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9x12

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14x18

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20x24

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18x24

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I have never heard of this artist before but I enjoy his work greatly. I love how he uses objects to create the facial structure in his portraits. These portraits are an interesting combination of portrait and still life.

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Few artists have painted portraits so beguiling as Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian painter of the late Renaissance who made a name for himself in the courts of the Holy Roman Empire by creating painstakingly detailed images of various sitters. In place of the richly detailed facial features one typically expects in portraiture, there are clever arrangements of fruits, vegetables, plants, animals, and other elements. Both psychologically acute and scientifically accurate, Arcimboldo's portraits were celebrated by his patrons and contemporaries, expanding traditional notions about what portraiture was or ought to be. The guide below traces Arcimboldo's career and highlights some of his most peculiar and extraordinary creations.

Arcimboldo was born into a family of painters.
Before Arcimboldo redefined portraiture, he got his start working on two famed Italian buildings. Born in Milan in 1526 or 1527, Arcimboldo's father worked for the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano, an organization that oversaw the construction and development of the city's towering cathedral and exists today as part of preservation and restoration efforts associated with the structure. Some of Arcimboldo's earliest artworks were designs for stained glass windows at the Duomo di Milano and frescoes at the Duomo di Monza. It was not until the painter was around 36 years old that he would leave Italy to become a court painter for the Hapsburg emperors Maximilian II in Vienna and Rudolf II in Prague. During his 25 years working in the courts of the Holy Roman Empire, Arcimboldo would continue to design stained glass windows, tapestries, and theater costumes.

The artist would develop his madcap style during his tenure as a court portraitist.
Maximilian II held a fascination with the natural world, and this interest in biology and other fields lured scientists and philosophers to his court. No surprise, then, that Arcimboldo's first projects for Maximilian II-the series "The Four Seasons," which he started in 1563, and "The Elements," completed in 1566-bore out that love of science. "The Four Seasons" comprises four profile portraits of figures forged from intricate arrangements of natural materials like fruits, vegetables, flowers, and plant life specific to either summer, fall, winter, or spring. Arcimboldo took a similar approach to the four-part series "The Elements," which features haunting depictions of figures composed respectively of fire and gold, multifarious sea creatures and pearls, clusters of birds, and various fauna. The artist's imaginative and highly detailed portraits were met with praise inside Hapsburg courts and beyond, and he had begun to establish a name for himself among Renaissance artists. Arcimboldo created reproductions of the paintings in the seasons series on account of its wide acclaim. Both "The Four Seasons" and "The Elements" would be put on view in Maximilian II's kunstkammer of artworks, antiquities, and natural wonders. Art historian Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, who authored the 2009 book Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting, has said that such works conveyed "the majesty of the ruler, the copiousness of creation and the power of the ruling family over everything."

Arcimboldo's subjects grow more varied in the years to come.
In the following years, the artist created portraits of specific professions and biblical figures while continuing to further his interest in natural phenomena. Among his most idiosyncratic paintings are The Librarian (ca. 1566), which some believe depicts the Austrian humanist, historian, and physician Wolfgang Lazius and shows a stoic, anthropomorphic pyramid of tomes; portraits of Adam and Eve from 1578 that show the faces of a woman and a man composed of groupings of human bodies; and The Cook (ca. 1570), which shows a serving dish presented atop a wooden table that, when turned upside down, reveals a menacing face.

Some of the artist's final works are his most iconic ones.
Having returned to Milan in 1587 and nearing the end of his life, Arcimboldo continued painting meticulous groupings of lush fruits and vegetables and distinctive plants. One of the artist's most famous works from that period is Vortumnus (Vertumno), produced around 1590 and named for the Roman god of the seasons. The work shows Rudolf II as a formidable figure gazing intently at the viewer, his body formed by hearty gourds, blooming flowers, glimmering grapes, and more. Four Seasons in One Head (ca. 1590), which some art historians consider a self-portrait, features an angular face cut from a withered tree trunk and adorned with a pair of cherries on its ear; apples, grapes, and leaves atop its head; and flowers on its bust. Scholars at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which acquired the painting in 2010, have argued that the work stands out among Arcimboldo's body of work as an earnest contemplation of mortality.

Arcimboldo is celebrated for the striking unconventionality of his work.
The artist died in Milan in 1593. Some of Arcimboldo's paintings were taken from Rudolf II's collection in Prague by Swedish forces during the Thirty Years' War, and a handful of his paintings, including The Librarian, Vortumnus (Vertumno), and The Cook, are part of Swedish collections today. The artist's work can also be found in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Louvre in Paris, the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, and other international institutions. He is often credited as a source of inspiration for Surrealist artists, and some recent shows dedicated to the artist took place in 2017 at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao in Spain.

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How Giuseppe Arcimboldo Reimagined Portraiture in 16th-Century Europe

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Few artists have painted portraits so beguiling as Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian painter of the late Renaissance who made a name for himself in the courts of the Holy Roman Empire by creating painstakingly detailed images of various sitters.

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I do not think his shows should be postponed. I think them postponing it for the sole reason to avoid controversy is going against what art is about. I think his work should be given appropriate context and show why he made these pieces and what they portray. I think these paintings could be another way to educate the viewers on the bigotry of organizations such as the KKK. Guston portrays these figures in common settings doing tasks like driving a car, and in a sense I think it shows these figures symbolizing hate, could be anyone, and from what I have read about Guston he said that these hooded figures are a symbol of the hatred and bigotry that is happening in the world. Therefore, I think the shows should happen as planned and be used as a way to educate on the hate in the world.

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As an outcry continues to mount in response to the four-year pushback of a Philip Guston retrospective, directors of two its host institutions have explained their decision to postpone the show to 2024.

After issuing a joint statement with the leaders of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which are among the four institutions scheduled to present the exhibition, the directors of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and Tate Modern in London have said that the choice to delay the retrospective came amid tensions facing institutions in the U.S.

Previously, a National Gallery spokesperson told ARTnews that the museums were concerned about how works featuring KKK imagery were contextualized within the exhibition, which is being organized by four white curators. In the prior statement, the directors said that they felt it was "necessary to reframe our programming and, in this case, step back, and bring in additional perspectives and voices."

In a letter published by the English newspaper the Times, which ran a piece decrying the decision to delay the show last week, Tate director Maria Balshaw and Tate Modern director Frances Morris claimed that the postponement was made mainly in response to a potential outcry faced by U.S. institutions. "Tate does not self-censor," Balshaw and Morris wrote.

They continued, "For the U.S. institutions their very credibility among black and minority ethnic audiences is at stake. Proceeding on our own would not have been possible for financial and logistical reasons and would have been disrespectful to our partner museums."

Additionally, on a Hyperallergic podcast released last Friday, National Gallery of Art director Kaywin Feldman said that her staff had raised concerns about showing the Ku Klux Klan works in the current climate. "In today's America, because Guston appropriated images of Black trauma, the show needs to be about more than Guston," she said. "We weren't prepared for that. ... An exhibition with such strong commentary on race cannot be done by all white curators."

Criticism of the four organizing institutions came swiftly and has come from all corners of the art world. Musa Mayer, Guston's daughter, released a statement in which she described being "saddened" by the delay, saying, "These paintings meet the moment we are in today." Meanwhile, nearly 100 artists, including Nicole Eisenman, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and Stanley Whitney, signed an open letter published by the Brooklyn Rail in which they castigated the museums for delaying the show, and Mark Godfrey, a curator organizing the Tate show, also decried his museum's decision to not mount his exhibition in 2021 as planned. But some said the postponement felt fitting to the moment, at a time when the whiteness of many major institutions' programming and staff is being protested.

Calling the show in its current form potentially "disrespectful" to its audiences, Feldman said, "We make statements [about institutional change], but it actually means also doing something different. Trying some things. We may not get it all right, but it's a time to experiment."

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Museum Directors Explain Controversial Decision to Delay Philip Guston Show

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As an outcry continues to mount in response to the four-year pushback of a Philip Guston retrospective, directors of two its host institutions have explained their decision to postpone the show to 2024.

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I really enjoy the way he represents human hands. I feel like there is something so abstract about them but still remaining human. Baselitz's use of gold on top of the black creates an interesting twisting and dripping effect that gives the illusion the hand is being tangled on the canvas.

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Georg Baselitz reflects on his own aging hands through the prism of all the art he has seen.

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Frank Jones was an African American self-taught artist who was famous for his prison drawings. He started his work using scraps of paper and blue and red accountant pencils that were accessible to him in prison, but eventually introduces other colors such as green. According to the article, Jones claimed he could see supernatural beings which were the main inspiration of motifs he referred to as “devil’s houses”.

I find Jones’ work interesting; it is very whimsical to me. His pieces have a very nice balance of shape and color, especially for his pallet being so limited. The drawings have a chaotic feel to them, but I think this chaos creates movement in the piece. His pieces almost remind me of a child’s drawing, like those in horror movies when the child is drawing the monsters they see in their room at night.

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For Frank Jones (1900-1969) - a Black self-taught artist who spent his life in Texas, where he died while serving time at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, north of Houston (home of the Lone Star State's execution chamber) - making art might have served as a form of spirit-lifting escape from the monotony and tension of his long years in prison.

Although his remarkable drawings in colored pencil on paper are well known among informed collectors and specialists in the outsider-art field, they still have not achieved the broad recognition enjoyed by the similarly unique works of Bill Traylor (circa 1853-1949) or Thornton Dial, Sr. (1928-2016), to name two other renowned, African American self-taught artists. This might be due in part to the fact that only a few hundred of Jones's drawings are known to exist, and many of them have been in private hands for many years.

As a result, although examples of his work do routinely turn up at events like the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York, presentations of significant quantities of Jones's drawings are generally less frequent than those of, say, Traylor. His last notable showings took place at Carl Hammer Gallery in the spring of 2017 and, later that same year, at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York.

Now, though, Shrine, a gallery at the southern end of Manhattan's Lower East Side that often focuses on outsider art, is presenting 114591 - at nine drawings, a relatively bountiful exhibition of Jones's production and one brimming with some of his highest-quality, most emblematic creations (tip to fans: there's a tenth piece available that is not on display). The show takes its title from the artist's own prisoner number. (Jones, who was illiterate, routinely marked his drawings with that impersonal, institutional identifier.) The exhibition remains on view through September 13.

Jones was born in northeastern Texas, near the border with Oklahoma. His enslaved ancestors had labored on cotton plantations. Young Frank grew up in a rural environment in which generations-old African traditions helped shape his aesthetic-spiritual sensibility and worldview.

Jones was born with a caul: part of the fetal membrane covered his left eye. In the society in which he grew up, this unusual physical feature was known as a "veil," and children born with such cauls were regarded as "double-sighted." It was believed that they could communicate with the spirit world. Throughout his life, Jones claimed that he could see supernatural beings - animated objects, animal-like creatures, demons - which he called "haints" ("haunts"), "devils," or "haint devils."

Jones, who worked as a farm laborer and did odd jobs to eke out a living, spent roughly two decades in and out of Texas jails; he was sent to the prison in Huntsville to serve a life sentence for a murder he insisted he had not committed. In the 1960s, as an inmate, he began making drawings on found scraps of paper with the stubs of blue-and-red accountants' pencils. In them, he developed his "devils' houses" motif - wiry-looking structures depicted in cross-section, in which his omnipresent, horned, bird-like "haints" resided.

Through his depictions of the demons he claimed to be able to see, and that, he explained, were always eager to cause mischief, Jones not only gave visible form to his spirit sightings, but also contained or curtailed what he perceived to be their hurtful powers. His winged devils' grinning faces belie the harm he believed they could cause. Clocks often appear in Jones's drawings, too, alluding to the marking of time and sense of mortality that, inevitably, are on many a prisoner's mind.

In the early 1960s, Murray Smither, a young employee of the now-defunct Atelier Chapman Kelley, then an important gallery in Dallas specializing in modern and contemporary art, traveled back to Huntsville, his hometown, to judge a competitive exhibition of art made by inmates at the state penitentiary. There, he chose Jones as the winner of the contest. He shared his discovery with his boss, Chapman Kelley, whose gallery began offering the self-taught draftsman's works for sale at a time when the market for what would become known as "outsider art" was still in its infancy in the United States.

Smither went on to become a collector, curator, and respected authority on folk art and outsider art from Texas and the American South. Today, at the age of 83, he is bringing his large, renowned collection to market through a year-long series of exhibitions at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, a small town south of Dallas. (Seekers of Jones's works take note: one of his iconic drawings is among the Webb Gallery's offerings, and Smither is in the process of donating a second work to a Texas museum.)

In the works on view at Shrine, some of Jones's houses are so packed with fluffy demons that they seem ready to teeter or wobble. In some of these drawings, which are rich in decorative detail, Jones's devilish spirits seem to emerge right out of the crossbeams of the houses they inhabit. In one elaborately shaped structure, they appear only symbolically, integrated into the artist's form-giving, decorative patterning.

In this group of drawings, Jones's houses are also at times exuberantly non-rectilinear, with appendages or protuberances providing quirky charm. (The artist's cathartic intentions notwithstanding, another way to appreciate his works is to view them as intriguing examples of fantasy architecture.) Notable here, too, are the drawings in which Jones's colored-pencil palette expands beyond blue and red to include green, orange, and purple.

Of special interest among the works at Shrine are five that the gallery's founder-director, Scott Ogden, a longtime outsider-art collector, managed to find from a private source who had owned them for many years and was ready to bring them to market.

These drawings offer vivid evidence of the expressive range of Jones's draftsmanship and compositional skill, and several still bear, on the backs of their frames, labels from the galleries through whose inventories they passed over the years. For collectors interested in such artworks' provenances - the records of those who have owned them over time - the collective history of these drawings mirrors the development of the outsider art field in the U.S.

Admirers of drawing in all its forms have plenty to savor in Jones's mysterious - and mysteriously elegant - delicacies. Those who are already familiar with his art will find some gems in Shrine's presentation. Newcomers may find them devilishly alluring.

Frank Jones - 114591 continues at Shrine (179 East Broadway, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through September 13.

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For Frank Jones (1900-1969) - a Black self-taught artist who spent his life in Texas, where he died while serving time at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, north of Houston (home of the Lone Star State's execution chamber) - making art might have served as a form of spirit-lifting escape from the monotony and tension of his long years in prison.

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Susan Chen is a young Asian American artist, and current MFA student at Columbia University. Her pieces are very detailed and always have something interesting to look at. In her paintings she makes subtle nods to great writers, thinkers and artists which I think makes her pieces interesting to look at trying to find these subtle nods. Her COVID-19 Survival Kit piece I find very interesting and current and very different from other covid-19 related works I have seen during this time. I think her piece shows the sense of worry; however, I find there is a lighthearted feel to the piece as well. All her works feature great brush strokes and use of color, but I think what I enjoy most is her sense of layering. Her paintings have a very nice balance between thickly applied paint and thinner layers which is really working and adds nice textures. I think she is an artist I will keep an eye on.

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As a young Asian American painter, Susan Chen knows what she is up against and is consciously pushing back.

I was intrigued and delighted by the names and books that Susan Chen cites in some of her portraits. In "Streetcars of Desire" (oil on canvas, 40 by 30 inches, 2020), the artist depicts herself sitting on an ambiguous pink form (a rug or a tiny island) reading a recently published paperback. The title, How To Be An Artist, is clearly visible on the back cover, but Chen has deliberately omitted the author's name (Jerry Saltz).

By placing the title on the back cover, Chen alludes to her Chinese heritage of reading from right to left; the title also in essence takes over the book, becoming its author. These are among the many curious, purposeful details that we discover in Chen's debut exhibition, Susan Chen: On Longing, at Meredith Rosen Gallery (August 15-September 19, 2020)

Beside her, three books lean against a glass vase of sunflowers - an allusion to Vincent van Gogh. The name on the spine of the leftmost volume is Neale Donald Walsch, the author of a bestselling book series called Conversations with God. The title on the cover is An Uncommon Dialogue, the subtitle of the first publication in the series, which appeared in 1995. By citing only the part of the title, Chen invites us to read it as an indication of the artist's longing.

The next book is Portraits by John Berger, though we see only his surname, and the third, Creative Interpretation - again with the title on the back cover - suggests, as she has with Saltz's book, that the author is unimportant, and that perhaps the painting is open to the same creative interpretation that the title calls for.

Behind the artist, a large, rounded rectangle, cropped at the top and left, could be a window or a painting that presents a slightly, skewed, hilly landscape with a row of cheerfully colored, widely spaced box cars rolling down railroad tracks. A sign rises above the track, bearing the word "Glory" and pointing to the left. Is it meant to indicate the artist's soon-to-be-recent-past? (She is currently an MFA student at Columbia University who expects to graduate in 2021). Each of the six boxcars bears the name of one of her teacher's names, including Hull (Richard), Amenoff (Gregory), Coffey (Susanna) and Nisenbaum (Aliza).

In the foreground, another set of railroad tracks runs along the painting's bottom edge, with six boxcars emblazoned with the names of contemporary and historical artists, including Hockney, Matisse, Bonnard, Burchfield, Soutine, and Le Pho (1907-2001), a modernist Vietnamese painter who is still under the radar in the United States, despite exhibiting in San Francisco and New York. Le Pho is best known for his paintings of nudes and flowers in which he merged aspects of Asian and European art.

Chen's inclusion of Le Pho's name and its placement on the first boxcar challenges the canonical thinking that sees only white male artists as constituting the history of avant-garde or innovative art. In this and other paintings, it is clear that Chen knows what she is up against and is consciously pushing back. Rather than trying to fit in, she is deliberately making a place for herself and for other individuals of Asian descent.

In the group portrait, "About Face" (oil on canvas, 74 x 54 inches, 2020), Chen depicts four casually dressed young Asian women in the foreground. Behind them, a Greek Revival building based on Columbia's Butler Library, complete with columns and the names of Greek philosophers and writers chiseled into the frieze - Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes - fills the painting's upper right-hand corner. Above this unsurprising, all-male list, and separated by a row of small windows, Chen has added another list of names chiseled into the facade - Angelou, Anzaldua, Chang, Hurston, Morrison, Revathi, Shange - writers, cultural theorists, and a film director, all of them women of color who should be required reading in a class on Western Civilization in its late stage, meaning the present.

The woman on the painting's far left, who bears a strong resemblance to Chen's self-portrait, holds a book, Racial Melancholia by Eng and Han. Again, Chen's omission is telling, as the book's exact title is Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation. The melancholy seems reflected on the women's faces. They seem intent, through their study of women writers, filmmakers, and cultural critics, on challenging the hierarchy and undoing the canon.

There are two other self-portraits I want to mention, "COVID-19 Survival Kit" (oil on canvas, 40 by 30 inches, 2020) and "Nude Self Portrait" (oil on canvas, 40 by 30 inches, 2020). In "COVID-19 Survival Kit," the artist depicts herself in a gray T-shirt sitting on a brown throw rug in the middle of an undecorated room. She is holding a small, fluffy white dog on her lap, surrounded by emergency supplies: cans of beans, cough drops, cleansers, aspirin, and other goods. All three cans of beans appear to be dented, and the triangular stack they form seems precarious.

Behind her, near a closed door, a loose roll of toilet paper unravels on the floor. To the right, against a wall the color of dried blood, Dr. Anthony Fauci appears on a large-screen TV beside the statistics of reported Covid-19 cases in the United States, and the number of related deaths. Chen's expression is one of quiet alarm. This is our shared daily experience of living in a pandemic, whether we acknowledge it or not.

In "Nude Self Portrait," the artist, nude except for the polka-dot sock on her left foot and the blue neoprene glove on her painting hand, sits in a green office chair, headphones wrapped around her ears, a paint brush in one hand and an open sketchbook in the other. The drawing in the sketchbook mirrors the pose in the painting, sans headphones. Beside her, on the right, her painting table is arrayed with gobs of colors piled up in rows according to hue. On the left, a canvas sits on an easel, angled away from us. Behind her shoulder, in the upper right quadrant, a glass vase filled with paintbrushes sits beside a book atop a cabinet or heating unit, while, through the window above, a roiling dark gray and violet sky threatens a distant skyline. It seems as if Chen is painting her nude self-portrait just as a storm is about to begin. Perhaps the headphones will help her shut out the noise of the world.

Chen's attention to detail imbues her work with panache. I found myself looking closely at the paintings in case I missed anything. At the same time, they did not feel fussy or contrived. The details are sharp, funny, and telling, such as her listing of Matisse, Soutine, and Le Pho, a transparent display of her inspirations and the artists with whom she is having a dialogue.

I see Chen's paintings as a sophisticated amalgamation of styles, from Matisse's floral patterning, to Soutine's unstable landscapes, to the thick brushstrokes of Van Gogh. But, almost paradoxically, I failed to detect any irony in this way of working, nor did I feel that the imagery had been stitched together from her sources.

Rather, there is an earnestness to these works that I find both bold and refreshing. She is not afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve, or to make paintings that are awash with feeling.

Susan Chen: On Longing continues at Meredith Rosen Gallery (11 East 80th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through September 19.

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University of Michigan, Stamps School of Art & Design

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As a young Asian American painter, Susan Chen knows what she is up against and is consciously pushing back. I was intrigued and delighted by the names and books that Susan Chen cites in some of her portraits.

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Charles Garabedian is an artist who began his career later in life. Garabedian's works draw from elements of classic mythology. I find his works very interesting to look at because there is a certain realness to them. He doesn't depict these mythological figures in a pretty way like we are all used to seeing, he gives these figures more character. I also find it interesting he doesn't concern himself too much with the idea of making things look like art.

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I think these murals are very important and very current. I think these artists did an excellent job of showing diversity. I also think the way they used current events like the statement "I Can't Breathe" in big bold letters to invoke a change. These artists did an excellent job of informing and inspiring voting in an artistic way.

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Colorful and Loving Murals in Philadelphia Are Inspiring People to Vote

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To the Polls 2020 features murals by six Philadelphia-based artists, including a jubilant altar to “our voting rights ancestors.”

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This article caught my eye because I was like: why is David Byrne from the Talking Heads on here? In quarantine he apparently took up drawing and I am not that impressed. Yeah, he had a pretty successful music career, but now it seems like he decided since he can't do too much with music right now to invade the fine art world. I do not see what is so special about his drawings, they are just basic marker drawings, a little weird but nothing spectacular and I feel like if he was not already famous no one would pay attention to these drawings.

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David Byrne is not prone to idleness. Since cofounding the Talking Heads-the Ne w Wave band that launched him to fame-Byrne has founded a music label, released an extensive body of solo albums, and written two books, including 2012's How Music Works , which blends music theory and autobiography. But when the pandemic forced New York into lockdown, Byrne returned to his roots in a different field: visual art.

Over the past seven months, Byrne took up drawing, and while he said his art is not explicitly about Covid-19, the activity became a way to confront, in a roundabout way, more existential threats-anxiety, mortality, boredom. So far, he has created around 100 hand-drawn ink images, 50 of which have been collected in the series "Dingbats," which is now being sold online by Pace Gallery, his representative.

The works were originally intended as dingbats-filler doodles used to break up blocks of text-for , the online magazine Byrne founded in 2018 through his Arbutus Foundation. The drawings cost $3,000 each, and all proceeds from the sales will benefit the publication's writers, editors, and various contributors.

The illustrations toe the thin line between irony and sincerity. Byrne said they make him laugh, which is partly the point. In , which depicts a mountain range with a man's face, could be interpreted as a comment on climate change, according to the artist. "They express those feelings that you sometimes don't want to say to one another," he told T.M.I, a long-limbed figure is flatted by a rectangular sheet. ARTnews.

Earlier this week, spoke via Zoom with Byrne, who was in his apartment in Manhattan. The interview has been edited and condensed.
ARTnews: You've also been promoting the release of Spike Lee's film adaptation of your stage show American Utopia, which hits HBO this week in the U.S. What's it been like to split your time between a huge production like that and small-scale drawings like these?
Byrne: I'm used to juggling different things. It actually works out well for me. There's only so many hours you can put into one thing before the sponge is run out for the day. It was easy to put on the other hat for a bit and see what needed needed to be done for the movie release. Things like ["Dingbats"] are long-range projects. They started as an assignment, which is nice as I like assignments, and I was given a lot of freedom. They emerged to be a kind of expression during the pandemic. There's humor to them, but there's also a lot of locked-down feelings, the kind that come out when you draw. Feelings that you haven't yet put into words.
What was the beginning of lockdown for you like? When did you realize we were in the "new normal" for the long haul?
It was incremental. I remember in the beginning, how we thought that it was going to be three or four weeks, maybe a month and a half. And I thought, "Wow! That's a long time, a month and a half. I better get some toilet paper and some groceries." During that time we realized: "Oh, it's going to be a lot longer." And then we realized truly how longer is ahead. We thought that the show that was filmed would be in theaters and back on Broadway now, which seems laughable. We continue to live life, even in a pandemic, as you think back and try to remember what it felt like at the beginning, to remember if we knew what kind of world we were moving into.
How did you think up the surreal imagery in the drawings?
A fair amount of the drawings have faces and bodies, in ways that are sometimes grotesque, but I hope grotesque in a funny way. We're not talking about Goya here; there's a bit of humor. I can only assume some of my focus came from the fact we are now partly imprisoned by our bodies. The illness-the pandemic-has limited our bodies, limited our movement, limited our interactions, limited our social connections. Our bodies are revealed to be essential to us, part of who we are. We tend to think, "Oh, no, life is in the mind, and that's where we reside." But we can't separate the two. That becomes apparent during this time.

David Byrne, A Balanced Life, 2020.Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

There's one drawing in the series, A Balanced Life, which has a figure balancing household items on its head.
We're trying to hold all of that stuff all the time and not fall over. The drawing is about keeping our lives, our things, our various odds and ends from falling to the ground and smashing to bits.
Then there's Supply Chain, which is more overtly political.
[ ] Ah yes, the train made out of vegetables. During the pandemic we became so much more aware of the things we rely on and our reliance on all these connections across the country, across the world. Boats and ports and planes, warehouses-if one of those gets disrupted, then we can't get certain things. Luckily, most vegetables and groceries are still available to us, though I think of all the outbreaks in the meatpacking industry. In my little world, I have friends who tried to get bicycles, and they couldn't, or they had an old bike and wanted to get it repaired, but the bike store couldn't get the parts. There's these little things you forget about that get revealed. You forget the people involved.

David Byrne, Supply Chain, 2020.© David Byrne, courtesy Pace Gallery

What's your process like when you sit down to start a new drawing?
It starts as an idea, and then I take time to plan it out. I had one yesterday, of a very large baby running roughshod over a very small town and squishing little houses-a Godzilla baby. So I start with a concept and then sketch it out. Then I ink it in, which I learned from graphic designers and illustrators. The question is how far you take it to let it look filled.
What's the meaning behind the baby?
Well, my daughter has an infant, and they was visiting her the other day, and therefore the apartment is a mess. I thought, "I could take that image to another place and give it another meaning." Quite a number of us see Trump as big baby, let's say, running roughshod over folks. But we can also see ourselves as the baby. We all have our infantile desires and motivations that surface every once in a way and we trample over not just tiny houses, but over our friends and loved ones and relationships.
This year, Reasons to Be Cheerful launched "We Art Not Divided," a special project aiming to bridge gaps between Americans ahead of the general election. Don't you find that task daunting?
Of course! When my colleagues first proposed that I said, "Are you kidding? Do you read the newspapers? Can you show me examples of what the stories can be?" And they did. A short time later, they said, "Look, here's a bunch of stories, here are things that are actually happening." And I said, "Alright, that's kind of amazing." But it's still a battle every morning. I look at the papers and feel like, oh god, people are at each other's throats. It's like we're on the verge of armed warfare with each other. Publishing these stories of people who have gone against that tide is pretty necessary. It's sustaining for people to hear this, instead of the constant barrage of negative things which by human nature we are more attracted to.
You said in the recent Esquire interview with Spike Lee that "as citizens we have a responsibility to engage." How do you apply that idea to yourself as an artist?
That idea has been a gradual incremental shift in my life, over many years. I've tried to some extent to remain nonpartisan with the idea that, if we can keep talking to each other, that's how we might move forward, though gradually I've come to feel that yes, at my age, I can afford to be more engaged and speak out. I'm not struggling with my career in the ways an emerging artist might be, so I have the luxury to approach these various topics. But it is a kind of balancing act. Doing art, whether it's music or these drawings, approaches social and civic issues.
You started as an art student at RISD and then took an incredible detour into music before returning to visual arts. What do you make of that trajectory?
It's a tricky thing. I think when art becomes didactic it loses its power. So the question becomes: How to engage, and in what way? Sometimes one's art is the right way to express an idea. Sometimes it might be better to write an op-ed opposed to creating a painting. It's a journey of discovery, figuring out how to engage without losing the integrity of the work. It's an ongoing thing. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes not.

From my point of view, I managed to get back into visual expression when I started creating music videos in early '80s. The detour was huge, but it wasn't as long as it might seem. Throughout time, my performances started to become more performative, visually thoughtful and visually engaged. I'm not even sure how long it was ago, let's say 15 years, that I really started drawing again. I was drawing these trees sort of like diagrams in the way they do in books of evolution, which I was inspired by. And I used the drawings to imagine connections that might be slightly preposterous, which then started to seem not totally wrong or ridiculous. I like drawing more than large-scale expression because it seemed like a direct expression of what was in my head, as it tends to be. I think viewers sense it too. Maybe it's because drawing is a preliminary expression, the first expression of whatever is going on in the artist's head and heart. You can feel a closer connection when looking at a drawing rather an artwork that has been taken to the next level.

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While in Lockdown, Musician David Byrne Took Up Drawing to Help Fight Fatigue

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David Byrne is not prone to idleness. Since cofounding the Talking Heads-the Ne w Wave band that launched him to fame-Byrne has founded a music label, released an extensive body of solo albums, and written two books, including 2012's How Music Works , which blends music theory and autobiography.

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I think this article was very interesting. Some of his works definitely speak to these mental illnesses they are saying he was affected by. I also find it interesting that even today they are still deciphering what was going on in his head.

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A new study by the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders claims that the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh likely suffered from delirium associated with alcohol withdrawal in the years leading up to his suicide in 1890. Rather than assign a single illness to the artist, as some previous studies have, the paper attempts "to assess all mental symptoms ever reported by Van Gogh in his letters or as found in other sources."

In addition to interviewing art historians about the artist's life and work, researchers used hundreds of van Gogh's letters, many written to his brother, Theo, and other family members, to better understand his condition. The study suggests that the artist experienced "brief psychosis in Arles on the days after the ear incident during which he likely stopped drinking abruptly" and that, between 1874 and 1988, "he almost certainly suffered from several depressive episodes." It argues that van Gogh likely suffered from a bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that has been assigned to the artist by previous studies of his mental condition, and refutes past diagnoses of schizophrenia as "highly unlikely."

[ Read about eight international curators' favorite works by van Gogh.]

The study's key conclusions are that van Gogh "suffered from several comorbid disorders," and "no single disorder" can account for the state of his mental health. It describes the artist's "enormous willpower, resilience, and perseverance" in the face of such struggles, and points out, "Over the years he kept on painting, also during most difficult periods in his life. Only during the most severe psychotic episodes he temporarily stopped working, but in intervals with less symptoms he was able to paint."

This is not the only research on van Gogh to be released this year. In July, Wouter van der Veen, scientific director of the Van Gogh Institute in France, revealed details about where the artist may have created his final painting, Tree Roots.

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New Study Suggests van Gogh Suffered from 'Several Comorbid Disorders'

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A new study by the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders claims that the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh likely suffered from delirium associated with alcohol withdrawal in the years leading up to his suicide in 1890.

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Lu Yang creates avatars going against norms of humanity. I find it interesting how this avatar he most recently created is void of any gender. I feel like this is very relevant in today because gender conformities are changing and being broken in new ways. I also find it interesting his inspiration coming from Buddhism. I also find it fascinating how much detail is used and how life like these CGI avatars are.

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Lu Yang with his pug Biabia in his Shanghai studio. Dave Tacon for ARTnews

Fi ve years ago, Lu Yang made a genderless rendering of himself the protagonist of Lu Yang Delusional Mandala, a 2015 video in which the artist's avatar wears a baseball cap and dances through a computer-generated version of outer space. Not that the figure is carefree. The viewer is given to understand that there is a tumor in the avatar's brain, and at times it seems to be in pain. At various points in the 16-minute piece, it is probed by diagnostic machines. The avatar dies and lives again numerous times, and ultimately ends up suspended in an enormous mandala.

Speaking by Zoom recently from his studio in Shanghai, Lu said that, with that video, he wanted to make a version of himself that was free of the constraints of gender and sexuality. "I really don't like to have some label for gender placed upon myself," he said. "I am just a human being-that's all. When we go out, people think, 'Oh, you're a male, you're a female.' People always judge you. But actually, when we are alone, we don't really think about who we are and what kind of gender we are. That body," he continued, referring to his avatar, "is the perfect body for me."

Books in Lu Yang's studio. Dave Tacon for ARTnews

Being alone is something Lu has come to embrace-especially during the coronavirus pandemic. In his mid-30s, he is one of the world's most visible emerging artists, and by the time everything shut down, he'd gotten used to frequent travel. One of the foremost members of a new generation of artists working with digital technology, he has shown his work at the Venice Biennale, as well as festivals from Moscow to Istanbul; a typical year involves getting on a plane every two months. But since March he's been confined to his two-floor studio in Shanghai. "That brings me more time to polish my work," he said.

Lu's work is as maximalist as art gets-it's filled with pulsing electronic music, fast-paced edits, and colorful CGI. His studio, on the other hand, tends toward minimalism. Much of his work is done on a bank of computer monitors, where he uses digital technology to envision new bodies free from traditional Western conceptions of life and death. Above one monitor hangs a page from an old calendar showing the Hindu god Mahakala encircled in fiery red and orange flames. Mahakala is a manifestation of Shiva-an avatar not all that dissimilar to the digital ones that populate Lu's videos.

Those videos and performances involve highly complex technology of the sort typically used to make video games and Hollywood blockbusters. Whereas many artists working with similar technology farm out the labor to firms around the world, Lu prefers to craft his art largely on his own, without assistants. "I don't like having people sit beside me, so I work by myself. But I chat with people online," he said. When he works, he mostly listens to J-pop. "Boy bands," he admitted, with a laugh.

Adorning his walls are posters for video games like Final Fantasy. Heroes from that game or others from the Marvel and DC Comics universes interest Lu because the impulse to create such characters has existed from the beginnings of human history. "We always love to create a new human being," he said. "It's like creating a new avatar."

Artworks and mementos in Lu's studio. Dave Tacon for ARTnews

From a young age, Lu was interested in worlds other than his own. Born in 1984 in Shanghai, he was attracted to his grandparents' books on Buddhism. "During that time, I could accept everything," he said. "I read Buddhist books for deeper meaning." He went on to attend the vaunted China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he studied under artist Zhang Peili, who is known for his painstaking performances shot on video. Lu enrolled with an interest in painting, and graduated with a predilection for the newest technologies.

Lu made his first avatar in 2012-Uterus Man, a semi-human asexual superhero rendered in an anime-like style and equipped with a chariot crafted from a human pelvic bone. The latest one in a line of seven is Doku, short for Dokusho Dokushi. "In Chinese," Lu said, "that means you are born alone and you die alone"-a reference to a Buddhist sutra. "How can we say that Doku came to the digital world alone, without other people? I don't think he has a consciousness."

Lu Yang in his video Lu Yang Delusional Mandala, 2015.Courtesy Société, Berlin

Months of work went into making Doku seem as lifelike as possible. The character recently appeared in a video for the British band The 1975, where Doku is shown in an empty digital arena, chest inset with glowing lights and hands producing purplish afterimages as the figure gyrates and mouths the words to the song. Like his other avatars, this one is asexual. Doku looks uncannily like Lu, an effect he accomplished with the help of Facegood, a Shenzhen-based studio that uses motion capture technology to create digital animations. A number of dots were drawn on Lu's face with a marker before he stepped into a device fitted with cameras that photographed his face as it moved through all its countless expressions. A computer then analyzed the images, and Lu fed them into Unity, a program typically reserved for video games.

Lu as Doku in a music video for The 1975's song "Playing on My Mind." Courtesy doku2020

Doku's dancing can be traced to animation programs like MikuMikuDance that Lu mastered in high school. "I really wanted to dance like that avatar inside that digital world," he said. He hired professional dancers to model Doku's moves; one of them is Kenken, a huge star in Japan. Test footage of the dancers at work shows them flinging their arms around in gridded cyberspace.

Doku has also taken on the accoutrements of celebrity, including a personal clothing stylist and a tattoo artist-Oshima Taku-who provided the avatar ink art inspired by the Jōmon people of Japan. And collaborations such as that with The 1975 won't be the last. Doku's next project involves teaming up with Li-Ning, a Chinese sports brand. "Doku is not like digital idols, where they just wear nice clothes," Lu said. "We really want to set up connections."

In the meantime, Lu is hard at work continuing to hone Doku's aesthetic. Up next are more realistic-looking wrinkles and a new hairdo. "CGI work, you are always polishing it," he said of his preoccupation while in quarantine. "You have to spend a lot of time polishing it, to make it more like a digital human."

A version of this article appears in the Fall 2020 issue of ARTnews, under the title "Lu Yang Programs an Avatar."

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Best Practices: Lu Yang's Otherworldly Avatars Imagine New Possibilities for the Body

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Artist Lu Yang has been working to engineer new bodies using technology in a series of avatars.

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I have never heard of Ming Smith before but the image of her work they used as the cover photo for this article caught my eye. Her signature "blur" creates an interesting movement in the piece and also breaks away from the idea of picture perfect. The images of her work they chose for this article are very powerful to me especially the piece titled Amen Corner Sisters. I also found it interesting how she said she knows its a successful photograph if she can feel their soul.

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Ming Smith can still remember a phrase that Arthur Jafa used to describe something he saw in her photography: "the blur." The two artists were at an opening for Smith's work at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, and Jafa uttered those words in such a way that they were elongated and guttural, suggestive of a kind of presence that can be felt as much as seen. For followers of Smith's photography, blurriness figures in images sometimes shot in low light and with a slow shutter speed, so that they are often smudgy and hard to read-but also evocative in probing and poetic ways that evade easy analysis.

Although Smith has been considered a touchstone for generations of Black photographers, it took a while for her to become a mainstay in the art world's biggest institutions. Over the past few years, her expressive pictures have been featured in two key surveys-"We Wanted a Revolution," focused on Black women artists during the 1970s at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018, and "Soul of a Nation," a traveling show about art and the Black Power movement that originated the year before at Tate Modern in London. Jafa also included her work in a show that made the rounds in European museums, and this week, some of her pictures will go on show at the Whitney Museum in an exhibition about the Kamoinge Workshop, a key Black photography collective of which Smith was an integral part. Smith has also just been awarded one of the ultimate accolades for a photographer: an Aperture book surveying her work.

Smith considers her work a form of survival-for both herself and her subjects. "When I look at photos, if it's a successful photograph, I can feel their spirit," she said. "They become alive, to me, because I'm alive."

Ming Smith, Self-portrait, ca. 1988.©Ming Smith/Courtesy the artist and Aperture

Part of that energy owes to Smith's method, which is improvisational and determined by her own desires. "A jazz musician has certain notes-and then they improvise. I basically improvise with what I have," she said. "If there's low light, I deal with it."

In some cases, improvisation has meant applying paint to her pictures or processing them in ways that turn black-and-white into purplish and greenish tones. Pointing to photographs such as Flamingo Fandango (Painted), West Berlin, from 1988, which features a flock of flamingos in a dusky forested landscape, Smith said she allays color onto her black-and-white pictures when she deems it necessary. "I wanted to add color [the way] someone would put a ribbon on a dress or a lacy collar or a big belt-to embellish and make it more exciting," she said.

From a young age, Smith began prioritizing visual pleasure in photography. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, she watched her father, who worked as a pharmacist, take pictures and develop them in his darkroom. But she disagreed with his careful technical readings and the culture that he and his friends facilitated, which revolved around protracted discussions of camera technologies. "It was just guys talking about photography," she said.

On the first day of kindergarten, she took her mother's Brownie camera from a closet in her house and began snapping pictures of her classmates, instilling in her a lifelong interest in the medium. She remembers facing racism: "There was Jim Crow, so it was a real different time," she said. But her family fostered an interest in fine art, with her grandmother introducing her to poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar and others. Still, she was told she couldn't make it as an artist and thus went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., as a pre-med student. When she took the sole photography course available, she was told that, if she pursued a career behind the lens, she could only have two areas of focus: machinery or medical studies.

Ming Smith, Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York, 1976.©Ming Smith/Courtesy the artist and Aperture

Smith struck out in a different direction. She moved to New York and began doing dancing and modeling, though she never identified either as her primary occupation. In 1972, Smith was brought into the fold of the Kamoinge Workshop, an all-Black photography collective that had been formed in 1963 and initially led by Roy DeCarava, whose rigorously composed images made him one of the day's finest photographers. She had come in for a job assignment, and the workshop initiated a new consciousness for her when she heard two of its members chatting about photography. "Kamoinge introduced me to photography as an art form," she said. "It opened up a whole world for me It was a calling." Through Kamoinge, which was the subject of a Studio Museum in Harlem show in 1972, she fell in with a crowd that included Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and many of the era's top Black artists.

At the time, Smith was the sole female member among a group that included luminaries such as Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, and Beuford Smith, but she doesn't remember feeling dissuaded by the palpable gender disparity. "I wasn't thinking about it," she said. "I was just thinking about being an artist or a photographer." Such a spirit also led her to become the first Black female photographer with work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art when she submitted pictures to an open call in 1979. At the time, few knew about the milestone she had achieved. "It was like getting an Academy Award and nobody knowing about it," she said. But the experience was so validating for her and her family that, when her father was dying, to make him smile, all she would have to say was "Museum of Modern Art."

Ming Smith, America Seen through Stars and Stripes (Painted), New York, 1976.©Ming Smith/Courtesy the artist and Aperture

In the years since, Smith has continued producing her signature pictures, creating images that cover a lot of ground. She has photographed portraits (James Baldwin sitting in a theater, Sun Ra performing before a crowd, Grace Jones in her dressing room) and documentary-style images in the mode of Brassaï and Lisette Model. Then there are nature shots that allude to paintings by Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh and self-portraits in which she revisits and subverts her modeling photos. Some of her work alludes to structural racism, slavery, and the African diaspora-but usually elusively and by way of their titles.

"I always shot in black and white and in color," Smith said, explaining that she often totes around two cameras, one for each type of imaging. But because critics stigmatized color photography as being the stuff of advertising and fashion spreads, she initially hewed away from it, until she saw Gordon Parks's color pictures and felt inspired to take the subject up.

Yet Smith believes that color is even present in her black-and-white work. "With black and white, two colors create magic," she said, "just from using different shades."

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Ming Smith Shook Up Photography in the '70s. Now, She Is Coming into Full View.

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Ming Smith can still remember a phrase that Arthur Jafa used to describe something he saw in her photography: "the blur." The two artists were at an opening for Smith's work at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, and Jafa uttered those words in such a way that they were elongated and guttural, suggestive of a kind of presence that can be felt as much as seen.

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I really enjoy these paintings by Ewa Juszkiewicz. I remember seeing her work shown on one gallery's instagram page. I find it interesting her method of obscuring the faces. I also enjoy the realistic and surrealistic qualities of her paintings. These paintings have such a richness to them and the rendering of everything in the piece captures my interest.

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For nearly 10 years, the Warsaw-based artist Ewa Juszkiewicz has created paintings in style of 18th- and 19th-century European portraiture with a twist-her subjects' faces are obscured. The faces of the women she paints are always covered, whether by arrangements of plants or fungi, intricate hairstyles, tightly wrapped fabric, or other means. On the occasion of the artist's exhibition of new works at Gagosian's Park & 75 space on New York's Upper East Side, which runs through January 4 and is viewable through the gallery's front windows, ARTnews interviewed Juszkiewicz about how she engages with and upends art historical conventions, the role contemporary fashion plays in her oeuvre, and more.
ARTnews: What first drew you to take portraiture-specifically historical European portraiture-as the inspiration for your own work? Are there any specific artists, works, or historical periods that have been especially impactful on your practice?
Juszkiewicz: I have been interested in portraiture since starting out on my artistic path. And because of this, going back into history and exploring how portrait painting has evolved over the centuries was something that felt completely natural and essential to me. While looking at classic examples of portraiture from the past, I felt a kind of dissonance in the way I perceived them. On the one hand, those paintings attracted me and fascinated me because of their artistry and technique. On the other hand, I noticed that many of them present women according to a particular formula or convention. For example, in 18th- and 19th-century European painting, women were very often portrayed in a uniform way. Their poses, gestures, and facial expressions were very similar and showed no deep emotion or individuality. As a result, I developed a strong need to reference those portraits, and to establish a dialogue with them. I was driven by a desire to revitalize history, or rather to create my own story on the basis of it.

Besides 18th- and 19th-century European painting, to which I refer directly in my works, early Netherlandish painters, like Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and Robert Campin have had a significant influence on my practice. I am always impressed by their technique, approach to color, and especially their unbelievable precision in capturing the texture and features of objects and human figures. Every time I have an opportunity to see the Portrait of a Young Girl by Petrus Christus at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin it is a very intense and emotional experience for me. Other important influences have included Cindy Sherman's works, especially her "History Portraits." Apart from painting, I have been inspired by contemporary fashion designers, such as Rei Kawakubo and Iris van Herpen. In the fashion world, I am particularly fascinated by projects that disrupt stereotypical canons of beauty and show the female figure in an innovative way, reshaping its form and image.
There are disquieting, surreal aspects to your portraits. When did obscuring the faces of figures in your works become central to your practice, and what are some of the desired effects of this approach?

Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Jan Adam Kruseman), 2020, oil on canvas, 86 5/8 x 63 in.© Ewa Juszkiewicz/Courtesy Gagosian

I started this series of paintings in 2011, but before then I had already experimented and subjected the traditional portrait to various deformations. I had examined where the boundaries of the portrait were and what effects I could achieve by means of deformation and distortion.
What is the origin of the Gagosian show's title, "In vain her feet in sparkling laces glow?"
In these paintings, by covering or modifying a portrait, I want to disrupt the known order and shatter the uniform and conservative image of female beauty. Through a metamorphosis of classical paintings, I change their interpretation and provoke new, alternative associations. In my paintings, by juxtaposing seemingly incompatible elements, I create new, surreal images, which are hybrid characters that evoke ambiguous, often disturbing or grotesque associations. By interweaving elements relating to the canon and tradition with elements derived from nature and the senses, I want to release the expression, emotion, and vitality previously hidden by convention.

The title of the exhibition is taken from 18th-century poetry. It is a quote from a poem Dorinda at her Glass by the English poet Mary Leapor. I discovered Leapor's work quite recently. In her poetry, she touches upon subjects like social expectations with regard to female appearance. She also describes the female body in a very natural way. I think her poetry is universal and still speaks to us today.
All of your portraits are idiosyncratic and full of fascinating poses and details. Have you become more experimental with those works since you started creating them?
The paintings presented at Gagosian Park & 75 were prepared specially for this exhibition and with this particular space in mind. In this show I paraphrase artworks by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Jan Adam Kruseman, Joseph Karl Stieler, and Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller. Despite the fact that I draw inspiration from different sources, this set of paintings constitutes a harmonious whole, that becomes my own personal collection.
What can we expect from you next, and how do you continue to find new ways to riff on a centuries-old genre?

Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Joseph Karl Stieler), 2020, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 25 5/8 in.© Ewa Juszkiewicz/Courtesy Gagosian

Definitely, my portraits have evolved over the past years. It is a constant process. In the newest paintings, I have experimented even more with color and painting texture. Working on them has given me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction. I also have a feeling that my latest paintings have even greater dynamism, and that they have a kind of wildness that I have really wanted to show in recent times.

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Painter Ewa Juszkiewicz Wants to Shatter Conservative Ideas About Beauty

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For nearly 10 years, the Warsaw-based artist Ewa Juszkiewicz has created paintings in style of 18th- and 19th-century European portraiture with a twist-her subjects' faces are obscured. The faces of the women she paints are always covered, whether by arrangements of plants or fungi, intricate hairstyles, tightly wrapped fabric, or other means.

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36x40

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Here are scale images of my largest paintings I still have at my apartment with me. Could not find my ruler so a 12x12 record for scale.

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This article is about artists quarantined with their art collections. I think it is interesting to see how their perspectives of their pieces changed from when they were originally created. I also question how they would perceive these works today if they were not on lockdown with their pieces.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: An artwork's meaning is a tissue of implications and inferences, as Barry Hazard's contribution to this (below) suggests. Those implications may be embedded in the form of the work, but beholders infer what they will. I've been asking artists who live with art other than their own: In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, do you look at your personal collection differently now, and which works in particular? Is there one that especially resonates with you in this weird, frightening time? And does it take on new meaning?

Barry Hazard (Brooklyn, New York): I own this colored pencil drawing by Jaqueline Cedar. It is a bold, playful rendering of a flying woman, floating over the top of a well-combed head and surrounded by other randomly suspended images. Initially, the drawing seemed ethereal, full of levity, whim, and casual humor. As the days of quarantine progress, I am beginning to look at this drawing in a slightly different light. It now looks a little heavier, tenuous, surreal, with a touch of angst. It is the same daydream narrative as the first time I saw it, but now I wonder what I may have initially missed, or if the 2020 experience has tainted my perception.

Jaqueline is not only a dynamic visual artist, but she is also the founder and curator of the Brooklyn gallery Good Naked. Jackie has transformed her apartment gallery into a virtual and mobile experience, through online and outdoor exhibitions. A couple of her exterior shows included artwork wrapped to trees in Prospect Park, and sculpture placed on portable pedestals that were sitting in the grass and leaves.

Busy with the gallery, she has also been very productive with her own artwork. Seeing Jackie's tenacious response to the quarantine experience has tweaked my perception of her drawing. I wonder if the winged woman might be Jaqueline herself, trying to navigate a new reality.

I definitely see the drawing in a broader, more complex way, after spending more time viewing and reflecting on it. What content does Jackie imply, and how much of it am I inferring? The drawing has evolved in my mind, but also the world is a little different now, and that collective difference seems to have changed everything.

Wendy White (New York City): I traded with Lamar Peterson for this piece in 2004. We were in a residency with several other artists and exchanged works at the end as a way to remember our time together. I don't live with many works on paper and have always cherished the directness and simplicity of this image - a small, tender moment rendered succinctly in black and white. Who but Lamar Peterson would think to document such a seemingly innocuous moment?

I've always loved looking at this drawing, but recently its quirkiness has become an even more comforting presence. What is that fence? Why is her lower body missing? Why is the dolphin's eye open... is it bored, apathetic, tired of performing?

In a year of insufferable loss, we can't hug anyone. We can't even shake hands. Suddenly a woman embracing a dolphin like a long-lost friend feels like a fever dream. I'm jealous of her. I want to hug a dolphin. This tiny image that used to seem surreal and perhaps even a bit comical has taken on a disarmingly serious tone as the months drag on. Like many other things that we used to take for granted, this small, personal moment now looms huge and universal.

Rema Ghuloum (Los Angeles, California): Earlier this year, Sarah Cain's painting "Untitled (early summer)" entered my life. Its presence is undeniable. Living with this work carries so much meaning for me. I can't help but associate it with strength, confidence, and power-which also describes Sarah, one of my dearest friends and greatest inspirations.

The painting is situated at the center of everything. It feels like the sun, always shining in my living room. It's where I spend most of my time feeding my son, where I nursed him, and now where he drinks his bottle on his own. He was seven months old when we received the initial stay-at-home order. Grappling with the isolation was difficult even as I gained confidence as a mother.

The painting has been present through this period. It expanded and opened its arms wide. It became a window and an anchor that my son has lived with for most of his life. It is large, but its physical scale pales in comparison to the energy it exudes. It is like a prism that keeps transforming. The washy pinks, greens, violets, the one opaque red, the blues that reflect the sky on a clear LA afternoon; the black shapes, parallelograms, and fluorescent yellow rectangles that recall signs, the city - they are all contrasted by open space. They transport you. The white recedes into the wall. It oscillates beside the strips of canvas that flicker against an early evening blue backdrop of warms and cools. It feels like a walk, like fresh air.

The painting has attitude. It cuts through the BS. The strips of canvas hang effortlessly and the beaded line embeds itself into the ground. The painting doesn't try to trick you. It's a quiet reminder to devote time to what nurtures, what is most essential, and to do it with love.

Mary Jones (New York City): Stephen Mueller (1947-2011) is in my bubble. He was there before COVID-19 and will be there long after. I keep his work close to me IRL and in reproduction at the studio. This painting is from 2004 and I bought it about four years later from his studio on Little West 12th Street. I consider it both a trophy and a muse and it would certainly be in my arms if this place were suddenly ablaze.

The painting has two parallel objects - a silhouette of a Buddhist torso, flattened with a diamond pattern, and a striped oval. Both float serenely forward from slightly diagonal washes of an unfolding spectrum of pure colors. Deep space, deep consciousness, geometry, and a light touch. How he keeps it breathing still has me hypnotized, and I intend to stay camped in its spell.

As this stifling stretch of quarantine time extends indefinitely, my relationships take on new dimensions - mandatory boundaries necessitate new ways to keep us communicating and vibrant to one another. I want my relationships to survive the pandemic. Although techno connections can be a necessary effort for the pleasure of staying involved, I often have nothing to say, but nevertheless unleash the onscreen chat that is, in its essence, a ritualization of longing, a refusal to let go. There are people that I miss so much, and since I can't see or touch so many of them, the boundaries between those who have left us and those who are lodged in a Zoom screen begins to dissolve, and in that space I've remembered visits to Stephen's studio with renewed clarity.

The end of Little West 12th was still surprisingly undeveloped when he was there, and it was exciting just to encounter this small relic of the old city of the 1970s. The building seemed shuttered and uninhabited; I'd always check his address a few times before pounding on the door, and never failed to be surprised when he opened it. The entrance was dark and small, with a glimpse of his bedroom on the right, where a meditation rug lay on the floor, then into the kitchen and his table. Incense, tea, and great music were always part of the experience. Sitting with him over tea, he would smoke and I'd use the time to overcome, to the best of my ability, my overwrought fandom and my needlessly total intimidation of Stephen. Then came the work. The room was square with high ceilings and a central skylight. Extra paintings were always stored out of sight. Everything visible was new, in progress, in the light. These were paintings beaming their magic as if they'd just landed from outer space, with codes and trace memories for psychic survival.

Or at least that's what my painting of his seems to be emitting to me, as I watch it from my couch.

Beth Campbell (Brooklyn, New York): It was the whites of the eyes that hooked into my doldrums, slowly oscillating between anxiety and emptiness.

Back in January 2020, my perception of this painting by Karen Heagle would have settled on the otherworldly majesty of this lioness surrounded by reflective gold while adorned with the deep velvet red of a mouthful of meat pulled from a carcass - wild, powerful, and beautiful.

But these eye whites, or sclerae, would begin, in the following months, to amplify my sadness, much like hitting repeat on a biting love song in hopes that it will push you deeper into your melancholy. Alone in the bedroom, changing my clothes, I would look up at her.

According to Wikipedia, the sclera surrounding the iris conveys the direction in which the eye is looking. To engage another's eyes is to witness their awareness, yet we opt out for the reflective glints in the pavement or the hungry feed on our phones. Currently, it's a challenge to avoid contact in this new sea of eyes. I look to the eyes, all the masks with eyes; I don't want to see the mask-less face.

It's not very common to see the whites of an animal's eyes. Perhaps this conveniently allows us to animate these creatures with our own agendas and hierarchies, as we do with each other. I feel sorry for the fate of the feline, I feel sorry for the brutality on the streets, and I feel so terribly sorry for the many afflicted families.

I can't really know the lioness and I don't really know much of myself. I do feel the slightest bit of jealousy about the way she eats the meat, perhaps with pleasure, definitely with necessity. I eat the meat with sides of guilt from land use, exhaust from semis, truck-stop biscuits, gravy, large plastic cups... Everything is so out of control.

For the moment, COVID is removing this covert domestication of daily busy-ness, endless consumption, and needy media interactions, and exposing that, despite this ruse of civilized performance, we are all wild and alone, misunderstood to ourselves and everyone else.

John Monti (Brooklyn, New York): This is a cherished work by Kathy Grove titled "The Other Series After Benton." Grove is known as a conceptual feminist photographer who manipulates iconic images, fundamentally changing their meaning. There are many layers of interpretation in this work and, through the lens of COVID-19, it goes meta fairly quickly.

Thomas Hart Benton's 1939 painting, "Persephone"(which Grove alters) is based on the Greek myth of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus, who is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. Through the abduction she becomes goddess of the underworld, springtime, flowers, and vegetation. She is often portrayed robed and is said to make her appearance in the spring in anticipation of the harvest, and later in the fall disappears back into the earth.

Benton portrays a farmer in the role of Hades, leering lecherously from behind a tree. Persephone is represented as a nude - an unknowing ingénue enjoying an autumn day, or a vintage pin-up replete with black high heels and a velvety red robe. In Grove's work, "The Other Series After Benton," the figure of Persephone is digitally removed from the scene and from our gaze, and the robe is meticulously reconstituted, made languid in its entirety. The farmer's sexual desires are thwarted; he is emasculated, wanting, longing. The viewer is caught in a double bind, wanting to conjure the missing figure whilerecognizing the poignancy of Grove's feminist critique.

During our moment of political upheaval and pandemic, I have been looking at this work often with so many things in mind: our misogynist 45 th, the Woman's March, the #MeToo movement, rising COVID-19 deaths. The absence of the body in Grove's work conveys a dreadful metaphor for the 275,000 people dead of COVID in this country (and the 1.5 million worldwide). The scene where the figure once lay now conveys a shrine of sorts, not unlike an impromptu memorial where people leave flowers and other mementos. The red shroud is a stand-in for the body's absence and now seems to be a site where it is laid to rest.

In spite of all this there is optimism, and with the vaccine on the horizon there is hope. Beyond the foreground there is a languid, bucolic scene ripe for renewal; it must be spring!

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Artists Quarantine with Their Art Collections

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: An artwork's meaning is a tissue of implications and inferences, as Barry Hazard's contribution to this (below) suggests. Those implications may be embedded in the form of the work, but beholders infer what they will.

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Did not finish this piece I started last week in class but here is how it has progressed since
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