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Letters from Helen O'Leary | Art in Isolation
While googling 'how to fertilize tree peonies and will they grow in the shade' I for a minute linger on the Washington Post main page and get enough in two seconds to know the world is bad.
Like a Brain Scan: Amy Myers on April Gornik
You experience the light through cumulus night clouds that gather then disperse within minutes, light ricocheting in groves of trees.
Norm Paris on Max Ernst
This is a portrait of a culture in the late stages of psychic rot.
Haley Josephs on Alice Neel
I felt the awkward little girl in me stirring, a sense of vulnerability recognized and transformed into a different kind of power by this painting.
Raoul Middleman on the Master of the Osservanza Triptych of St. Anthony
Their separate egos are hereby erased when the two saints conjoin in an embrace, which echoes the cave behind them, a cosmic hug of sorts, clinching the final humanistic coda of this panel.
Leslie Roberts on 'Fire in the Evening' by Paul Klee
Klee presented the grid as a flexible container for ecstatic color.
Lisa Hoke on Addie Herder
Hers are the machines that we can’t hold onto, fleeting signs of our human desire to mark which way to go.
Ali Miller on Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Alexa Wilding fluctuates between a confident and seductive nymph, a stiff and unamused model, and a vulnerable damsel awaiting a rescue.
Mariel Herring on Chuta Kimura
Imagine if de Kooning and Matisse painted a landscape together, and maybe Bonnard was their professor/mentor? That’s ya boi Kimura.
Lydia Pettit on Henry Taylor's "I became . . ."
Overall there was chaos in his figure, strokes sometimes lining up with the form, and sometimes going against the logic of the body.
Suzanne Unrein on Henri Rousseau
His mane strangely blows forward on a windless night, while his eye appears as a mesmerizing orb that plays off the moon and mandolin.
Gabrielle Vitollo on Nemesis: The Great Fortune by Albrecht Dürer
When I eventually approached the mirror to throw water on my face, I caught a glimpse of Nemesis striding forward in the same direction.
Patrick McDonough on Benjamin Edwards
Entering the studio with “Justin” was an unforgettable kind of magic, like passing through a Super Nintendo game portal where the colors and the physics forever change.
Barry Nemett on Robert Rauschenberg
All looked pleasant enough near the foot but, like a dramatic plot twist, everything closer to the bed’s head looked war-torn, tortured.
Heide Fasnacht on Martin Kippenberger
The gizmo he depicts with slapdash but accurate strokes of orange and red is reasonable, yes, but dissolves into the vagaries of emotional weather; it does not add up to the logical structure it pretends to be.
Jessica Stoller on the Sévres Breast Bowl
The dairy she created allowed her to demonstrate her political agency while intertwining ideas related to femininity, nature and health.
Ruth Marten on Paul Caranicas
He’s condensed a mall into a theatre set, flattening the rich detail into a sort of Greek chorus to serve the dumb central gun shop.
Katie Miller on 'Young Girl with a Dead Bird'
Pupils dilate when we are happy and contract when we are sad. Inky dilated pupils are attractive, which is why most portraits depict their sitter with sparkling black saucers.
Jane Irish on Karen Kilimnik's Programme of Humour
She has a beautiful hand that is ruled by a fairy, but sometimes a demon gives her a stick to paint with.
Lilian Day Thorpe on Nicolas de Staël
Breaking the natural world down into its basic forms, the painting as a whole evokes a quiet hum.