"How do we make meaning out of the seeming inexplicability of what's around us?" asks Doyle Gertjejansen. "My work deals with that 'Aha!' moment when we are on that cusp of experience where a body of information coalesces into an idea. That's how we as human beings became what we are."
BY CHRISTINA POLETTO | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MAY 28, 2020 | THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Real-estate agents are commissioning original artwork to make luxury property listings "stand out in a crouded sea of sameness"
..."Custom art can be a great tool to attract buyers as it adds to the allure of originality and exclusivity," said Mr. Saft.
This NOLA Life Stories interview was conducted by Mark Cave for The Historic New Orleans Collection and produced for WWNO by Sarah Holtz.
BY D. ERIC BOOKHARDT
Enigmatic Narratives
By, Kathy Rodriguez
By, Eric Bookhardt via BestofNewOrleans.com
What's with all those weirdly wavy Spanish paintings? Rounded forms can be alluring, but only Spanish artists have made them as immortal as Picasso's curvy, convoluted concoctions or Joan Miro's mysterious blobby squiggles — and only Fernando Botero could get away with a tubby, chubby Christ in crucifixion scenes.
By, Eric Bookhardt
by, Sara Ruffin Costello
photo credit: Paul Costello
by, Eric Bookhardt
by Terrington Calas
GEORGE DUNBAR, “Elements of Chance” A Retrospective
The New Orleans Museum of Art
New Orleans, LA
by Richard Speer
In Palladium, his fourth solo exhibition at Callan Contemporary, critically acclaimed artist George Dunbar (b. 1927) explores the beauty of one of the world’s most alluring metals. Dunbar has long used palladium leaf, a distilled form of platinum, to impart a unique luster and a sense of character and history in his powerfully dynamic compositions. The mixed-media paintings and sculptures in the exhibition, all of which incorporate palladium, range from 1999 to the present and encompass the artist’s work in relief, hard-edge abstraction, and figuration.
The paintings of James Kennedy are intriguing, dignified, and beautifully crafted. Formal but never predicable, their subject is space. With training in modern art, dance, and architectural design, he has created a personal language of form and color. Kennedy’s approach is both deliberate and intuitive. He experiments with painting materials, choreographs relationships among eccentric hard-edged shapes, and builds diagrams of incised lines and small black dots to achieve complex surface and spatial interactions.
By D. Eric Bookhardt on a new show at Callan Contemporary.
D. Eric Bookhardt on new sculpture by Sibylle Peretti at Callan Contemporary.
By Taylor Murrow
Norah Lovell’s works live in the space behind our eyelids, the flashes of imagery that skip the synapses of our brains while we dream. Like the compositions of Hieronymus Bosch, these microcosms are compact puzzles teeming with animals, plant life, mythological creatures, playing card symbols, and more. It’s overwhelming at first to attempt to unpack the many narratives that seem to be lurking within. Each work feels like a fairytale whirring through a blender.
In her Untwinned Horn series, Lovell uses tenth-century riddle poems as springboards, offering a pictorial interpretation of the original poems, creating new riddles of their own. In the Master of Hounds series, multiple stories—such as a foxhunt and a journey through a labyrinth—are woven together through graphic tiles and baroque patterning. The tendrils of a creeping vine bisect the face of a grimacing hare before flowing into a brick wall. What Lovell accomplishes largely in fleshy pinks, stark black, and white is mesmerizing and confusing. It’s a trip you want to take and could take countless times with different results.
D. Eric Bookhardt on new paintings by Norah Lovell and Peter Barnitz
Norah Lovell's colorfully intricate compositions can be seductive yet elusive. Like fragments of dreams that linger upon waking, they draw us in with elements of beauty, familiarity and intrigue while defying easy interpretation. Rendered in pencil and gouache, these small (12 inches by 16 inches) but very precise compositions hint at the shadowy baroque elegance of Boccaccio's Decameron tales, or the old Venetian carnivals where the beautiful and the sinister, darkness and light, flickered kaleidoscopically. Untwinned Horn: Capillus (pictured) is a dreamy pastiche of hearts and candelabra where fairy tale princesses share space with rollicking cats, florid wallpaper and ghostly shadows in an imagistic vortex that draws you in then makes you wonder where you are and how you got there. Similarly, Master of Hounds reads like a graphic acid flashback to a realm of historical fiction reminiscent of Emily Bronte. Here Lovell takes us on an elegantly executed magical mystery tour where high culture and street carnivals find common ground in the far recesses of the imagination.
The work of a physical therapist and the work of an artist would seem to have little overlap, but for sculptor Eva Hild there are direct and indirect lines between the two. Back in the 1990s, she worked full-time as a physical therapist in Gothenburg, Sweden. Later, she switched to part-time duties as she worked her way through art school...
By Robin Rice
