Jane Durrell

Jane Durrell writes on the visual arts and travel for a variety of publications. Her career has tacked between stints at various museums, particularly the Cincinnati Art Museum, and journalism. Each kind of work has been useful to the other. Her bachelor's degree from Western College in Oxford, Ohio, is in English literature, and like other lit majors she thinks literature prepares one for life. It has been perfectly satisfactory for her life, at any rate.

Interview with Jymi Bolden

“Art is one of the oldest forms of creative expression. . .but often everything is explained in terms of the white male,” Jymi Bolden, black and male and himself an artist, told me when we met to talk about black artists today and their inclusion/exclusion in the visual arts world. The conversation naturally moved to […]

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Profile, Cedric Cox

Artist and native Cincinnatian Cedric Cox  considers his work “A spiritual testimony to the visual experiences that arouse my senses and my synapses, as I examine and interpret the world around me, quietly and loudly.”  Artists in any field would be the first to understand how something could be both quiet and loud; my own […]

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Profile of Bonnie Goldberg

“Blue will give me fits.  Red, I can tame” Bonita Williams Goldberg told me.  We were in her studio, the walls alive with her paintings. Some coast along pretending to be landscapes – well, actually, they are landscapes, but the color sense and design of her abstracts hold true here as well. “I learn something […]

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CAROLYN SHINE: IN MEMORIUM

Carolyn Shine, who died late last year at the age of 101,  lived a life illuminated by visual arts and illuminated those arts for others. She was my colleague at the Cincinnati Art Museum, my friend before that, and always an example of life lived well. A Cincinnatian by birth, Carolyn’s home from the beginning […]

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Profile of Patricia Olding

Patricia Olding says she likes to paint something others might miss. To call attention to it. “Not an apple, but this particular thing about apples. I believe the unnoticed needs to become the preeminent subject of my paintings.” We talked in Olding’s studio at the Pendleton Art Center, where she has worked since 2001, in […]

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Profile of Joe Girandola

Joseph Girandola, president of the Art Academy of Cincinnati since mid-summer, first came here in 2012 to join the faculty of University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), after living and working in such varied and often storied locations as Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Philadelphia, Omaha. What, we asked, was it […]

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"Art in Bloom" at the Cincinnati Art Museum

By its nature, Art in Bloom at the Cincinnati Art Museum comes and goes quickly in its biennial appearances. This year’s took place October 17 – 20 and as usual brightened the experience of Museum-goers on those fortunate days. If visual art is sometimes considered a for-the-ages sort of thing, blooming flowers are its exact […]

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Profile of Jan Brown Checco and the recent exchange with Sister City Liuzhou, China

Jan Brown Checco’s pleasure in making art generously extends to all those who use art as the means of interpreting what they see. Most recently she’s been deeply involved in “The Great Cincinnati/Liuzhou Paint Out!” –  a week-long visit by eight artists from Liuzhou, China, partnering with Cincinnati artists to paint together in Eden Park […]

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Profile of Nancy Nordloh Neville

“I do enjoy showing my work,” Nancy Nordloh Neville told me. “It’s my life on review.  You remember how and where you were when you painted it.  You remember if the rain came before you were finished, if you made friends with the neighbors’ dog, or if you forgot an important supply.” A plein air […]

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Jens Rosenkrantz: Profile

Pendleton Street Photography is a new Over-the-Rhine gallery in an area long linked to visual arts; in it founder Jens Rosenkrantz expands the area’s coverage of the constantly enlarging field of photography. Rosenkrantz, retired now from a career in the investment/brokerage field and a brief fling in the restaurant business, is a serious photographer himself […]

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Profile of Ena Nearon Menefield

“Cincinnati is a good city for creating a place for yourself,” Ena Nearon Menefield, who has been here since 1996, says.  Her own background, as a woman of color, makes her an experienced judge in such matters. Originally from New York City, the place where she raised her children, and later resident in California, she […]

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Stewart Goldman

Stewart Goldman has been making art longer than many viewers – although not this writer – have been alive, a circumstance that does not seem to hamper either his relevance or appeal. By his mid- 20s, when the 20th century itself was in its sixties and seventies, Goldman’s work began appearing publicly with considerable regularity. […]

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Profile of Carl Samson

The challenge for figurative painting, says Carl Samson, practitioner of same, is that it needs to be relevant to today. He speaks of hoping that his works “give people something they’ve not considered. Give them things to think about. New considerations. Preservation of the natural world. Patina is not everything.” That’s a large order. It’s […]

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Two FotoFocus shows at The Lloyd Library

Anyone drawn to museums knows that the stacks, the storage space for everything not on exhibition, have an irresistible fascination. Lloyd Library & Museum, 917 Plum Street in downtown Cincinnati, capitalizes on that attraction for the exhibition “Out of the Stacks: Lloyd Inspired Artist Books” (September 28 – November 30), one of their two FotoFocus […]

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Profile of Robert Flischel

Robert Flischel is someone who can’t get enough of looking.  He speaks of seeing abstraction in porches, in tool heads, in 300-year-old pavement – “all the lines” – and says he learned long ago that “the body is an abstract composition.”  He talks of “the series of lines that work underneath the picture’s composition within […]

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Lloyd Library Exhibition

The Lloyd Library, to my knowledge, is the first entity ever to use as exhibition title the key word broken into syllables, with accompanying accent.  Phar’-ma-cog-no-sy Illustrated: A History of Natural Pharmaceuticals, on view there now, does just that, and those of us not pharmacologists are grateful. The term, the exhibition tells us, “is planted, […]

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“Spring Creations”, Landscapes at Eisele Gallery

Eisele Gallery welcomed warmer weather with “Spring Creations,” featuring three regional representational artists whose paintings blended well in an exhibition on view May 11 through June 16. Because each is represented by the gallery their individual works can be seen there at all times. Cindy Nixon, one of this trio, gives us un-peopled landscapes that […]

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ART ACADEMY OF CINCINNATI

An institution that’s been in existence for a century and a half must be doing something right, including response to changing times.  The Art Academy of Cincinnati, which will celebrate 150 years in 2019, fits these criteria. Although modern memories may assume the school’s earliest existence was as an appendage to the Cincinnati Art Museum, […]

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Liz Zorn at 124 West Pike Street, Covington

Liz Zorn likes a square canvas.  Not always, of course, but more often than many artists, she confines her compositions to a canvas measuring the same on every side.  Her works as seen in “Liz Zorn Solo Show” at 124 West Pike Street Gallery in Covington now through May 26th are seldom enclosed in frames […]

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'Hassard & Steele: Concrete Dreams" at the Richmond (Indiana) Art Museum

“Geometry is like music,” artist Marlene Steele recently told a group of high school students, gathered around an exhibition of her work at the Richmond (Indiana) Art Museum. The students looked surprised but interested. “Drawing is a basic artist skill,” she went on, and showed them her sketch book.  It is small, perhaps six by […]

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Profile, Linda Schwartz

“I like artists and scientists,” Linda Schwartz told me.  We were seated at the dining table in her art-filled house, with tea and a barely touched plate of cookies, talking about her career in art. The other two occupants of the house, a pair of small but stocky, very vocal black dogs, had been shushed […]

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Review of Lloyd Library exhibition

Perhaps the most seasonal exhibition in town right now is “Winter Greens: Seasonal Illustrations from the Lloyd Library.” The Library, at 917 Plum Street in downtown Cincinnati, is both a library and museum with rare books, botanical drawings and manuscripts that provide, for this exhibition, a long look back at our pleasure in the natural […]

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“Yes!” at Cincinnati Art Galleries

Those who missed the engaging exhibition “Yes!” at Cincinnati Art Galleries, 225 East 6th Street in downtown Cincinnati (October 27 through November 25) are not wholly out of luck as it consisted of recent pieces by fifteen Gallery artists, whose work can often be seen in the spacious exhibition area there, although not so fully […]

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Manifest Gallery Artists in Residence

In case you haven’t noticed, figurative painting is alive and well and the absorbing   interest of any number of young artists.  Two such artists are recipients of the 2017/18 Manifest Artist Residency award and are currently established in their respective studios at the Cincinnati gallery. We talked with each of them for this issue of […]

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Review of "Biophilia, Standing Witness" at Studio San Giuseppe Art Gallery, Mt. St. Joseph

An undercurrent of pleasure runs through the exhibition Biophilia, Standing Witness on view now through October 20 at Studio San Giuseppe Art Gallery, Mount St. Joseph University. Twelve women artists, all with roots in Cincinnati and/or Columbus, are each represented in some depth – not easy in a show including so many artists. The exhibition […]

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Relation at Brazee Gallery

Relation, an exhibition of Stuart Fink’s intense and intricate sculpture, fills the two relatively small exhibition rooms at Brazee Gallery in Oakley with ease and assurance. It’s almost as though they’ve been there before and in a sense they have, although not these particular pieces. They have a famial relationship to earlier work Fink has […]

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Wash Park Gallery Review

In a neighborly gesture, Wash Park Art at 1215 Elm Street welcomes the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company to its new location half a block away with “Midsummer Dreams,” a show inspired by the Company’s first offering there, Midsummer Night’s Dream. More than a dozen artists, many with Cincinnati ties, are represented in this engaging exhibition. The […]

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Profile of Sara Pearce

Sara Caswell Pearce makes art with verve, gusto and infinite care. She delights in doing it. This artist is most regularly a print maker and collage artist, and she works in two smallish rooms across the hallway from one another on the upper floor of Brazee Studios in Oakley. Pearce and her husband live only […]

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Profile of Leslie Shiels

Leslie Shiels makes paintings and prints as her own response to life, to what she sees around her in solid fact and in underlying meaning. Talking with her, I had the feeling that she just can’t help it; when something interests her, bothers her, gives her an idea, she wants to make art of it. […]

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"Birds of Paradise" at Marta Hewett Gallery

The birds in Kevin Veara’s paintings are vividly alive in their stylized natural world. Birds of Paradise, an exhibition of a dozen or so of the artist’s recent works at Marta Hewett Gallery, Cincinnati, is on view in an area far from the door, almost as though these handsome creatures might fly right out if […]

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PAINTING IN PUBLIC

Kevin T. Kelly and his son, Jack Kelly, are in the same line of work. They are artists; they make paintings. This is often a solitary craft, practiced in the studio, possibly alone. Their recent project at the Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Airport was not at all like that. They worked twelve ten-hour days (9 a.m. […]

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"Provocateur" by Tyler Shields

Provocateur, Tyler Shields’ new book of photographs, is a weighty publication. Close to a square foot in shape and about an inch and a half thick, it comes in at between six and seven pounds on my kitchen scale. So – best looked at opened on a table. Shields sets out to surprise and engage […]

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Tribute to Fran Watson

Remembering Fran Watson, I think first of the pleasure of being with her.  We had a scad of things in common, and probably an equal number of things not in common, so conversation was both easy and informative.  We were both mothers, both writers, both tuned into changes our longish lives allowed us to observe. […]

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"Foto Founders" at Covington's Behringer-Crawford Museum

Foto Founders at Covington’s Behringer-Crawford Museum provided an interesting element in the flurry of Foto Focus exhibitions during its October run. Who were primary influences on many of today’s practicing photographers in the Cincinnati region? Five professors at three area academic institutions were spotlighted, with five to six works by each, usually including both color […]

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"Memorable Impressions" at Cincinnati Art Galleries

Mark Daly’s appealing paintings are on view at Cincinnati Art Galleries in a show called “Memorable Impressions” that shares with viewers his own pleasures at looking. He likes looking at:  sailboats, sunsets, church spires in hazy weather, city streets filling up with snow.  The works are new, some as recent as three weeks before the […]

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Bill Broun's "Night of the Animals"

Communication and observation are constant and encroaching for the populace in Bill Broun’s big, unnerving novel, Night of the Animals, set in a London of the future but uncomfortably close to our own time. Its climactic events take place in 2052. Broun’s hero, Cuthbert Handley, is an Indigent, capital “I,” a specific class in this […]

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Profile of Kim Krause

Kim Krause’s paintings are teasingly near to representational, until you realize they are all about the interaction of shapes and colors to the exclusion of other considerations. These colors are seldom nuanced; they are flat and precise but infinitely varied. The shapes themselves are nearly figurative, with hints of being more so. What goes on […]

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Profile of Ellie Fabe

This is a profile in every sense. Multi-talented Ellie Fabe is a singer/songwriter as well as a maker of visual art, our focus here. So profile, with its suggestion of a view from only one side, applies in all shades of the word. Recently I met with Fabe in her studio to talk about her […]

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The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842-1843

For nearly two years in the early 1840s, Victoria still new to the throne, a young Englishman with a nimble pen for both drawing and writing fulfilled his father’s request for weekly letters, although during most of that time they lived in the same house. The elder Doyle meant it as a learning experience, and […]

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THERE AND THEN

Here and now mercilessly morphs into there and then, but sometimes a news release Now brings up a Then.  The Museum of Modern Art reports a new hanging of some of its permanent collection, bringing to mind a visit I made to New York in late winter, 2005, to see what the Modern was showing […]

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Profile of Thomas C. Umfrid, College-Conservatory of Music

Artists make things.  They make stories, they make pictures, they rustle around through possibilities, try something different, emerge with what may be a new look for some old thing. A particular line of work – that is in fact making things – is the creation of sets for theater productions. People can learn to do […]

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Letter From New Orleans

New Orleans is a state of mind, and in its own individual way, a state of art. There’s no question but that New Orleans residents care about how things look. Where else are you likely to find a museum called “The House of Dance & Feathers” installed in a small-ish building once a barber shop, […]

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Profile of Frank Satogata

Frank Satogata’s studio is deep in the Brazee Street complex of artists’ work spaces, down one hall and then another, up stairs and along another hall before a knock on a door brings this pleasant, smiling man to open it and a little flurry results as his companion Elle, a West Highland terrier, is equally […]

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Profile, Thomas Towhey

The artist Thomas Hieronymous Towhey, born in Cincinnati in the mid-20th century and resident here most of the time since, gave himself his middle name. Towhey is an admirer of that early Netherlandish painter, Hieronymous Bosch, who in fact played around with his own nomenclature. The Dutchman’s original surname referred to the place his family […]

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Cole Carothers, Pragmatist on the Run

An artist, says artist Cole Carothers, must be patient and inquisitive. Carothers has been a working artist since the 1970s so speaks from experience. For his own paintings and prints, he says it’s a matter of simplifying, simplifying, pushing toward “a reduction of elements, simplicity of masses, trees becoming shapes.” What is happening here is […]

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Havana at Malton Gallery

Susan Schuler’s paintings in the exhibition Havana at Malton Gallery in Hyde Park/Oakley speak for themselves, which is fortunate as the background information I asked for consisted of a statement by the artist relating to an earlier show, and when I requested a press release on this exhibition I was told they no longer do […]

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Profile of Kevin Kelly

Kevin T. Kelly’s studio is deep in the Essex Studios building in Walnut Hills; he met me at the Essex Street door to lead me through multiple corridors to his space where the north wall is all window and the clutter all has meaning. Any studio is cluttered if real work goes on there, and […]

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Letter From Atlanta

An Atlanta visitor might easily miss Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, but as a frequent traveler there I’ve learned to stop by. Temporary shows are interesting and the permanent collection itself is fine. The building, designed by the late Michael Graves relatively early in his career, gives thoughtful attention to what it houses and […]

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Urbanscape: Through Paint and Lens at Wash Park Art

In the pleasant confines of Wash Park Art, 1215 Elm Street, just a few doors down from Music Hall, the work of three painters and two photographers shared space handily in Urbanscape: Through Paint and Lens, a show that only recently closed. The gallery is the first floor of a 19th century row house and […]

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Magnitude Seven at Manifest Gallery

In our culture, where Bigger is often equated with Better, there’s a decided relief in turning to a competition where Small is All. Manifest Gallery’s eleventh annual Magnitude Seven, with no boundaries on method or media but strict boundaries on size – seven inches max in any direction – this year as for every previous […]

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Returning To Our Beginnings

In the 1980s the support staff at the Cincinnati Art Museum, like others before them and after them,was engaged with the collection, with the Museum, and with the idea of visual art itself, all of which enlivened their days. Last month some of those 1980s staffers gathered (from Chicago, from Cleveland, from Washington, D.C. as […]

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LETTER FROM WASHINGTON

We lived in The District – Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia) – when our youngest child went off to kindergarten.  I went right down to the Smithsonian and said “I volunteer.” The Smithsonian was welcoming – by then I’d published some articles and worked in public relations – and sent me off to the National […]

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“Meditation” at Wash Park Art Shows Evan Hildebrandt and Alison Shepard

Gorgeous is not a word to be thrown out lightly, and in any case it’s usually not accepted  ArtSpeak, but some of the works in Meditation at Wash Park Art, 1215 Elm Street, call out for it.  The show presents new works and collaborations by Evan Hildebrandt and Alison Shepard, established artists who are married […]

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Susan Schuler at Malton

Susan Schuler, abstract painter, has moved to Albuquerque.  For the light. For the glorious southwestern sunlight, clarity intact, that has bedazzled artists since at least the 19th century. Schuler, widely traveled, is a sophisticated judge of sunlight and its artistic uses. A Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area native, children now grown, she last year packed up and […]

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Letter From Italy: Christmas Past

We were in three cars, and two of them had missed a turn. It was foggy, it was dark, it didn’t seem like Italy although that was where we were. The American cell phone, incompatible with the English one, only accommodated text messages but those of us in the two lost cars communicated by the […]

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The Urban Landscape: Six Artists – Six Views Clifton Cultural Arts Center

How odd – not one of the artists whose works comprise The Urban Landscape: Six Artists – Six Views at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center  through December 5 indicates that people occupy the spaces they portray. This seems to be a curatorial decision, as the show’s defining statement says “Six contemporary painters explore the urban […]

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Cincinnati: Shadow and Light

All of us who have read the Cincinnati Enquirer down the years know Michael Keating’s photographs. They are both smart and subjective, they are on the note, they tell us more than print sometimes can.  But we don’t know them as they can be seen at the Kennedy Heights Arts Center in Cincinnati: Shadow and […]

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The Peoples' Art

An unexpected and rewarding photography exhibition in this photo-saturated fall, mounted by Dan Wheeler, the son of the artist (himself a serious photographer), is in a spot you are not likely to run across by chance. “The Art of Grayce F. Wheeler,” in the Event Center at Marjorie P. Lee Retirement Community, 3550 Shaw Avenue […]

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Letter from Mantua

I am in Mantua (well, Mantova to the home folks), having dinner under a groined and painted ceiling in a square room with remnants of frescoes on the wall. I have spent the day in palaces, specifically the palazzo the Gonzango family called home and the other one, the Palazzo del Te, where they hung […]

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Letter From London

In London, this time, we went to the source. The art-shows-open-to-the-public source, that is. The source itself is unlikely. It’s The Foundling Hospital, established two hundred and seventy-five years ago to care for unwanted babies but not long after also becoming England’s first public art gallery. William Hogarth, that caustic observer of the kind of […]

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Letter from the Mid-Atlantic

by Jane Durrell June 18, 2014 We are cutting through calm waters in a ship so large, so superbly engineered that only now and then does a tremor indicate we are at sea.  The Queen Mary II is majestic indeed, elegantly Art Deco in most respects and staffed by people so obliging they seem to […]

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Poetry – June

THREE POEMS BY JANE DURRELL LONG TIME GONE Who cried, in that other time from now, Whose heart hurt, unhealed, until Bliss intruded, out of nowhere, and then was gone again. Old carings, rustling like cicada shells Form intact, being gone Remembering remembering. THOUGHTS GOING SOUTH ON I-75 I cannot read in Tennessee The mountains […]

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Raveled/Unraveled at Clifton Cultural Arts Center

by Jane Durrell Raveled – Unraveled starts off with a a linguistic challenge. In most usages “ravel” and “unravel” carry the same meaning, but for the purposes of this exhibition they are taken to be opposites. If that were always the case, MacBeth would have had no need to knit up his raveled sleeve of […]

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CAC 75th Anniversary

When we joined the CAC in the 1950s we were just back from two months abroad, having saved our money and quit our jobs to make the trip. CAC was young and so were we, and I think we were fired with the idea of keeping our culture level high and open. Also, it didn’t […]

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Atmosphere at Miller Gallery Review

by Jane Durrell Atmosphere at Miller Gallery is a pleasurable show, hung so that the works feed off each other in interesting ways. computer science homework help The chosen subject matter is a jumping-off point to present artists moving in both original and time-tested ways, admittedly some more successfully than others. Karen Hollingsworth’s “Lake Effect,” […]

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Lily Mulberry Retrospective

by Jane Durrell Lily Mulberry’s long and difficult battle with cancer ended this month. For almost a decade her 1305 Gallery has given authenticity and continuing interest to the vivacity of the upper Main Street art scene and she herself was always a pleasure to encounter. The loss to the art community is both professional […]

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Review of M. Katherine Hurley's “Returning Home,” La Poste Eatery

by Jane Durrell At La Poste Eatery in Clifton, artist M. Katherine Hurley is telling a story over dinner.  Her story, “Returning Home,” is on the walls, in colors good enough to eat – if she will forgive me for saying that – in a series of ten works that reflect a trip from Ohio […]

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Threads of Heaven

by Jane Durrell It was Mark Twain who told us “Clothes make the man,” adding a Twain-ish thought about the little influence naked men have on society.  Certainly the Manchu, who came roiling in from the northeast to take over the whole of China in the 17th century, bought the sentiment, for both men and […]

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Letter from Santa Fe

by Jane Durrell The light!  The light!  No wonder artists, passing through, change their minds and never go away. The town is tucked in an upper layer of mountainous terrain, peaks rising on three sides and the fourth side best essay writing services open toward Albuquerque, sixty-some miles away. We had come for a winter […]

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The Medium is the Message

by Jane Durrell The Medium is the Message is a fitting title for the new show at downtown’s YWCA. In it four artists, each besotted by color, express themselves in individual mediums.  Even the two painters use markedly different methods, contrasting with each other as well as with the fabric artist and the glass artist. […]

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Speaking of Color: Trish Weeks at The Carnegie

Speaking of Color: Trish Weeks at The Carnegie By Jane Durrell Trish Weeks calls her show at The Carnegie Speaking of Color, a topic her work explores with zest and spirit. Weeks is enamored of color, besotted by it, can’t get enough of marvelous shades. She slips easily from almost naturalism (a couple of renditions […]

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Outside/Inside

Outside/Inside By Jane Durrell Outside/Inside at Covington Arts is a show its curator, Jennifer Grote, conceives as an interaction between architecture (i.e. the space itself) and the art. Two of the artists take on that challenge with enthusiasm while the curator’s placement produces relationships with the surroundings for the other two. The exhibition’s title surely […]


LETTER FROM NEW YORK

LETTER FROM NEW YORK By Jane Durrell It’s slow going on a Sunday afternoon in the new installation of European Paintings (1250-1800) at the Metropolitan Museum. The handsome spaces have been spruced up and galleries once given over to temporary shows now are part of the logical flow of ideas and innovations that can be […]

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One New Painting: Mark III

One New Painting: Mark III By Jane Durrell It’s like a party at The Galleries at Frame Designs, Loveland, where individual works by twenty-six artists fill the walls and more for the third edition of a show called “One New Painting,” running through September 28. The resulting mix of styles and approaches is almost like […]

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The Human Face: A Revelation at Artisan Enterprise Center

review of   The Human Face: A Revelation at Artisan Enterprise Center Jane Durrell Covington’s Artisan Enterprise Center currently is chock-a-block with art, with ideas, with good reasons to spend time looking at the two linked exhibitions on view there as The Human Face: A Revelation. You may spend more time than you expected – there’s […]


Review of Eternal Summer: The Art of Edward Henry Potthast.

Review of Eternal Summer: The Art of Edward Henry Potthast. By Jane Durrell The Cincinnati Art Museum has concocted a truly vacation-time exhibition with Eternal Summer: The Art of Edward Henry Potthast. Concoct is the operative word here; the installation, in a manner of speaking, is the show, with a bonus at the end. Eternal […]

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Donna Talerico at Saks Fifth Avenue

Donna Talerico at Saks Fifth Avenue By Jane Durrell The invitation is to meet the artist, Donna Talerico, whose show opens that very evening, in the shoe department on the first floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. In Cincinnati Saks is on Fifth Street rather than Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Race. Saks is kicking […]

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MILTON GLASER: Drawings and Rugs

MILTON GLASER: Drawings and Rugs Carl Solway Gallery, 424 Findlay Street, Cincinnati By Jane Durrell Milton Glaser, designer for all seasons, has turned his omni-talented hand to carpets, as can be seen in the glowing exhibition Milton Glaser: Drawings and Rugs at Carl Solway Gallery now through July 13. “Glowing” is used advisedly, as the execution […]


Profile: Tyler Wilkinson, Manifest Gallery Artist in Residence

  Profile: Tyler Wilkinson, Manifest Gallery Artist in Residence Jane Durrell Tyler Wilkinson, Manifest Gallery’s first Artist-in-Residence, greets visitors to his studio at the rear of the gallery during every opening, an act of hospitality he clearly enjoys aside from its requirement for his year-long role. Tall and slim, Wilkinson has a ready smile, extremely […]

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Philip LaVelle at 1305 Gallery

Philip LaVelle at 1305 Gallery ~ Jane Durrell   Philip LaVelle’s vibrant show of new work at 1305 Gallery on Main Street opened immediately after the January aeqai appeared and closed immediately before this issue.  Its visual and intellectual content encouraged a belated review. At first glance LaVelle might be proposing a future in which […]

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Review, Frank Satogata at Xavier University Art Gallery

Review, Frank Satogata at Xavier University Art Gallery ~ Jane Durell The surest antidote to a bleak winter day could be the joyous exhibition of paintings and prints by Frank Satogata at the Xavier University Art Gallery now through February 15. Satogata loves color as surely as Romeo loved Juliet, but with happier consequences. He […]


Review, Collector's Art Group Holiday Show

Review, Collector’s Art Group Holiday Show By Jane Durrell A cheerful holiday exhibition lines the walls at Collector’s Art Group, second floor at 225 Sixth Street, downtown, conveying all sorts of interesting ideas without a Santa Claus to be seen.  That is to say, this annual holiday show is a gathering of the work of […]

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Profile, Kent Krugh

Profile, Kent Krugh By Jane Durrell Curiosity – that need to know what would happen if???? – can be a driving force for both creative and scientific ends. Artist/scientist Kent Krugh is a nimble practitioner in both fields. Krugh has been a visible presence in the Cincinnati region’s FotoFocus this fall with a solo show, […]

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A Look Back at a Life in Pictures: Photographs by Gordon Baer

A Look Back at a Life in Pictures: Photographs by Gordon Baer On a Sunday afternoon midway through October’s FotoFocus the backroom at Baker Hunt was at capacity to hear photographer Gordon Baer talk about his work and the exhibition A Look Back at a Life in Pictures: Photographs by Gordon Baer. The exhibition could […]

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"Aperture" at Phyllis Weston Gallery

“Aperture”  at Phyllis Weston Gallery by Jane Durrell The dream-tinged images in Aperture, Phyllis Weston Gallery’s contribution to FotoFocus, come from distinctly individual bodies of work but share an other worldly quality. Jane Alden Stevens’ series, “Birth & Death,” is composed of large, labor-intensive mono-prints dating from the early to mid-1990s, “a time before digital […]

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Not Your Usual Art Opening

NOT YOUR USUAL ART OPENING Imagine an opening where people actually look at the art. An opening without cheese, crackers, or wine. And while you’re about it, an opening where everyone wears identical, almost snazzy, specially treated clear plastic glasses. Got it? You could have been at the opening earlier this month of Gravity of […]

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Profile of Walt Burton

It’s probably inaccurate to call Walt Burton a gadfly, even though a run-down of his career might suggest that. He’s been a photographer, a dealer in historic photographs, a teacher, a guest lecturer, non prescription cialis from canada produced books (two of them autobiographical) and now, after two strokes and a heart attack,  is making […]

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50th Anniversary Year, Carl Solway Gallery Exhibition

  By: Jane Durrell Imagine a cocktail party where everyone knows everyone else and the conversation never stops. That’s Carl Solway Gallery’s 50th Anniversary exhibition. More than one generation are here, but the young ones know the old ones and refine upon or react against, just like in your neighborhood. Sixty-three artists are represented. An […]

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French Painters Breaking Ground

By: Jane Durrell Bostonians with a penchant for French painting from the glory days might be disappointed if they stop by the Wadsworth Atheneum just now, for forty-five paintings from that collection are at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati in the exhibition Old Masters to Impressionists: Three Centuries of French Painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum. […]

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"Reverse Psychology" at Thunder-Sky Gallery

“Dance?” asks one of a pair of figures in a collaborative painting by the two artists in Thunder-Sky Gallery’s current exhibition, Reverse Psychology. “Sorry, not my type,” answers the other. The two inhabit a dreamy, fragmented setting; the pop-star-like woman wears a beehive hairdo, a polka dot dress and a prosthetic arm and the man […]

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