“Whenever you are doing a painting or a series, you have to leave something electric in the picture, something horrifying on a personal level.”  casual quote by Rand from the Journal of Delacroix A must-see exhibition held over at the Skirball Museum is Archie Rand’s: “60 Paintings from the Bible”. Rand, currently a professor at […]

Tucked within a plaza of galleries you’ll find the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica. On view until November 28th is the Black Madonna exhibition by Mark Steven Greenfield, a native Angelino (the exhibition is also available to view online, though you’ll miss much of the size and scope). I’d glossed a couple of the […]

Milano Chow’s intricate black-and-white drawings at Bel Ami depict a dreamy world where decorous women peer out of elegant townhouses and pose languidly against ornate clocks that seem to double as architectural follies. This show, “Park La Brea,” is titled after an iconic Los Angeles mega-development of mid-century apartment buildings. However, despite its plausible reference […]

Jennifer Grote’s work on display at Indian Hill Gallery is an exhibit for our time, for the very moment in which we are living.  A large number of the works were completed in 2020.  The title of one even references social distancing.  But this show is not about the terrors of the virus or the […]

“Let’s meet digitally” … the phrase many  hear most often these days. In addition to work meetings and social gatherings being moved to virtual formats, so have many fashion exhibits from major museums around the world. Exhibits about Christian Dior and his life’s work (from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs), Elsa Schiaparelli and her foray […]

As leaves of autumn transition in our try-state region, Eisele Gallery presents twelve descriptive plein air paintings by Joseph Orr. Orr’s contemporary depictions of rural American landscape are executed in acrylic, a medium he has championed over 40 years. Orr, along with his wife Rita and two other artists, founded the National Oil & Acrylic […]

Kennedy Heights Art Center’s holiday exhibition is “Metamorphosis.” Featuring artists from the Kennedy Artist Collective, Mallory Feltz, director of exhibitions and public art, explains that the show’s title, was chosen because of its meaning of change–either personally, professionally, and/or artistically. This year has brought about a lot of change for many of us, and some of that is […]

“Planar” John’s statement and bio: I see the world as an image from which I choose parts to create my photographs. For me, a wall begins as a canvas, a two-dimensional surface, a foundation on which to build an image. Each wall is like a found object, filled with the information I incorporate into my […]

Among the finest historical fiction of 2020, Jess Walter’s novel “The Cold Millions” is one of the very best (the other two I’ve read this year that are as excellent as Walter’s novel are “The Pull of the Stars” and “An Elegant Woman”).  Walters examines a relatively little known aspect of the development of The […]

Julia Alvarez’s new novel, “Afterlife”, is one of those relatively short but nearly perfect novels that I used to associate so strongly with the late Anita Brookner’s fiction. It’s beautifully written, and its tone subtle and elegant, just pitch perfect.  The narrator/protagonist, Antonia, has just retired from teaching in a small college in Vermont (in […]

“Shuggie Bain”, by Douglas Stuart, just won the prestigious Booker Award for fiction; I read it a couple of months ago, and it is an astonishing first novel. The narrator/protagonist is a young boy named Shuggie, for his father Shug, a cab driver married to the boy’s mother, Agnes. The relationship between Agnes, who’s increasingly […]