When I talk to people who don’t think they know very much about art, I say, “Just look. What do you see?” If someone can tell you what they physically see, and then stop to think about how it makes them feel—that’s really at the heart of any experience with art regardless of how much art history you know.
The paintings that mark a gradual return to across-the-board contemporary art at Marta Hewett Gallery, where glass objects have held the floor, are themselves almost glass-like. Jason Zickler’s labor-intensive works with their dense layers of clear, cured resin and paint gleam in a celebration of colorfor its own sake but hold in their depths delineations by line as well.
Third Party Gallery opened its first exhibition with a group show (the curator isn’t listed, but I assume it was Wyatt Niehaus, one of the co-founders) called Reductio ad Absurdum. According to the press release, the curator claims that its artists have “composed a dialogue between their work and a preexisting ideology, convention or concept that they feel at odds with.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it can also be a sincere source of creativity. That tenet is confirmed by “Still[ed] Life: Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis” at the Taft Museum of Art.
In collaboration these two area artists (Parker is an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and heads the ceramics program, and Davis is an adjunct...
Manifest Gallery’s “3rd Annual NUDE” international competition showing through September 9, offers more than the vast undulating landscape of skin to be considered. The subjects have been folded, stretched, posed and exposed in every manner from hypnotic fragility, as in Bain Butcher’s “Untitled” graphite rendering of a young woman, to the Diebenkorn-ish palette knife interiors of Edmond Praybe, two of whose large paintings...
It’s satisfying to identify the first seeds of what we become, and to what we commit. The mentor who sowed my life into a fertile ground of art and travel is clear: Uncle Bob gave me my first art history book in 1962 upon return from one of his many international adventures. A Renaissance man, he drew and painted, sang, wrote, and acted in theatre at Ohio State University, where he also professed a seminal marketing history...
