The Other Costa Vavagiakis

Renowned for his figures, an artist turns to the geometric bodies of cities and nighttime shadows.

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My Oil Painting Palette

There is no such thing as a correct or neutral palette. Every palette has an agenda; it aids and even encourages you to paint a certain way.

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The Quickening Image

The Quickening Image is the story of a radically new drawing technique: It incorporates both wet and dry materials, as well as both linear and painterly elements. It derives its power from juxtaposing and resolving many contradictory tendencies: drawing/painting; wet/dry; careful/spontaneous; planned/accidental.

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Robin Smith: The Human Presence

Exceptionally modest, reserved to a fault and largely unknown outside her immediate circle, Robin Smith is, nonetheless, one of the best portrait/figure painters working today.

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I Only Have Eyes for You

We have all had the experience of going to an exhibition and having one painting stand out so completely in your mind, that you remember little, if anything else, about what you have seen.

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Life is a House

On aging houses, broken bodies, and the passage of time.

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Paestum V

Temples & Cathedrals

“Temples and Cathedrals” is an on-going series of large-scale mixed-media drawings, utilizing the ‘wax resist’ technique. Executed on paper, these black and white works use wax as a resist for subsequent ink washes, which are then further developed in charcoal, […]

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Rivals in Rome

The 16th-century Italian drawings in a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York City, are beautiful working drawings that point toward grand final creations far beyond the edges of the paper and reveal the competing influences of Raphael and Michelangelo.

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The Voracious Eye: The Drawings of Adolph Menzel

Whether at a court ball or at a burial, on the street or in a moving train, the German draftsman Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) exploited every opportunity that presented itself to record on paper whatever caught his eye.

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Studio as Setting: The Paintings of Scott Noel

Through the careful orchestration of figures and still life objects, this Philadelphia oil painter uses his studio as the setting for both natural and metaphorical scenes.

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