Prefigurative Image, which accurately reflects my thoughts about some of the conversations I am interested in.
I am interested in challenging the anatomy of forms and the new meaning they assume as they adapt to a new space. Doing this creates tension between them and the space they occupy. The spaces are a mix of memory and imagination, yet they’re not purely autobiographical, as I am sometimes making a space that can only exist in a painting.
I desire the paintings to have a life of their own, so there is always an ongoing negotiation between my hand and the material to capture the poetics of the moment as I layer up, add and remove paint to reveal the underpainting. I am gradually embracing the plurality of perspectives because it opens for me an infinite number of possibilities and entry points into the painted picture. Picasso and Georges Braque breaking down the picture plane into the fourth dimension was a good example for me.
Although ideological concepts are important, I do not prioritize them over painterly values. This is because painting often operates beyond the artist’s intentions, especially upon first encounter. The meaning of a picture often reveals itself later. Therefore, I approach my work with an open mind, staying highly observant and sensitive to where the process leads me, even when working through a specific idea.
How has your own cross-continental exposure impacted the evolution of your artistic style and/or narrative?
Learning how to truly “see” is one of the most valuable experiences I’ve gained as an artist. It has enabled me to view the world contextually, through the lens of the human story—understanding that each person’s perspective is filtered through their unique experiences, histories and cultural contexts. Despite the world being incredibly interconnected, with vast diversity among people of different cultural backgrounds and nationalities, the “single story” perspective remains prevalent. This oversimplification reduces complex individuals and experiences to stereotypical narratives. I have taken a keen interest in the subjectivity of forms across borders; recognizing that the interpretation and meaning of forms, as a visual language, are shaped by individual lived experiences and perspectives.
This realization became particularly clear to me when I encountered the work of some modernist painters, such as New York School and abstract expressionist painters. Engaging with their works awakened me to new sensibilities and revealed possibilities I had not previously considered in my own work.
I’ve read that you draw inspiration from both scholarly texts and literary works; what can you tell me about those influences in particular? How, for you, does text translate into the visual?
I recently developed an interest in postcolonial theory and literature, particularly some of the writings of Homi Bhabha that have helped in my understanding of the international and intercultural Third Space of migration, the binary opposition between geographies, between the East and West and how that is impacting the formation of hybridity and complex cultural identities in the globalized space. A part of my work has been derived from some of the lexicons, such as the migrant or alien, used to describe these new identities and their adaptation in the Third Space.
The paintings actually do resist concrete references to the theoretical part of my influences. They only carry a sensation of my thoughts and imaginations as I sample through visual references that represent the information and feeling I am trying to convey. Hence there is nothing literal about the form of the paintings that directly references my interest in Postcolonial theory visually, the scholars have done great justice in theorizing that thought through text. It’s an interpretation of all the elements that work together in the paintings to evoke the same feeling we experience about the subject.
A direct translation of text to visual information or painting would be an unnecessary and overly illustrative narration of what has already been said. This would be a bit too much to ask of the medium of painting because it cannot have the desired impact that other media like film, animation or montage would have in doing the same thing. Rather than do that as a painter, I focus on the texture of sensations like tension, movement and transition.
Painting is slow, not just as a medium or in the process, but in its ability to become. It has the propensity for not just immediacy but also a prolonged impression or impact that has to be digested over time. Hence, I feel the purpose of painting lies in serving as a catalyst to stimulate feelings or thoughts about a subject, and an effective way of doing that is not by giving you all the visual information or telling you what you already know. Sometimes, a strong painting will not force down on you more information than necessary—that will become “propagandist,” it rather offers you a few essential ingredients to draw you in, and the rest is up to you. That’s why individual interpretations and the meaning we all ascribe to forms can be quite subjective. It’s like taking a Rorschach test- our personalities are revealed in how we see.
What do you hope people will take away from the totality of “Between Two Suns”?
First, I hope that they are able to visually digest, connect with and enjoy the formal component of the works. Through the conversations around it, I hope to invite them to meditate on the notions of displacement and hybridity and offer a visual meditation on the precarious balance between survival and dissolution. And by refusing the structuralist comfort of definitive meaning, I hope to leave space for the audience to confront their own assumptions about identity, migration and shared space.
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Christa Terry
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J.P. Boudreau of Folly Cove Fine Art in Rockport has always known the allure of the Cape Ann School of painters for collectors around the country.
But he did not expect to be contacted by the brother of a collector in the Albany, New York area who has a 350 Cape Ann School artworks. The Cape Ann School refers to past masters of this historic style of plein air painting who were drawn to Cape Ann.
The collection of David J. Nyhan included the leading artists of the day almost a century ago, such as Frederick Mulhaupt, Emile Gruppe, Lester Stevens, and Harry Vincent among many others.
In fact, Boudreau recently drove to Minnesota to deliver a large painting by Gruppe purchased by another collector of the Cape Ann School.
The gallery, which he runs with Jill Guthrie, specializes in the Cape Ann School, but offers a mix of other celebrated schools such as the Hudson River School and the New York Ten, as well as living artists.
When asked about the continued popularity of the Cape Ann School, Boudreau noted that these artists’ works capture the beauty of Cape Ann, which continues to draw artists to these shores even today.
Perhaps that is why Cape Ann is home to three thriving historic art organizations: the Rockport Art Association & Museum, North Shore Arts Association, and the Rocky Neck Art Colony in Gloucester.
“What attracted these artists to this area is the same reason that continues to attract artists today — the scenic nature of Cape Ann,” said Boudreau, who serves on the Board of Governors of the Rockport Art Association.
The Rockport Art Association’s current show, the American Impressionist Society’s 25th annual National Juried Exhibition, has 16 artist members of the Folly Cove Gallery represented among the 206 artworks in the show, which runs through Oct. 26.
Raised in Hamilton and Cape Ann, Boudreau has worked many jobs on the waterfront, from commercial fishing to sailing on schooners — often the subjects of these painters.
His fascination with historic things began when he was a child, always in search of items of interest, and he began collecting paintings. Now he has a headquarters at the gallery at 41 Main St. in downtown Rockport.
He grew up surrounded by art from Cape Ann, whether in his home or in the countless homes of Cape Ann that have historic artworks hanging on their walls.
“This area is — and long has been — a mecca of art for both historic and living artists alike,” he said.
His work and interest with artists of the Cape Ann School continues to grow. Boudreau is now handling the estates of two renowned artists, Paul Strisik (1918-1998) and Don Stone (1929-2015), both of whom achieved the status of National Academician, as well as Robert Gruppe, a Rocky Neck artist and third-generation artist.
Gail McCarthy may be contacted at 978-675-2706, or gmccarthy@northofboston.com.
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By Gail McCarthy | Staff Writer
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Last week, the artist Titus Kaphar opened “Exhibiting Forgiveness” at Gagosian Beverly Hills, a painting show that pairs with his film of the same name, which premieres next month and was called a “confident debut” for the painter-turned-filmmaker, by Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson at Sundance. Kaphar is the winner of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ whose work has graced the cover of TIME magazine. We caught up with him to hear about his new show and the transition to filmmaking.
The works in this show seem nostalgic in both their techniques and subjects. What do you see as the unifying principles in this new body of paintings?
Every piece in this show is rooted in memory—I started by writing down experiences from my past. I wanted to find a way to have a conversation with my sons about my childhood, which up until that point I had been hesitant to speak about. When I sat down to write, old memories brought new images to mind. This produced an entire body of paintings that were completed before we started shooting the film.
SEE ALSO: Christie’s to Sell Works from Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson’s 21c Museum Hotel Collection
You’ve been working with both mediums for some time now. What’s the difference in your creative approach to painting and film?
The process of making a painting is fundamentally different from the process of making a film. Making a painting can be a meditative solitary act, while there’s almost no way to make a film on your own. In the best cases, all of the individuals involved pour themselves into making the film, imbuing it with energy that is greater than the sum of its parts. In my mind, that is the greatest magic that film offers. That said, the editing process felt most similar to my painting practice. As a first-time director, my editor, Ron Patane made the process manageable. It was Ron who helped me see the parallels between the erasure and cut canvases in my paintings. The way we were removing something from a scene in order to come to a more potent statement.
It’s always fascinating to watch a painter turn to film direction. Do you have a favorite film by a painter? Mine would be The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Basquiat was my favorite movie as an undergrad. Up until then, I had not seen a Black painter portrayed in a film. It had more of an impact on me than you might imagine. Around that time, I decided that I wanted to be a painter. For inspiration, I brought an old television and VCR into my “studio,” a.k.a. the garage, and started playing Basquiat every day. Somehow, it assured me that my dream was lofty but attainable.
You gave a well-known TED talk in 2017 on the question, “Can art amend history?” Have your thoughts on that question evolved in recent years?
No, my feelings have not changed. Having just returned from my family reunion in Mississippi, I am certain that we still need artists to amend the monuments that stand as emblems of injustice in our town squares nationwide.
You were recently honored at the Brooklyn Museum’s Artists Ball. What was that experience like?
Those kinds of things are always very hard for me. I am keenly aware of how much I owe my success to my family and to my team. It’s easy to give credit to the person standing on the stage, but the truth is there’s nothing exceptional I’ve ever achieved without my family and a team around me. NXTHVN, the not-for-profit arts and community incubator I started, would still just be a dream without our staff, and Exhibiting Forgiveness would still just be words on a page without my producers, cast and crew. So as grateful as I am for the honor, it is a truism that great dreams require extraordinary teams. I would have been much more comfortable if I could have had my people on stage with me.
This is your first show at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, which brings a unique crowd. Are you ready for them?
The better question is: Is Beverly Hills ready for us?! You know folks travel… in packs!
“Titus Kaphar: Exhibiting Forgiveness” is at Gagosian Beverly Hills through November 2.
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Dan Duray
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The Ahl family of Newbury had art on display at the Gloucester Society of Artists galleries, according to the newspaper on this day in 1927. Henry Hammond Ahl; his wife, Eleanor Curtis Ahl; and their son Henry Curtis Ahl each…
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Artist Gina Beavers is primarily known for her straightforward tridimensional painting objects, or relief paintings, that take their subjects from the endless flux of online commercial visuals that inspire our daily consumption of products and experiences: exaggerated lips, glossy makeup palettes and visually appealing junk foods artfully arranged are among the advertising icons you’ll find in her work. But for her new solo show, which opens at Marianne Boesky Gallery on September 5, Beavers has conceived a far more abstract and comforting body of new works. These new “Comfortcore Paintings” were inspired by the endless variety of sheets and towels available online and their seductive power to activate our senses and desires.
The landscape of online communication has rapidly evolved since the artist started painting social media-derived narrative subjects in the aughts, when users exercised a greater degree of control over what they saw on Instagram, Amazon and elsewhere. “The algorithm has changed a lot, which has changed how we interact with the internet and the kinds of images you can come across,” Beavers told Observer during a studio visit. “I was appropriating food images or makeup tutorials for a long time, but now I don’t receive that content. Everything is tailor-made to offer you what you are looking for. I was looking for new bed sheets and towels when I started to conceive the works in the show.”
The exhibition, titled “Divine Consumer,” relates to Beavers’ way of intuitively reading, appropriating and remediating those digital images of commercial products which, from the flatness of their digital presentation, are brought back to their seductive tactility, sensuality and physicality that communicate the concept of comfort. She explores this in the series by focusing on the comforting range of patterns, textures and colors that function as psychological triggers to encourage us to indulge in a purchase, prompted to buy by the promise of softness.
Beavers translates the concept into simulacra with her signature tridimensional surrogates that, here, are already something more like painting objects: physically molding and reshaping those images, Beavers brings them back to life with uncanny closeups that stimulate our senses. The works in “Divine Consumer,” in particular, engage even more with tactility. They look soft, and one naturally wants to touch and caress them. These new relief paintings also represent an evolution in Bevers’ art-making process. The resulting pieces are less heavy with less paint—she uses foam, braiding it to emulate texture, molding the movements of the fabric and later painting them into an image. Despite being static physical objects, her works activate multisensorial reactions in the same way flat images on screens do as we passively scroll.
Although she does not apply any ready-made technique, the hyperrealism of Beavers’ works directly links her practice with Pop and New Realist artists who similarly commented on consumerism and popular cultures, like Robert Rauschenberg or Claes Oldenburg. She readily acknowledges these direct references and embraces them as continuing a legacy of a practice that is deeply rooted in the American culture of mass production and mass communication. It is, for her, the only way to experience this current reality: “I don’t know how to experience living without stuff,” she said. “I don’t know how to talk about life without everything we consume or the fact that we spend so much of our life in these consumption networks.”
More than that, her hyperrealistic compositions serve as a commentary on an entire cultural attitude. “In America, you go to someone’s house and you get the nice set of towels, which is how they’re marketed—it’s the capitalist kind of system that forces you to get more than one,” she reflected as we previewed the works in the show.
In pursuing her visual and semiological research into the culture of consumerism, Beavers applies the technique of collage, which, as in its cubist and Dadaist origins, combines materials stemming from different contexts to coexist and draws new trajectories of meaning from their dialectic juxtapositions. For the artist, collage is both a way to confront the chaotic, random flow of images we are all overexposed to and to find new vocabularies with which to decode this flux and find some order. It’s how she claims creative agency over a barrage of materials and messages. “It reflects my inability to pick up on a narrative from the internet and social media because it is chaotic,” Beavers explained. “There’s this idea of divine inspiration when you’re collating, as you’re putting things together. I’m creating something independently from this chaos.”
SEE ALSO: ‘Richard Serra, A Film and Video Exhibition’ at Dia Chelsea Celebrates His Cinematic Oeuvre
Scrolling through Google and Amazon, Beavers selects and captures images of comforters, towels and all those textile accessories of a domestic world meant to communicate care, coziness and comfort. She then pulls them out of their online environment and combines them via Photoshop into collages that rework them, mostly through intuition, drawing connections with traditional painting genres, particularly still life and landscapes.
In translating images into a third dimension for the upcoming show, her signature object paintings appear in fewer works and there are more objects modeled with foam directly on wood panels. Some pieces slated to show at Marianne Boesky Gallery are materially more elaborate than others, depending on the fabric of the subject. For instance, Beavers meticulously braided and weaved foam as fabric to replicate the intricate texture of red wool blankets. “I’ve used linen on my paintings because I wanted them to have a conversation about the history of painting,” she mused, “but for this series, I just started to question why it mattered.”
Beavers has also been experimenting with scale. The larger works seem to envelop the viewer, while the minor works are studies in which it’s easy to get lost in the details of the interplay of light and shadow. There’s something obsessive yet extremely comforting in her precision. Indeed, it’s this precision—her extreme and almost obsessive hyperrealism—that makes Beavers’ work unique. It not only reflects on but also isolates and remediates fragments of the endless flood of digital images, bringing them back to the physical world and the human needs that created them.
The new series Beavers is presenting at the gallery represents a new stage of maturity in her work: she appears to be much more confident with her language and choice of subjects, as well as with her artistic research into the contemporary materialist imagery that has invaded our lives, totalizing our experience of the world and promising to heal all our problems with “retail therapy.” Amid the uncertainty of our time and rising political tensions, the artist reflected, ads for home goods can appear “safe,” as they contain no hidden agendas, no misleading propaganda. They ask us to buy, promising some version of fulfillment in return. After all, beyond our desire for transcendence or justice or hope, we all have physical desires that objects can help us satisfy.
Gina Beavers’s “Divine Consumer” opens at Marianne Boesky Gallery on September 5 and remains on view through October 5.
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Elisa Carollo
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Tahnee Lonsdale was a name on everyone’s lips during and after last year’s Armory Show. Collectors fought for her work, and Cob Gallery’s booth sold out. A year later, the artist is set to open a solo exhibition at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14. We caught up with Lonsdale, who is finalizing the details of the show, to discuss her work and its evolution over the past twelve months.
Lonsdale’s ethereal compositions are a tool she uses to explore the delicate interplays between consciousness, affection and sorrow. She told Observer that her process is mostly intuitive; the interactions of the colors on the canvas suggesting diaphanous allegorical and symbolical figures that manifest as she works. More recently, her process became even more intuitive as she embarked on a more loosely controlled practice—Lonsdale no longer traces or outlines her figures after spending time at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico. “I had never made anything with ceramics,” she said. “The process is very intuitive. I lost control of it at one point. It was meant to be like a vessel shaped like one of the smoothly curvilinear figures of my paintings, but it just kept growing outwards, with its own life.”
Freed from the line, her mystical presences are made of color and light in a nebulous atmosphere, built up in the painting as Lonsdale would mold clay to make a vessel without any preconceived idea or outline. “I’m now building the painting from a central color,” she explained. “I start with a color field, and then I build the figures from the inside out rather than the outside.” Intuition is important, as is having faith in the process.
That process is like an excavation of archetypes hiding in our collective subconscious. Lonsdale’s intuitive paint application oscillates between opacity, transparency and fluorescence, creating auratic figures that emerge like mirages from an interplay between texture and depth, light and pigment. In this back-and-forth between abstraction and figuration—now much more present than before—those spiritual presences reappear.
But while Lonsdale’s process changed, the themes in her work have not. Inhabiting her paintings are her signature mystical and chimerical feminine spirits characterized by curvilinear shapes… the matriarchal presences that reconnect with all the mothers before us or with the Great Mother Earth. As the process has become looser, Longdsale feels an even more profound connection with them. “It’s more like an energetic color field,” she said. “Like some kind of heat coming out of it, then spreading with movements, and the figures will naturally start to emerge.” When she looks at the figures populating her paintings, many of them are traveling somewhere, fleeing or at least running in a defined direction. “They’re heading somewhere I cannot control.”
SEE ALSO: The Brooklyn Museum Will Showcase the Borough’s Talent in ‘The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition’
There are no absolute autobiographical references in her work. Her subjects are universal images of womanhood and motherhood with all its implications: carer, guardian, warrior. During our conversation, Lonsdale admitted that her imagination was deeply influenced by the sculptural language of Henry Moore and his struggle to shape and describe humans at a historical turning point. The British modern master’s work was existential in its questioning, characterized by the postwar period; Lonsdale’s paintings capture the present-day need for reconnection with something profound, spiritual and timeless, both inside and outside us, after the pandemic.
In that vein, Lonsdale’s work engages with an endless back-and-forth between rationalism, physicality and humanness. “I want them to start to be something,” she said. “I want to define that: I can see ahead; I can see a body. And I want to define it. However, every time I get that, it’s about really slowing down. I’m not going to define anything. I will keep this so slow and unintended and unintentional for as long as I can because if I try to define anything too soon, it feels contrived.”
Lonsdale found additional creative nourishment in her reconnection with Leonora Carrington, reading her writing and immersing herself in Carrigton’s rich symbolic imagination, diving deeper into Mexican culture and the mystical atmosphere in her period there. “They’re very fantastical and mystical, and there’s a feeling of transparency,” Lonsdale said. This idea of the veil returns and lives between the painting layers that she creates and the surface of prefiguration she wants to break. “She’s ancient, and you feel like she’s already half in the spirit world and half in the physical realm. Or maybe crossing over.”
Lonsdale’s figures also cross between dimensions, time and space, tapping into timeless and profound archetypes: not just the mother archetype but the broader maternal archetype, which extends to ancestors, like grandmothers, great grandmothers and so on. As she dove further into the genesis of those images, we learned how they emerged in challenging moments as a form of resistance. “I was having a very hard time, and I remember sitting down with my sketchbook and being like, ‘I don’t want to plan what I will draw, and I’m just going to see what comes out,’” she said. “And I just started drawing these weird figures. They were very much about humanness back then. They didn’t feel celestial. They felt like a representation of emotions.” When she was overwhelmed—by heartbreak, by the pandemic—those figures helped her connect with something deeper inside of herself. When she made her first painting of them, they felt like the idea of protection and deeper spiritual meaning even as they embodied strong emotions. But, she emphasized, nothing about them is menacing, threatening or dangerous. They stand as symbolic reference points to offer this opportunity to reconnect with older traditions and the deeper spiritual meanings they’re embodying. “I have a solid connection to the figures in the paintings… they are very much present with me, and putting them on the canvas is just illuminating them.”
Collectively, Lonsdale’s ethereal figures are psychological or emotional shadows marching against the sun… against the light of self-reckoning and personal awareness. “They walk with you,” she said. “They’re just there constantly.” And there with them are the infinite possibilities and potential within women’s identities once they reconnect with a more primordial and wild but still creative feminine energy.
Tahnee Lonsdale’s “A Billion Tiny Moons” opens at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14 and will be on view through October 19.
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Elisa Carollo
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Ask locals where to see the best art in Denver and more than a few will point you toward the famously angular Denver Art Museum. Multiple Uber drivers will suggest you visit the trendy RiNo district. Both are good ideas, but keep pestering the nice people of Denver and the recommendations start to get more interesting. There’s the American Museum of Western Art. There’s Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station, though I leave it up to you to decide whether that’s really art. There are the eye-catching public installations, many rather horsey, like Donald Lipski’s The Yearling and the sculptor-killer, Blue Mustang (Observer correspondent Nick Hilden rightly pointed out some months back that Denver has a thing for big blue mammals). Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental dustpan, Big Sweep, is certainly something. And Leo Tanguma’s murals in Denver International Airport are said to hide the secrets of the Illuminati.
But I’m not here to see any of that. I’ve traveled to Colorado’s capital with a friend for the sprawling Cherry Creek Arts Festival—an annual juried event that attracts applications from thousands of artists and supports arts initiatives across the state. This year’s festival was spread out over six short blocks with tent after tent of exhibiting artists plus at least four cross streets with more artists’ booths and food vendors, live music, a silent auction and a crafty area for kids, which is where we stopped for shade and shaved ice on Day 0.
It wasn’t just the heat that got to us. As Jason Horowitz—now Rome bureau chief of the New York Times but once staff writer for this publication—put it in 2008: “Even if you are not thirsty, the one thing everyone in Denver tells you to do is drink water. That headache you feel is not a headache, it’s dehydration. Don’t take Advil, Bayer or Tylenol. Drink water. Lots of water. Keep water on your bed stand and water in your car. Put water in your backpack.”
My friend put water in her bag; I did not, but I did pack sumatriptan, and she was kind enough to share her water with me during our whirlwind semi-self-guided tour of what’s on in Denver. We had two days and two nights to experience as much art as possible—like a pub crawl of culture. Our host and home base: Hotel Clio, one of several upscale hotels in Denver, home to Toro Latin Kitchen & Lounge (more on this later) and the site of one of the most well-appointed fitness centers I’ve ever encountered. Also, deep, deep bathtubs. I took two baths per day, just because I could, but beyond the baths, here’s what our 48 hours of art in Denver looked like.
I pick up my friend at 4:45 a.m. for a 7:30 a.m. flight. Neither of us plans to check a bag, but I am naturally anxious and like to be in the terminal two hours before boarding to confirm that my gate actually exists. We breeze through security, our gate does in fact exist and we grab breakfast sandwiches that I can’t eat because who the hell is actually hungry before nine? I end up tucking into my gluey room-temperature egg and cheese on the plane while cringing through the new Mean Girls and then Jules, which I’d never heard of and am honestly still not sure I’d recommend. My friend graciously takes the middle seat and sleeps through almost the entire flight.
We land at Denver International Airport without incident and despite how much I’ve talked up the absolute weirdness of it—from the subterranean reptiles dwelling in the bunkers underneath to the Flat Earth propaganda in the murals to the resident ghosts—I’m too tired to even look for the famous gargoyles. I am, in fact, desperate for two things: to get more coffee and to get to the Uber that arrived roughly a minute and a half after I ordered it. Once on the road, we gaze unblinkingly out the windows, anxious for a glimpse of Blucifer, but we’re on the wrong side of the highway.
It’s too early to check in, and I don’t want to visit the Cherry Creek Art Festival until we talk to PR head Bryant Palmer, so we drop our bags at Hotel Clio—briefly admiring the art in the lobby on loan from Clayton Lane Fine Arts, which we’ll visit tomorrow—and head away from the long line of artists’ booths just around the corner. By now, we’re exceedingly hungry, but our first stop is Masters Gallery, which has a fun mix of bronzes and other sculptural works, paintings and glass art. We were particularly taken with Lawrence Feir’s fantastical metalwork wall sculptures that rendered the human form in something like chainmail (but make it sci-fi). Lunch is hand pies from the nearby Pasty Republic.
In the early afternoon, after checking in and refreshing ourselves—that’s bath number one—we have a quick meet and greet with festival PR head Bryant Palmer, who gives us the Media tags that will get us into the daily festival VIP lunch and hopefully make it less awkward when I ask artists if I can record them. During our brief chat, he tells us that last year’s participants sold $4.4 million worth of art, averaging out to about $18,000 per participating artist, which probably accounts for the popularity of this festival with artists.
Still, Palmer says, it’s a pretty accessible event, which is reassuring for us to hear, as our art buying budgets are relatively small. “You don’t have to spend fifteen thousand dollars to get something fantastic. You can if you want, it’s perfectly doable here, but you also can purchase original art for a lot less, too.”
As we start down 2nd Avenue, the festival’s main thoroughfare, I am already grappling with how I will write about all this. There’s the by-the-numbers approach: the festival showcases the work of 250 artist exhibitors selected from among 1,942 artist applicants, with twenty returning award-winners from last year’s festival and five specially selected emerging artists, and so on. Booth 1 is a real eyecatcher, hung with the colorful, vintage-photo-inspired paintings of Signe and Genna Grushovenko. One large work, Picture in Picture, stands out: in it, two women browse artworks displayed on a city street. Very meta.
From there, it’s a mad dash to see as much of the work of those 250 artists as we can while attempting to stay cool in the afternoon heat. My friend is immediately taken with the glass and ceramic art, and I can’t blame her. It’s not really my thing—I’m a painting person—but there are people here doing absolutely amazing stuff with glass and clay, from Amber Marshall’s modular pouffes to Randy O’Brien’s crackled wall pillows. Meanwhile, I gravitate toward the minimalist paintings of Ezra Siegel and similar works (I have a type) but nothing really has me overcome until I see Darryl Cox, Jr.’s striking amalgamations of frame and driftwood that are unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Other booths that stand out on our first walkthrough of the festival include those of Amy Flynn, who builds whimsical robot sculptures out of found materials, Brice McCasland’s visually immersive collage paintings and Glory Day Loflin’s paintings inspired by fiber art and quiltmaking and based in her grandmother’s textile practice.
“Every festival is different,” she tells us when we ask about her Cherry Creek experience thus far. “One thing I’ve noticed about this one is I’m seeing a lot of traction with specifically what I’m creating: the color saturation and the high key colors. That’s really drawing people in.”
All told, we spend about four hours roving from booth to booth, for both the artworks and the shade, but we have other places to be. First, the Toro Denver x Relevant Galleries kickoff cocktail event featuring drinks and small bites inspired by David Yarrow’s El Toro, during which I eat too much because everything is so damn good—including the company.
“You really shouldn’t wait if there’s something you want to buy at the festival,” a gallerist warns us as we nibble. “I fell in love with this painting but decided to wait. When I went back, I got there just in time to see a couple walking away with it.” My friend and I briefly consider heading back out into the still-glaring sunshine to panic buy several things that had caught our eyes earlier in the afternoon, but by then the El Toro-inspired cocktails are working their magic and we strike up a conversation with a local art collector who, in one of those random coincidences, has friends who work at a distillery in my friend’s town.
Our next stop is Toro proper to make a late-ish dinner reservation that now feels a little too early given how much we’ve accidentally eaten. But I’m a completionist, so I gamely dig into scallops with pork belly and pepita rosemary butter and a plate of sweet corn empanadas. Let me tell you something: should you find yourself in the neighborhood of Hotel Clio, have dinner at Toro. And when you have dinner at Toro, order the sweet corn empanadas. And when you eat the sweet corn empanadas, do not—I repeat, do not—neglect the accompanying chimichurri.
For the rest of the night, I gush about the Toro chimichurri—to our waiter, to chef de cuisine Tracey Todd and to Hotel Clio concierge George Maresh when I need his help figuring out how to access our museum tickets. I’m a little tipsy, and I’ve got chimichurri on my mind as I enjoy bath number two.
After exhausting all the coffee pods in my room, I persuade my friend to grab to-go coffees in the Hotel Clio lobby and join me on my morning stroll. While I wait, I browse the Hotel Clio art collection on my phone—I am trying to have as many art experiences as possible, after all. Artists whose work is scattered around the hotel include Hannah Ehrlich, Kim Knoll and Jared Rue, and the common curatorial thread, marketing manager Christopher Polys tells me later, is “an appreciation for Cherry Creek’s past at the confluence of the Cherry Creek and Platte River where gold mining was prevalent.” Something I’ve noticed about art in Denver is that a lot of it is very much geographically grounded. Folks in the West really like Western art.
The festival doesn’t open until 10 a.m., and I’m interested in seeing more of the neighborhood anyway. We knew Cherry Creek was a little tony—there’s the country club, the independent pasty shop, the lovely little store specializing in Versace kitchenware, the new Vespas everywhere—but I find out just how tony when I look up the asking price of the townhouses with For Sale signs in the yards.
Thoroughly caffeinated with muscles warmed and ready, our first stop of the day is not the festival but the single-artist Clyfford Still Museum, which opened in 2011, the culmination of Still’s wish that his body of work (much of which he retained until his death) would remain in storage until an American city built a museum to house his art “exclusively.” That city turned out to be Denver, and that museum in its beautiful building designed by Brad Cloepfil now holds more than 3,000 paintings and works on paper—roughly 93 percent of his lifetime output—in 30,000 square feet. Still once said seeing his work in its entirety was akin to “a symphony,” and I can’t disagree. I was only passingly familiar with the artist before this trip, and I find myself moving from painting to painting in rapt fascination. As it turns out, I really like Still’s monumental canvases and how the Clyfford Still Museum preserves and presents them—particularly how it makes every effort to incorporate the stories of both the women who launched his career and the women who were creating art at the same time but were excluded from the Irascibles.
(Please forgive this digression, but Denver is weird. It’s obviously a city, but where are all the people? It’s a beautiful Saturday and the streets and greenspaces around the museum are practically empty. Our Uber driver tells us there’s been a population boom that started with the legalization of recreational cannabis and has since attracted tech companies to the region, but I’m not seeing it.)
We drop back in at the hotel for tacos in the VIP lounge with plans to tour a few of the local art galleries in between visits to the festival. The forecast says the high will be roughly ninety degrees in the late afternoon and I gratefully grab two of the branded paper fans I’d seen people the day before. Thank you, CherryArts! For the rest of the day, my maniacal fanning will prompt my friend to ask repeatedly if I’m okay, but it’s just hot and I’m starting to think Jason Horowitz was right about Denver and dehydration. Luckily, there’s an afternoon Arnold Palmer station (with syrups!) in the Hotel Clio lobby, where we stop after more time at the festival and before heading back to Relevant, where we meet with consultant Melissa Batie.
RELEVANT PHOTO
It is, she tells us, one of a veritable fleet of galleries operating under the umbrella of AD Galleries, a mini empire of fine art dealers built by Paul Zueger. Two other AD Galleries are right here in Cherry Creek: Masters Gallery, which we’ve already visited, and Clayton Lane Fine Arts, which is our next stop. “Each gallery has a different vibe,” Batie says. “If you walk into Masters Gallery over, you’ll see lots of bronzework and glass. We’re representing a lot of photography right now.” And so they are, with large-scale works by Yarrow, along with pieces by photographer and printmaker Russell Young (who works with diamond dust left behind by Warhol—look it up). Their roster also includes the estate of modern American bronze master Gib Singleton, painters like Earl Biss and others, whose works are rotated through the various galleries. While Relevant doesn’t bill itself a gallery of Western art, the thread of inspiration is certainly there.
Clayton Lane Fine Arts, just three doors down Clayton Street, couldn’t be more different, with its focus on Pop Art and Surrealism along with works by Old Masters like Rembrandt and, surprisingly, limited edition lithographs and serigraphs of the art of Dr. Seuss. There are works by Salvador Dali and Joan Miró, as well as pieces by rising stars in an eclectic mix of works that gallery director Carrigan Sherlock rearranges depending on the season. “It’s summer now” she says, “and I wanted something kind of fun and fresh so I put the Hamilton Aguiar ocean pieces up in the front windows.” She’s worked in Aspen and Vail but tells us she likes Denver, and this spot in Cherry Creek more particularly, because of the international collectors who come through.
CLAYTON LANE PHOTO
There are still at least two short block’s worth of art festival we haven’t yet checked out. We do our best to take it all in from the relative quiet of the center of the street, but my friend and I are both suffering from acute art fatigue. Almost nothing stands out—imagine you’re at a wine tasting on your fifth vintage and you’re a little buzzed and suddenly it’s all just wine. I do stop and buy a bright Pop-y rooster print by Kenneth Kudulis. I almost buy a print by Tanya Doskova, who as far as I’m concerned dominated the festival with her deeply political and deeply weird works of magical Surrealism, and I’ll be forever sad I didn’t when I had the chance. We also pause and talk with painter Janina Tukarski Ellis, who tells us she landed on crowds as her primary subject because she likes the unity. “We may not know each other and we may not be interacting, but we’re all there for a similar purpose, whether that’s an adventure or an art show,” she tells us, and it feels like the perfect ending to our festival experience.
I optimistically have two more gallery visits on the agenda, but Abend Gallery’s Cherry Creek outpost closed not fifteen minutes earlier. It’s small and has big windows, though, so I peer in and am taken with Patrick Nevins’ Playtime is Over, which I would buy in a heartbeat if I had the means. We briefly step inside Fascination St. Fine Art, which is worth a visit but much larger than it looks from the street—suddenly we’re traversing a Tardis-like maze of hallways and staircases that eventually dumps us back onto the sidewalk via a wholly different entrance.
We hurry along to Cucina Colore, an Italian place founded by Venanzio Momo that is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Though tempted by the pastas and mains, we opt for cocktails and a pair of pizzas—the Bergamo and the Carne—since Signor Momo’s first restaurant in Colorado was a pizzeria. The quality was top-notch; the quantity, too much. Unless you’re absolutely ravenous, one pizza and a shared app or salad will be plenty enough for two people. We do look at the dessert menu, but I order an after-dinner coffee as a balm for my uncomfortably overstuffed belly.
Back at Hotel Clio, George the concierge has sent two jars of Toro’s chimichurri to my room and the gesture has me feeling oddly emotional, which is how I know that this overtired art lover should probably go straight to bed. Instead, I go down to the hotel’s fitness center and do a mixed routine of strength, stretching and cardio, because I can’t resist the siren call of an on-site gym.
After my morning bath, I spend some time gazing out my room’s window at the sun-kissed Rockies, which seem both loomingly close yet so far away. Striding along the squeaky clean and utterly empty sidewalks of Cherry Creek—yes, I have convinced my friend to go on another morning walk—you wouldn’t even know the mountains are out there. As we sip and stroll, we discuss our plans for our final half day in Denver.
Do we want to go back to the festival after our final meal at Hotel Clio? Not really, we decide together. The Cherry Creek Arts Festival is great, but we’ve seen everything we wanted to see (in some cases more than once) and talked to everyone we wanted to talk to and bought everything we’re going to buy. And while there are other art galleries in Denver we could check out, it’s Sunday and some are closed and gallery hopping doesn’t sound particularly appealing after more than a day and a half of near-continuous art exposure.
We settle on a relaxed visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, a 27,000-square foot, environmentally sustainable institution housed in a Sir David Adjaye-designed building (the first U.S. museum commission for the now disgraced architect). We bring our luggage, and the people at the admissions counter are super chill about storing my bag and my recently purchased art.
Currently on at MCA Denver are “Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature” and “Critical Landscapes: Selected Works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection.” The latter gives me space to hold forth about Ana Mendieta and the controversy surrounding her death and how Carl Andre was a piece of shit. The former wows me and my friend both. My only previous exposure to the work of Colombian-Korean-American artist Gala Porras-Kim was in a brief Observer writeup about last year’s Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, but I suggest you look her up. (In the words of my friend, Porras-Kim “is so smart and so driven to pursue fairness and justice for historically marginalized peoples.”)
The exhibition, which is focused primarily on climate change, is thought-provoking, but what stands out are the works in which Porras-Kim directly challenges the collecting practices of museums through letters and corresponding artworks. Leaving the institution through cremation is easier than as a result of a deaccession policy pairs a letter to Alexander Kellner, director of the National Museum of Brazil, which suffered a devastating fire in 2018 that destroyed much of a 12,000-year-old fossil nicknamed Luzia, and a tissue with a handprint rendered in ash from the fire that Porras-Kim calls the “closest thing to a cinerary urn” as she encourages Kellner to recognize Luzia’s personhood.
After seeing everything there was to see, we navigate MCA Denver’s narrow and echoing stairwell to the top floor where there is a small but engaging display of works by the museum’s staff. There’s also a rooftop garden cafe overlooking the quiet and strangely empty street, which is exactly what we need in that moment. I’m about to Uber back to the airport, which is sure to be busy given that this is the tail end of a holiday weekend. My friend tells me she’s thinking she’ll do a little more exploring before checking out the Denver Botanic Gardens, having dinner with a local acquaintance and finally returning to the east coast on a red eye. I order my usual latte. And my friend, because Denver is Denver and she is smarter than me, drinks more water.
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Christa Terry
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Editor’s note: An untold number of unheralded artists live in Colorado, those creators who can’t (or don’t want to) get into galleries and rely on word of mouth, luck or social media to make a living. You’ve likely seen them on Instagram, at festivals or at small-town art fairs. This occasional series, Through the Lens, will introduce you to some of these artists.
The last time you saw a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, there’s a good chance that live-music artist Keith “Scramble” Campbell was there, painting a 3-by-4-foot abstract acrylic artwork of the very band you came to see.
A fixture at the venue, Campbell has created more than 630 live paintings since his debut there in 2000, when he painted the band Widespread Panic. Immersed in the rhythm of the music, the artist moves with the beat, using his paintbrush like an instrument to capture the vibrant spirit and energy of the performance onto his canvas.
Inspired from a young age by New York graffiti artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, he found his calling in emulating American speed painter Denny Dent, known for creating large-scale, 8-foot canvases of musicians in just 10 minutes, often at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival. Discovering live music painting, he says, transformed his life and solidified his path as an artist.
“It seems easier to tell you which artists I haven’t painted versus the ones that I have,” he said recently. “I’ve painted over 1,000 live shows and 4,000 canvases in my career. It is a lifetime of going to shows all over the world. It isn’t just Red Rocks. If it’s live music, I will paint it.”
Q: Where does your name come from?
A: I was a speed roller skater in the 1970s and ’80s. I had a friend who called me Scramble because of the way I scrambled around the rink. Early on, I was heavily influenced by artists Andy Warhol, Bob Ross, LeRoy Neiman and Dalí. When I decided to make art my career, I felt like all of the influences from these artists were like an alphabet soup of names, a scramble of influences on me. I decided that Scramble would be a fitting name for me. (I also felt that it sounded a lot more creative than Keith and it rhymed with Campbell.)
Q: Could you give us a brief history of how you became an artist?
A: When I was in the seventh grade, I wanted to quit school because I knew I wanted to be an artist. My mother luckily convinced me it was wise to stay in school.
In the late ’80s, New York City was deep in the rave culture and the graffiti scene with rising artists like Haring, Warhol and Basquiat. They showed their work through nightclubs and public art. They were doing paintings on walls, in the subways and on the streets directly bringing art to the people. I was entranced by their work.
In 1991, I answered an ad looking for a visual artist to paint live during a music festival. The man who placed the ad was Perry Farrell, of Jane’s Addiction. The music festival was Lollapalooza.
When I got the job, it felt like the beginning of my career. I had had so many rejections over the years of trying to get into galleries and art shows. It was when I made the crossover from the art world into the music world that I really discovered my path as an artist.
Throughout the ’90s, I did music festivals such as the New Orleans Jazz Festival, Lollapalooza, the HOARD festival, Bonnaroo, Woodstock ’94, the Lilith Fair and even the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. I have painted Widespread Panic 170 times.
Q: What kind of artist are you?
A: At heart, I am really a musician with a paintbrush. My instruments are my canvases, paintbrushes and paints.
I like to think of myself as a conduit of music, transcribing their energy and their music into a dance on canvas.
As a live artist, my paintings reflect the concert. I let the music and the environment dictate how I paint. If it’s windy and the music is hardcore, my paintings will reflect that. I’ll paint fast and furiously, the work looking abstract and impressionistic. I dance and move with the music as I paint. If there is a slower song in between, that is the time I take to fill in the details. The musicians, the weather, the people all play a role in the painting I create. I am trying to tell a story of that night. If it rains or is windy, I add that in my paintings. If there is a rainbow I will put that in there. I am capturing the entire night into one canvas.
Q: What kind of music do you like to paint to, and do you specifically stay within a specific genre?
A: I don’t stick to any one genre. I have painted over 1,000 different bands and 4,000 canvases that include jam bands like Widespread Panic and Leftover Salmon to up-and-coming Christian rock bands. Next month, I’ll be painting King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, an Australian rock band. I’ve had the opportunity to paint jazz legends Fats Domino, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. I’ve painted Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Prince and other legends like Diana Ross, Melissa Etheridge, Carlos Santana, Blues Traveler, Lady Gaga with Tony Bennett, Johnny Winter and Tom Petty.
It seems easier to tell you which artists I haven’t painted versus the ones that I have.
Q: How did you end up becoming what seems like the artist-in-residence at Red Rocks?
A: After a show in Florida, Todd Nance, the drummer for Widespread Panic, traded a summer tour pass for a painting I had done of the band. I ended up at my first Red Rocks show where the band played in June 2000. It was love at first sight when I did that show.
Since then, I have done over 630 paintings at Red Rocks. I buy my own tickets and pay for every single concert that I go to. Red Rocks does not pay me to be there but they do allow me the space in which to paint.
Q: Do you remember the first piece of art you ever got paid for?
A: It was 1987 at one of my first group shows at a shopping mall where I sold a drawing of Joey Ramone. It was a studio piece before I was a live-music artist. I guess I have always been a music artist. even from the start.
Q: Where can we see your art?
A: On my website (scramblecampbell.com), but I invite people to come see me live at Row 23 at Red Rocks. I also have small paintings, postcards, magnets and other items for sale at the Red Rocks Trading Post.
Q: Do you have a favorite art piece?
A: I did a painting of Lou Reed in 1998 in Bethel, N.Y., on the original Woodstock grounds for the 29th anniversary of the original Woodstock. I got to talk to him and meet him afterwards and he signed the back of my painting. There are also paintings I’ve done of legendary musicians, like B.B. King and Fats Domino, who have since died. All of these paintings I love and will never sell.
Q: What memorable responses have you had to your work?
A: I showed David Crosby a painting I had just done of him and he said, “Not bad for speed painting.” Another time when I showed my painting to James Brown, he said, “Son, I’d like to thank you for coming out and painting my portrait.” He signed the entire back of the painting and said “I feel good. James Brown.”
Q: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
A: In my mid-20s, I wrote a letter to well-known graffiti artist Keith Haring asking for advice. He was a big influence for me back then. He actually wrote me back and said: “I’m not good at giving advice. All I can say is do what you want to do and find a way to do it as much as you want to. There is no ’answer’ that is the same for everyone. You have to find your own direction.” I’ve followed that advice ever since.
Q: What advice would you offer to beginning artists?
A: Try to make your own way and make your own art. Don’t do art for somebody else, do it for yourself.
Q: Describe your dream project.
A: Next season is my 25th at Red Rocks. I’d really like to do a book that talks more about my experiences at the hundreds of concerts and of the thousands of artists I have painted. I feel like I already have the book illustrated with my paintings. It just hasn’t been written down yet. There are so many stories that go along with the artists that I have painted. I want to be able to tell those stories. It’s 25 years of jazz fest, 25 years of Red Rocks, 35 years of live painting. I’d like to tell those stories.
Originally Published:
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Helen H. Richardson
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Entrepreneur Grant Cardone said collecting and displaying art gives him more fulfilment than investing.
Grant Cardone
Multimillionaire Grant Cardone, who has been collecting art for around 15 years, says he’s a spontaneous buyer.
“I don’t consider myself a connoisseur. I’m very new to the art world. If I like it, I buy it. I don’t care who did it,” he told CNBC. Alongside pieces displayed throughout his home, Cardone also has an art gallery to house his considerable collection.
CNBC spoke to Cardone by video call — behind him in his Miami home office was an untitled piece by American graffiti artist Retna that Cardone bought in an online auction.
“I clicked the button — really hadn’t done any research … and got the piece … And it got here and I absolutely freaking loved it,” he said. He paid “maybe $140,000” for the work, he said.
A piece called “It’s Now Time,” by the artist Fringe, seen in Grant Cardone’s home gallery.
Grant Cardone
Along a corridor in Cardone’s home are two pieces by American pop artist Burton Morris, both depicting red Coca-Cola bottles lined up in a repeating pattern named Coca-Cola 50A and Coca-Cola 50B. “This I bought from Tommy Hilfiger … it reminds me of the importance of scaling,” Cardone said — fashion designer Hilfiger is the home’s previous owner.
Cardone, a real estate investor and author of “The 10 X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure,” has around 17 million followers on social media and uses his platforms to give occasional advice on art investing.
“[Followers are] starting to see the art saying, hey, you know, [has] that been good for you? And I’m like, yeah, it’s good for me … It’s better than the dollar or the euro … The stock market doesn’t give me any fulfillment, I don’t go back and look at my Apple shares and feel good about it. But I walk in my gallery or down the kitchen or in my office and I see a piece and I’m like, man, it’s super cool.”
The gallery in Grant Cardone’s Miami home. A print of a piece by Basquiat is seen bottom left.
Grant Cardone
Inside Cardone’s gallery — complete with floor-to-ceiling windows and a security guard — is a work by American contemporary artist Kenny Scharf titled “Blipsibshabshok” (1997), an abstract painting featuring colorful futuristic symbols. Cardone owns a second Scharf, “Controlopuss” (2018), a striking image of a red multi-legged creature, acquiring it for $279,400 from auction house Phillips.
“This is a Basquiat right here. The original would be $45 million,” Cardone said, pointing to a print of a Jean-Michel Basquiat piece titled “Flexible” (1984/2016). The original was sold by auction house Phillips for $45.3 million in 2018. “This piece I bought with the house,” he said, gesturing to a work above the Basquiat titled “Read More” by American contemporary artist Al-Baseer Holly.
Grant said he chooses pieces to buy on instinct. “I’ll try to walk away from it. And if I keep seeing it, or I keep thinking about it, then I go back and say, OK, I’m supposed to have this,” he said.
“I plan on never selling any this stuff. It’s really for my personal enjoyment. And you know, art makes me happy,” he said.
Former investment banker Christian Levett has a different approach. He’s been collecting art for almost 30 years, starting with old master paintings and Roman, Greek and Egyptian antiquities before moving on to pieces by female abstract expressionists.
Art collector Christian Levett conducts private tours of his home in Florence, Italy. His collection is largely made up of abstract expressionist works by female artists.
Christian Levett
Aside from owning an art museum in Mougins, France, Levett conducts tours of the artwork on the walls of his home in Florence, Italy, where he lives for six months of the year — you could say his whole home is an art gallery. “It’s, kind of, a museum by private tour,” Levett told CNBC by phone.
Close to the city’s famous Ponte Vecchio bridge, Levett’s home has 20-foot-high ceilings, original frescoes and two floors of art, all by women. The collection is largely made up of abstract expressionist works by artists such as the impressionist Mary Cassatt and the surrealist Dorothea Tanning.
Once or twice a week, Levett invites small groups to see his collection, often taking tours himself. Groups are sometimes made up of students from the American colleges that have outposts in Florence, such as Harvard University and New York University, or come from museum or patrons’ groups.
A 1977 painting by American artist Joan Mitchell is a highlight of Levett’s collection, he said. The large piece, titled “When They Were Gone,” is nearly 240cm tall and 180cm wide, and hangs in his dining room.
Levett acquired it for about $2.8 million around 2015.
Christian Levett has switched from collecting antiquities to work by female artists, seen here in his Florence home.
Christian Levett
“It’s now probably a $15 million to $18 million picture at auction … Mitchell has always been one of the most important female painters of the 20th century,” Levett said.
He also spoke highly of an Elaine de Kooning oil painting of John F. Kennedy, commissioned as part of a series of portraits of the former U.S. president in 1963. Levett bought the artwork in 2020, paying around $600,000.
Levett said he opens his home to students in part because doing so might spark an interest in supporting art in future. “The students … are the acorns of the art world,” he said.
Work by female artists is Levett’s focus, and he is set to re-open his museum in France as the Female Artists Mougin Museum on June 21. He is currently selling the museum’s previous collection of art and antiquities via a series of sales at London auction house Christie’s, which have reached almost £9.5 million ($11.9 million) so far.
Christian and Karen Boros’ home is on top the bunker that houses their private art collection, the Boros Collection, in the center of Berlin, Germany.
John Macdougall | AFP | Getty Images
At a unique art space in Berlin, husband and wife Christian and Karen Boros live in a 6,000 square foot penthouse apartment above their private collection. The Boros Collection is housed in a former World War II bunker, a vast, high-rise building the couple acquired in 2003 and spent several years converting into a five-floor exhibition space, with their home on the sixth.
The bunker sheltered up to 4,000 people during the war, after which it was used as a storage facility for tropical fruit before becoming a nightclub. According to Raoul Zoellner, director of the Boros Foundation, 450 tons of concrete ceilings and walls were removed during its conversion into an exhibition space and home.
An artwork by Cyprien titled “Gaillard Lesser Koa Moorhen,” 2013, part of the Boros Collection.
Boros Collection, Berlin | Noshe
Christian, an advertising entrepreneur, bought his first artwork — a spade by German artist Joseph Beuys — when he was 18, he told the Financial Times.
“The bunker is not a museum … but an exceptional project initiated by an enthusiastic collector couple who could not have imagined how many diamond saws it would take to tear down dozens of bunker walls — or what that would set in motion,” Zoellner said in an emailed statement.
Karen and Christian Boros live in a penthouse apartment above their art collection in Berlin.
Max von Gumpenberg
Nearly 600,000 people have taken guided tours of the bunker since its conversion in 2008, with pieces from the Boros Collection shown on rotation, Zoellner added. At the moment, there are 114 works on view, with a “focus on the human body in a multiplicity of positions,” Zoellner said. “The works home in on the constant compulsion to optimize, the gradual adaptation of our bodies to technological devices,” he said.
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California legislators plan to introduce a bill Thursday that would bolster efforts by Holocaust survivors, their heirs and other victims to recover artwork and other property stolen from them as a result of political persecution.
Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and lead sponsor of the bill, said the measure was inspired by a recent ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that found that current California law required an Impressionist masterpiece looted from a Jewish woman by the Nazis in 1939 to remain with a Madrid museum rather than be returned to the woman’s family in the U.S.
“It immediately made sense to me that this was a unique opportunity to correct a historical injustice and make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again,” Gabriel said. “Respectfully, we think that the 9th Circuit got it wrong, and this law is going to make that crystal clear.”
Gabriel said the bill hopefully will ensure better legal outcomes for other Californian families who have suffered politically motivated thefts — whether past, present or in the future.
“Our hope is that it’s going to help others, other Holocaust victims and other victims of genocide and political persecution,” Gabriel said. “It’s specifically crafted to be applied more broadly.”
The legislative effort — which Gabriel said already has bipartisan support — is the latest twist in a more than two-decade legal battle over the Camille Pissarro masterpiece “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain.” It is also not the first time the California Legislature has bucked the powerful 9th Circuit on issues related to Nazi-looted art.
David Cassirer, whose great-grandmother Lilly Cassirer Neubauer had the painting stolen from her at the dawn of World War II, is appealing the 9th Circuit ruling against his family and welcomed the legislative effort as a potential leg up in that fight.
“It’s very important that our laws support and enable Holocaust victims and their heirs to be able to recover this artwork that was stolen so long ago,” he said. “I’m grateful.”
Thaddeus Stauber, an attorney for the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, which obtained the painting as part of a massive collection of masterpieces in 1993 and rejects the family’s claim to it, did not respond to a request for comment.
Neubauer relinquished the painting to a local Munich art dealer acting as a Nazi art appraiser in 1939, in exchange for a visa to flee Germany. It was a decision made under clear duress, as part of a vast Nazi program to steal Jewish wealth, and both parties to the ongoing case have agreed the incident constituted a theft.
Despite that, however, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, which is owned by the Spanish government, argues it has since obtained proper title to the painting under Spanish law. It says it purchased the painting in good faith, without knowing it was stolen, in 1993, from billionaire Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza.
The baron, one of the world’s most prolific art collectors before his death in 2002, was the scion of a German industrialist family that made a fortune in steel — and helped finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power along the way.
Neubauer’s family believed the painting was missing — perhaps lost for good in the war — until Neubauer’s grandson Claude Cassirer, who escaped the Holocaust before moving to Cleveland and then retiring in San Diego, discovered around 2000 that it was in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum.
He asked for the museum to voluntarily return the painting, then sued in 2005 when it refused to do so. David Cassirer, his son, took over as lead plaintiff in the family’s case after his father’s death in 2010.
The case has bounced around U.S. courts ever since, and has repeatedly caught the attention of the 9th Circuit. Around the same time as Cassirer’s death, the appellate court tossed a California rule expanding the window under which looting victims or their heirs could file claims for Nazi-looted artwork, saying it infringed federal authority in such matters.
The state Legislature responded by passing a measure making the window for all sorts of stolen property — not just in international cases with a federal nexus — six years from the time a victim gains “actual knowledge” of the lost property’s whereabouts, which was a window large enough to justify the Cassirer family’s claim. Congress later established a similar window for looted art claims under federal law.
Still, the battle over the Pissarro — which is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars — raged on.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Cassirer family another win when it ruled that California law — not Spanish law — should be used to determine the legitimacy of the family’s claim to the painting. However, in January, the 9th Circuit once again ruled against the family.
A three-judge panel found that California law required it to consider the interests of Spain and of California in enforcing their respective and contradictory laws around stolen property, and to apply the law of the government whose interests would be “more impaired” were its law ignored.
Under that analysis, it had to apply Spain’s law, it found, and therefore the painting had to remain with the museum. One of the judge’s wrote that she agreed with the analysis as a matter of law, but it went against her “moral compass.”
It also went against “California values,” Gabriel said, which is why he decided to introduce the new measure.
“The purpose of the bill is to ensure an outcome based on morality and justice, and not legal technicalities,” he said.
If the new bill passes, it would make clear that, in scenarios involving property looted or stolen by the Nazis or as a result of political persecution, California law dictates that the property be returned, Gabriel said.
The law would apply in any legal case considering such issues in which the ultimate decision is not yet final, up to and including those on appeal before the Supreme Court.
If passed and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the bill probably would take effect Jan. 1, Gabriel said. It also could be expedited, but that hasn’t been considered yet.
The timeline for the Cassirer case is unclear. It currently remains before the 9th Circuit, where Cassirer has asked for the January decision to be reconsidered by a larger, 11-judge en banc panel. After a decision is made there, the parties could potentially appeal to the Supreme Court, as well.
Sam Dubbin, a longtime attorney for the Cassirer family, praised Gabriel’s effort to update California’s law.
“The clarity of Assemblyman Gabriel’s legislation is necessary to change the current dynamic in which governments, museums, and collectors are incentivized to resist restitution and employ tactics and arguments that trivialize the Holocaust,” Dubbin said. “It is essential for truth, history, and justice in the Cassirer case, and for future cases as well.”
Gabriel said he already has co-sponsors from both ends of the political spectrum — including assemblymembers Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles) and Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield) — and is optimistic that the bill will have widespread support.
Also backing the measure are Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), who is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, also a Democrat, who cited her time as U.S. ambassador to Hungary — where hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed — as strongly informing her support.
“The decades-long effort to return confiscated property to Jewish families is morally courageous,” Kounalakis said in a statement to The Times.
Gabriel said it was “appalling” to him that Spain’s government won’t voluntarily return the painting to Cassirer.
“This isn’t about money,” he said. “It’s about morality and justice.”
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Kevin Rector
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Hooray for spring and warm weather and being outside (and, when it’s raining, crafting like we’re outside)! My bean is much more grown up now, but we always kept busy doing all sorts of fun activities when spring arrived, and I thought we’d share our favourite springtime crafts.
Squirt gun painting. We filled two plastic dollar store squirt guns with coloured water and propped our cardstock “target” on an easel. My preschooler loved getting it all wet and watching it drip and make a mess everywhere (and then mommy just hosed the easel down).
Homemade garden markers. Just a few Popsicle sticks glued together and voila – we had fun ways to mark what we had planted and where. You could also use wooden spoons (they come in packs of three at the dollar store).
Egg carton aquarium. We gathered our favourite things that we’d collected on vacations (rocks, shells, sand, etc.) and turned an ordinary egg carton into a bright and beautiful mini aquarium. Use blue paint and glitter to get the water effects just right, and add some fun fish and sea creature stickers.
Handprint flowers. We made a flower for the grandmothers by tracing and cutting out a few paper handprints, threading them onto a pipe cleaner, and adding a few paper leaves. Curl the fingers of the “flower petals” with scissors for added effect.
A full-time work-from-home mom, Jennifer Cox (our “Supermom in Training”) loves dabbling in healthy cooking, craft projects, family outings, and more, sharing with Suburban readers everything she knows about being an (almost) superhero mommy.
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A clean and fresh home is an essential aspect of a healthy and happy lifestyle. However, over time, walls, ceilings, and other surfaces can accumulate dirt, grime, and stains. Painting is a great way to give your home a fresh look, but it’s important to start with a clean slate. A clean start and a flawless finish is the key to upgrading your home with cleaning and painting.
Before painting, you need to prepare the surfaces properly. This includes cleaning, sanding, and repairing any damage.
Cleaning the surfaces removes any dirt, dust, and grease, which can affect the adhesion of the paint. Sanding helps to smooth out any rough spots and creates a surface that the paint can adhere to. Repairing any damage, such as cracks or holes, ensures a smooth and even finish. By taking the time to properly prepare the surfaces, you’ll achieve a professional-looking finish that will last for years to come.
When it comes to painting, there are many techniques to achieve a professional finish. From using the right tools to applying the paint in the correct order, each step is important. Choosing the right colour and finish is also crucial to achieving the desired look. With the right techniques and colour selection, you can create a space that reflects your personal style and enhances your home’s overall aesthetic.
Before starting any painting project, it is essential to prepare the room and surfaces properly. The following subsections will guide you through the preparation process.
A flawless paint job starts with a spotless workspace. Thorough cleaning is crucial before painting, as it ensures proper paint adhesion and a smooth, even finish.
Start by removing all furniture and decor. Cover any remaining items with drop cloths to protect them from dust and paint.
Next, tackle those walls! Fill any cracks or holes and sand them smooth when dry. Use painter’s tape to protect the trim, doors, and other areas that do not require painting. Pay special attention to corners and areas where the ceiling meets the wall.
If you’re short on time or want to guarantee a perfectly prepped space, a house cleaner in Melbourne can expertly handle the cleaning process. This allows you to focus on the creative aspects of painting and ensures the best possible end result.
Choosing the right tools and materials is crucial for achieving a professional finish. Use a high-quality paintbrush or roller to apply the paint evenly.
The type of paint you choose will depend on the surface you are painting. For example, you could use a satin or semi-gloss paint for trim and doors, and a flat or eggshell finish for walls.
Priming is an essential step that should not be skipped. It helps the paint adhere better to the surface and provides a uniform base for the paint. Choose a primer that is suitable for the surface you are painting. For example, use a stain-blocking primer for walls with water stains or smoke damage.
Humidity can affect the drying time of the paint, so try to avoid painting on humid or rainy days. Ensure that the room is well-ventilated and that there is adequate lighting to see any imperfections.
Achieving a professional finish when painting a room requires more than just selecting the right colour. Brush and roller techniques, even coverage and texture, and mastering edges and corners are all critical to creating a stylish finish.
When painting, it’s important to choose the right brush or roller for the job. Synthetic brushes are ideal for water-based paints, while natural bristle brushes are best for oil-based paints. Rollers with a shorter nap are better for smooth surfaces, while longer nap rollers are better for textured surfaces.
To avoid lap marks and achieve even coverage, always maintain a wet edge. This means overlapping each stroke slightly with the previous one. Use long, even strokes when applying the paint, and be sure to fill in any missed spots.
To ensure even coverage, apply multiple coats of paint, allowing each coat to dry completely before applying the next. Sand the surface smooth between coats for a crisp, clean finish.
To add depth and dimension, consider using a glossy or matte finish. Glossy finishes are ideal for creating shine and depth, while matte finishes are better for a more subtle look.
Use a high-quality brush to create crisp lines and avoid drips and smudges. Be sure to paint the corners first, using a smaller brush to get into tight spaces.
By using proper painting techniques and following these tips, anyone can paint a room like a pro.
When it comes to upgrading a home with cleaning and painting, choosing the right colour and finish is crucial. It can make a significant difference to the overall appearance and aesthetic of a room.
Choosing the right paint colour can be a daunting task. Consider the dynamics of the room when making a decision. Different colours can evoke different moods and emotions, and it is essential to choose a colour that complements the room’s purpose.
For instance, blue is known for its calming effect and is an excellent choice for bedrooms, while red is an energising colour and is best suited to living rooms or dining rooms.
Additionally, it is essential to consider the room’s lighting when selecting a paint colour. Natural lighting can change the appearance of a colour throughout the day, and artificial lighting can also affect how a colour looks. It’s advisable to test paint colours in different lighting conditions before making a final decision.
Another crucial aspect of paint selection is understanding the different paint finishes available. The finish of a paint can significantly impact the appearance and durability of a painted surface.
High-gloss finishes are known for their shine and durability, making them an excellent choice for high-traffic areas such as kitchens and bathrooms. On the other hand, flat finishes are ideal for ceilings or low-traffic areas, as they are less durable but provide a smoother appearance.
Exterior painting services specialise in understanding the unique demands of exterior surfaces. They’ll help you select the right finish that not only achieves your desired look, but also provides the necessary protection against sun, rain, and other harsh elements. Quality paint can provide better coverage, adhesion, and colour retention, making the final result more durable and aesthetically pleasing.
After completing a painting project, it’s essential to clean up properly to maintain your tools and keep your property neat. In this section, we’ll discuss effective cleaning after painting, plus touch-ups and long-term care.
The first step in cleaning up after painting is to remove painter’s tape carefully to avoid peeling off fresh paint. Next, clean your brushes and rollers thoroughly, and store them properly for future use. For water-based paints, brushes, rollers, and trays can be washed with warm soapy water. For oil-based paints, use mineral spirits to clean the tools.
When cleaning the walls, use a mild detergent and a soft cloth to avoid damaging the fresh coat of paint. Finally, clean the floors and other surfaces to remove any debris and avoid tracking paint throughout the house.
Even with the most careful painting techniques, imperfections such as drips or missed spots can occur. To fix these issues, you can use touch-up paint and a synthetic brush to blend in the touch-up with the rest of the wall.
For long-term care, it’s important to consider environmental factors such as weather and lighting conditions. Adequate ventilation and lighting are crucial when painting a room, and different lighting conditions can affect the appearance of the finished product.
By following these cleaning and touch-up techniques, the DIY enthusiast can achieve a professional finish and maintain the beauty of their home for years to come.
Before painting a surface, it is essential to prepare it properly. The first step is to clean the surface thoroughly. This can be done using warm water and a mild detergent. Any dirt, grease, or grime must be removed from the surface. Once the surface is clean, it should be sanded to remove any loose or peeling paint. The surface should then be primed to ensure that the paint adheres properly.
Priming is essential for all types of siding before painting. It helps the paint adhere better to the surface and provides a smooth finish. Priming also helps to seal any cracks or gaps in the surface, preventing moisture from seeping in and causing damage.
To effectively clean walls before painting, start by dusting the walls with a soft cloth or brush. Then, mix warm water and a mild detergent in a bucket. Dip a sponge or cloth into the solution and wring it out well. Wipe the walls with the sponge or cloth, starting at the top and working your way down. Rinse the sponge or cloth frequently and change the water in the bucket as needed. Once the walls are clean, rinse them with clean water and let them dry completely before painting.
To ensure a smooth paint finish on exterior cladding, it is important to choose the right type of paint. For example, masonry paint is ideal for brickwork, while oil-based paint is best for wood. It is also important to use a high-quality paintbrush or roller and apply the paint evenly. Start at the top of the cladding and work your way down, applying the paint in long, even strokes.
Yes, it is possible to paint over previously painted brick surfaces. However, it is important to prepare the surface properly before painting. This involves cleaning the surface thoroughly, removing any loose or peeling paint, and filling any cracks or gaps. The surface should then be primed before painting.
Different cladding materials require different types of paint. Masonry paint is best on brickwork, while wood is suited to oil-based paint. It is important to choose a paint that is specifically designed for the type of cladding you are painting. This will ensure that the paint adheres properly and provides a long-lasting finish.
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Catherine
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NORTH ANDOVER â Any artist â or budding creativeâs parent â knows how expensive art supplies can get.
Materials are also not readily available.
So Julie Faro set out to ensure artists of any age and any financial background are able to participate in art and allow their creativity to flow.
âI just think itâs important for all of the kids to have access to all of the things and try out different materials,â Faro said. âI knew when I was a kid it was a big deal going to the art store and picking out a few things.â
Faro owns Julieâs Art School, at 5 Hodges St. Last summer she and her work partner, Michelle Roy, became inspired by the little free libraries across the area and decided to create something similar, but this time for art.
The free art shop was originally a greenhouse, Faro said. The blue-painted house was adorned with a water proof roof, and now the shelter sits outside of Julieâs Art School for anyone in the community â young and old.
âI just think itâs great that anybody who might want to paint or do anything creative and artistic has the ability to do so,â Roy said. âWeâre always supportive of anybody who wants to do anything creative.â
The free art shop neighbors are encouraged to âlook inside to find some creativity.â Artists can take supplies and leave some for others.
On Friday, the free art shop was filled with masks and other sketches on canvas for artists to color or paint in. There were also brushes, crayons, colored pencils, little fun-shaped erasers, and a few art kits for painting wood or clay sculptures.
âItâs generally mostly empty because people take stuff out of it,â Faro said. âGenerally when itâs filled up, within a week itâs taken.â
Faro said she regularly adds to the shop as well. She said extras from classes go into the shop, and if Faro sees a deal at the art store, she might grab a few pieces to put in the free art shop.
âIt came about because when we did a clean out of the studio, we had all of this extra stuff,â Faro said. âWe figured we could have a little free shop for all of the extra stuff.â
Faroâs art career started early. She was in a since-closed art class called Tashaâs Art, in North Andover, with Roy. The two now are able to share their talents, similarly to how Ms. Tasha used to with them.
âGrowing up I thought this was the coolest job in the world,â Faro said.
In 2012, Faro opened Julieâs Art School. It was originally located on Main Street, and right after opening, the school saw about a dozen students enrolled in a class.
Now the studio has grown to its location on Hodges Street and offers classes for both adults and children. Artwork by students, as well as Faro and Roy, decorates the school, with paintings ranging from a lighthouse to a mountainous landscape and even a few glass pieces.
Spring classes begin on March 1. Faro also offers private lessons, including canvas painting, slime creation and sharpie tie dye.
Julieâs Art School does have resources for students from low-income families to participate in some classes, but the space can be limiting. This is why Faro said the little art shop can be so beneficial. Faro and Roy said they âjust want to help out the students.â
âWe try to give our classes to a few kids who canât afford our classes every session,â Faro said, âbut thereâs only a couple of spaces for that, so this is an additional resource.â
Follow Monica on Twitter at @MonicaSager3
Follow Monica on Twitter at @MonicaSager3
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By Monica Sager | msager@eagletribune.com
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SLOVIANSK, Ukraine — Mykola Soloviov, 88, is a painter the world does not know. His landscapes of eastern Ukraine, records of a lost time, lie tucked away in a modest home under threat of Russian attack.
Soloviov can’t hear or walk and barely speaks. Disabled since a 2017 stroke, he spends his days bedridden in an apartment in Sloviansk, a city 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the front line in the region of Donetsk.
Waves of Russian missile attacks have continued to pound civilian areas across Ukraine as the war approaches its second anniversary next month, killing scores of Ukrainian civilians, often in their own homes. Eastern Ukraine, where troops live among the civilian population, is often hit the hardest.
But his wife, Liudymla, doesn’t want Mykola and his paintings to die in anonymity. She wants the world to know he’s not just another civilian caught in the middle of a war.
From the sofa where he lies motionless for much of the day, Mykola’s lively eyes are fixed on the window, his only view into the changing world he can no longer comprehend.
He’d paint the same scenes again and again. “It’s not about what you paint, it’s about how you paint it,” he used to tell his wife when she asked why.
Employed for much of his life as a painter in a factory, Mykola would spend hours by the window, gazing at the view and producing his works. Liudmyla, 78, held up a painting of that view: expertly layered soft colors bring out the purity of fresh winter snow.
On Saturday, the window was a hole framed by shattered glass, showing emergency crews cleaning up debris from the kindergarten across the yard. Men in military fatigues picked their way across ground pockmarked by artillery craters and covered in debris left in the wake of a Russian air attack.
Earlier that day, a Russian Iskander missile hit a ceramics workshop a few meters away from the Soloviovs’ home, leveling it and shattering their windows.
The blast jolted Liudymla awake, who ran to her paralyzed husband’s side and covered him with blankets as bitterly cold air wafted in.
“How can I feel? There is no joy in my life,” she said. “We are living on needles.” Her mind is occupied with all the things she must do for her husband. “I already changed (the blankets) and cooked for him, but it is cold inside my house.”
Sloviansk was never a luxurious place but it had allowed the couple to build a life. Both were the children of parents who moved to the city, known for its factories and riverside resorts, looking for work. Mykola’s family came from Russia, and Liudmyla’s from western Ukraine. When she was 16, she helped her father build them a house, making cinder blocks and planing boards after school.
On Saturday, she watched as workers sliced wooden boards to cover the holes left when the Russian attack shattered windows in dozens of apartments.
The Associated Press asked her about the explosion, but she changed the subject back to her husband’s paintings.
Liudmyla leafs through an old photo album containing images of Mykola’s paintings, the closest thing he has to an artist’s monograph, and then brings out a few of the originals she’s packed away for safe-keeping.
The paintings are unknown in Sloviansk, let alone the world. An old newspaper clipping contains a short article, describing a gallery of 60 of his works “charming” and “cleverly composed.”
Occasionally Mykola glances at her holding up his paintings, his face brightening.
“He has been drawing since childhood,” she said, “but stopped when he got sick.”
Soloviov often returned to the banks of the Kazenny Torets River to capture the changing seasons. “He was painting this river all the time, in summer, winter,” Liudymla said, her voice trailing off.
Mykola never aimed for realism, but his paintings captured the feeling of the pastoral landscapes, waterways and abundant greenery that defined Sloviansk’s landscape before the war. His loose and fluid brush work convey vibrancy and nostalgia for the passing seasons; vivid colors show his deep attachment to the land.
In 2014, Sloviansk was a flashpoint in the war against Russia’s invasion and one of the first cities to be seized by Moscow’s forces. Liudmyla’s sister was badly wounded by shrapnel during the fighting, dying of complications four years later.
By the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Mykola was too sick to be moved. His family, including his 49-year-old son Vitallii, stayed in Sloviansk, despite rapidly deteriorating conditions.
“There are places to go, for example, to western Ukraine or the Vinnytsia region, where my cousin lives,” Liudmyla said, “but it is very problematic because he cannot move around on his own. And now I don’t know what to do and where to go.”
In recent months a missile strike destroyed Vitallii’s home and he moved in with his parents.
“I will never leave my father,” he said, rolling cigarettes in the kitchen. “No matter the bombs.”
Outside, the screech of a saw cutting wood rang out. Her neighbors were still in line, waiting for their turn to seal off their homes from the elements.
Internet searches yield no results for Mykola’s name, or his art, but Liudymla preserves his paintings and his clippings as though they were important historical documents.
Just then, Vitallii tells her the heating system is damaged.
“One problem after another,” she sighs.
Soloviov has not uttered a word throughout the interview. His shriveled hand motions for the blanket, but his gaze is fixed on that window.
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What are the six aspects of a balanced person? Physical, mental, emotional, social, work/financial, and meaning/spiritual. Learn more about each one and how to improve it!
In life, there isn’t one single area that we need to focus on that is going to magically fix all of our problems.
Instead there are multiple dimensions behind every “good life.” Each dimension requires our attention and each contributes to our overall happiness and well-being.
Here are six aspects of life that come together to create a “balanced person.” By being more aware of these different dimensions in life, we can determine which areas we need to focus on more and work to improve.
The different aspects of a balanced person include: 1) Physical, 2) Mental, 3) Emotional, 4) Social, 5) Work/Financial and 6) Meaning/Spiritual.
If we focus too much on any one area, then we risk neglecting another one. For example, if you become solely focused on just work and money, you may end up spending less time taking care of your physical and mental health, or less quality time with family and friends.
This is a common trap people fall into. They focus all of their energy and effort into one area in life while completely ignoring another. Often they need to reconfigure their core values and priorities before making a meaningful change.
This is why practicing balance in all things is so important.
Each of these areas is one piece of a much larger puzzle, and only when you have all of these areas working together harmoniously can you finally build a complete life that serves all of your needs.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of each aspect of a “balanced person,” along with tips, tools, and practical advice on how you can start improving each one.
While reading ask yourself, “Which aspect do I need to focus on the most right now? What’s one small change I can make to improve that area?”
Now let’s dive in…
The “physical” aspect of life is all about taking care of our health, especially exercise, diet, and sleep.
This includes what types of foods and drinks we consume on a daily basis, how often we exercise and keep our bodies moving, personal hygiene and cleanliness, as well as minimizing alcohol, smoking, and other harmful habits to our physical health.
Our body is one of the most precious gifts we have – and without it we can’t exist. If we don’t stay healthy, we often can’t fully enjoy all the other aspects of life such as family, work, traveling, or leisure.
Our health can often have a spillover effect into all the other aspects of our lives – for that reason, taking care of our physical health is often an essential first step on any road to self-improvement.
No matter what the current state of our health is, it’s never too late to start changing our habits, even if it’s something small like stretching in the morning, taking daily walks outside, or starting an active hobby like Yoga, marathon running, or playing sports.
A healthy body is a healthy mind. When we take better care of our bodies, we also feel more confident, motivated, and energized overall. That’s the beginning of bringing out your best self.
Please don’t underestimate the importance of keeping your body in the best shape possible. As Socrates famously said, “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Physical health is about much more than just looking and feeling good about yourself – it’s about living a life of vitality and longevity. You can have everything else in your life figured out, but if you don’t maintain your health you won’t be around very long to use or enjoy it.
If you don’t take care of your body then it will slowly deteriorate – and the same is true for your mind.
Just because you don’t have to go to school anymore doesn’t mean you can’t keep learning new things, keeping your brain sharp, and challenging your intellect.
Reading books. Learning about new topics. Having deep conversations. Attending lectures and workshops. Following the news. These are all commonsense ways to keep our minds active and continue to update our knowledge and belief system as we move through life.
Learning is a lifelong endeavor. Balanced people are always seeking new things to dig into and learn more about like a new hobby, new game, or new skill such as painting, chess, learning a new language, or playing a musical instrument.
In addition, research shows that continuing to challenge our brain is an important way to prevent cognitive decline as we get older, including lower the risk of dementia and memory loss.
Take your education seriously. Maintain a healthy and active brain. Even if you were never a good student in school, that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your knowledge and intelligence, especially once you find subjects you are deeply passionate about. Benjamin Franklin once said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
In the “Mental” section we covered how to keep our brains active and be more intelligent thinkers, but there’s also a whole other side of our psychology that we need to pay attention to as well: our “Emotional” side.
Emotions can often seem like something that we have limited power over, but being a more emotionally intelligent person means becoming more self-aware and learning how to better respond to our emotions in the moment.
We can’t ignore our emotions or push them aside forever, they are a necessary facet of life and we must learn to navigate our emotional world effectively if we want to live the best life possible.
Remember that emotions are a resource, not a crutch. Every emotion serves a function or purpose, and if we channel our emotions in a constructive direction we can make great things happen.
One important lesson is that even negative emotions like sadness, anger, guilt, or fear are helpful to a better life if we approach them from the right perspective.
Emotions can “make us” or “break us” depending on how emotionally intelligent we are. They are a fundamental part of life, but we often have more power over them than we realize. Learn how to channel your emotions in a healthy and constructive way – become a master of them, not a slave to them.
Healthy and positive relationships are an essential ingredient to happiness and well-being.
No matter who you are, you crave some type of social connection; even the most introverted person on the planet will have a tough time finding happiness all by themselves.
There used to be a time when I believed “I don’t need people to be happy, all I need is myself.” But over the years I’ve learned more and more that having social support and a sense of belonging is a basic human need that can’t be avoided.
How strong is your current social circle? Here’s advice to get you started.
Always remember that quality of relationships > quantity of relationships.
You don’t need to be super popular or the life of the party to have a healthy social life. All you need is a couple really close friends who support you, trust you, and enjoy your presence. That’s everything you need to be socially satisfied.
Healthy relationships are a fundamental aspect of happiness and well-being for everyone. Our need to belong to a “tribe” or group is hardwired into our brain, biology, and evolution. Like every other aspect of a balanced person, it can’t be ignored.
Are your daily social needs being fulfilled?
Another fundamental aspect of a balanced person is work, money, and material concerns.
At the most basic level, we depend on food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and other necessities so we can live a healthy and dignified life.
People that struggle to make a living can often hurt in many other areas: physical health (can’t afford good foods, healthcare, or medicine), relationships (can’t support family, no money for dating), as well as our mental and emotional well-being (stress, anxiety, and low self-esteem).
Unless you win the lottery or have someone else to provide for you, finding a steady job or career is often one of the most focused on areas in life. From childhood up until we finish high school or college, we are constantly asked, “What do you want to do for a living?”
A few people find jobs they love, many find jobs they like, and most find jobs they can at least tolerate. Balancing psychological needs with financial needs can be a difficult task depending on your current situation.
While we don’t always get a choice in what we do for a living, there are important ways to give ourselves more power over our work life and financial life. Here are important guidelines to keep in mind.
Remember, money is important but it isn’t everything.
Financial well-being will often look radically different depending on the person. Certain people may be content with modest and minimal living, while others crave more luxury, adventure, and pleasure. Whichever lifestyle you choose, it’s necessary that money finds the proper role in your life without being completely consumed by it.
One succinct way to define true financial well-being is “not needing to think about money all the time.”
The meaningful or spiritual aspects of life can often be overlooked.
We may occasionally ask ourselves big questions like, “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” or “What’s my purpose?” but we rarely translate these questions into our daily lives through action.
For many people, religion is their main source of spirituality and meaning. Attending church, being part of a local community, prayer, and volunteering or giving to charities are common ways people boost meaning in their daily lives. Religion has been shown to improve happiness and well-being by creating a strong sense of purpose and community.
However, we don’t need religion to have a meaningful life. There are many other sources of meaning, including art, culture, philosophy, literature, music, relationships, activism, introspection, and creativity.
Where do you get your meaning in life?
A “meaningful life” can be one of the most difficult areas of life to improve, especially while living in a world that is filled with nihilism, hedonism, and materialism.
However, once you build a strong spiritual core you can withstand almost any difficulty or hardship. It can empower you to a whole new level that non-spiritual people don’t usually have access to.
To sum things up we must invest time and energy in all six of these aspects if we want to live a happy and balanced life.
Once again, these six aspects of a balanced life include: 1) Physical, 2) Mental, 3) Emotional, 4) Social, 5) Work/Financial, and 6) Meaningful/Spiritual.
Which area are you the strongest in? Which area are you the weakest in?
Keep this framework in mind as you embark on a lifetime of self-improvement. Try the Daily Routine (PDF) exercise and use this resource as a guideline.
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Steven Handel
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POMPEII, Italy — A new project inside the Pompeii archaeological site is reviving ancient textile dyeing techniques to show another side of daily life before the city was destroyed by a volcano in A.D. 79
The inspiration comes from frescoes unearthed inside the archaeological site that show winged cupids dyeing cloth, gathering grapes for wine and making perfumes.
“It is very close to the actual reality,” the archaeological site’s director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said of the images.
For the project, Zuchtriegel tapped a master dyer based in Umbria, Claudio Cutuli, who uses dyes that he makes from plants in his own clothing line.
Cutuli uses the root of “rubia tinctorum,” or rose madder, for the famous Pompeiian red. He uses walnut husks for brown, elderberries for black and gray and cardamom for the amber, yellow and shades of green.
With the Pompeiian color palette, Cutuli is dyeing scarves with motifs taken from the House of Vetti frescoes, which include the cupids. The rich home, like the rest of Pompeii, was buried under ash.
Half of the profits from the scarves’ sale will help fund further restoration efforts at the once-sprawling city, where gardeners recently recreated a nursery that includes plants that were used for dyeing before Pompeii’s destruction.
Garden historian Maurizio Bartolini said that roots, bark and flowers were often used in dyeing. Rosehip, for example, made a soft pink “that was one of the most used colors,’’ he said.
Frescoes in the archaeological site show wealthy Pompeiians dressed brightly in purple, green, pinks, blues and yellows. The hues were achieved by boiling the dyed textiles in metal-lined vats at workshops run by slaves who, by contrast, wore plain, brown tunics.
“It’s quite unpleasant conditions for the slaves who worked here,” archaeologist Sophie Hay said. “You have got the furnaces going, and it would be hot, crowded and noisy, because people would be shouting when they come in to see if their stuff is ready yet.”
For Zuchtriegel, textile dyeing is another way to bring Pompeii back to life for modern visitors.
“It is part of a scientific and cultural project to create awareness that history is not only the big monuments and beautiful paintings,” he said. “There’s also another history, of the economy, the daily life, the lives of the majority which often are not represented in the great narratives.”
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