Perhaps we can understand our jingoist present by examining our warring past. Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), was the first woman artist in the avant-garde of Russia. She was a painter, print maker, writer, and provocateur. She created costumes and set backdrops for the Ballet Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. She married fellow avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov, the two becoming inseparable life partners….
I can’t recall such an unending fuss about a presidential portrait. The hoopla at the 2018 unveiling of the portraits of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery was fairly understandable, but then came the media blitz. Every magazine and paper in the US celebrated the portraits. Likewise “The Obama Portraits Tour”…
In my childhood a large framed reproduction of the painting The Milkmaid hung in my family’s humble working class abode; the original painting was by the famed Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Even as a child I was infatuated by the image; it was one of the first artworks by an Old Master painter I had been exposed to. I…
A faction of the environmentalist movement has developed new plans for combating climate change. They’ve decided that disrupting art institutions with acts of “civil resistance” is a path to a sustainable future. The actions these “activists” engage in consists of spray-painting anti-oil graffiti on museum property and gluing themselves to the frames of masterpiece oil paintings. Few things describe cultural…
Regarding the ghastly assassination of Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (1954-2022). I found the illustration for this essay in a far corner of the internet. Created by New Zealand based illustrator Joseph Qiu, it’s an artwork created in the style of a traditional Japanese woodcut. The red-sun in the background alludes to Abe’s brand of Japanese nationalism, the crashing…
This essay will focus on a current poster design for a July 4, 2022 event. But first, a few words about America’s Independence Day. American revolutionaries announced the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain when a resolution of independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. John Adams, Founding Father and the second president…
On June 24, 2022, Green Day’s lead singer and guitarist Billy Joe Armstrong, shouted out an expletive laden proclamation to a fawning crowd at the group’s concert at London Stadium. The bombast was meant to protest the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Billy yowled and blubbered: “F*ck America. I’m f*cking renouncing my citizenship. I’m f*cking coming…
