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Pro-Palestine Vandal Destroys Painting of Lord Balfour
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Pro-Palestine Vandal Destroys Painting of Lord Balfour

ByMark Vallen

On March 8, 2024, a woman from the UK group “Palestine Action” completely destroyed a painting created 110 years ago by the famed Anglo-Hungarian painter Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937). The group defines itself as a “direct action network dismantling British complicity with Israeli apartheid.” The vandal attacked László’s 1914 oil painting Arthur James Balfour, housed at the Trinity College…

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Art Exhibition: American Beauties

ByMark Vallen

Starting April 1. 2006, I’ll be exhibiting several paintings at American Beauties: Different Stories, a group show at SpaceOnSpurgeon gallery in Santa Ana, California. Two of my latest oil paintings, The Red Dress and La Muerta (The Dead Woman), will be on view for the first time – in fact they were both painted especially for this exhibit. I wrote…

“Can’t draw or paint, must be an artist.”

ByMark Vallen

Stuart Jeffries writing for the UK Guardian, conducted a fawning interview with Jeremy Deller, winner of the esteemed Turner Prize. When the reporter asked, “You can’t draw, you can’t paint – how do you get the nerve to call yourself an artist?”, Deller replied, “The thing is – the world has moved on. You’re not writing with quills on parchment….

Happy Halloween!

ByMark Vallen

Some years ago I took this photograph at a place of honor and history, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in North Boston, Massachusetts… established in 1659. To the kids, moms, and dads of Melrose, Massachusetts, where Halloween has been canceled in public schools in order to promote “inclusivity.” Do not be afraid of those goblins and ghosts, just look ‘em in…

The Shabbiness of Today’s Art Criticism

ByMark Vallen

As a longtime art critic, and as the Senior Curator for the Riverside Art Museum, one would assume Peter Frank would know the difference between “Social Realism” and “Socialist Realism,” they may sound alike to those unfamiliar with art history, but Frank should know better. In his June 28th LA Weekly review of an exhibit of paintings by Armenian artist,…

Goya and the Sleep of Reason

Goya and the Sleep of Reason

ByMark Vallen

In the late 1700s the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) created a series of eighty etchings he titled Los Caprichos (The Caprices). An irrational thought or action can be a “caprice,” and Spanish society at the time provided Goya with myriad examples of ferocious caprices. For instance, Goya created paintings and prints that wryly scrutinized the Spanish…