“Remembrance, like a candle, burns brightest at Christmas.” Charles Dickens
My grandmother, Gertrude Gill
My grandmother discovered just how important working outside the home was when my grandfather retired from a successful career in construction engineering. He established a studio in the front bedroom of their Philadelphia duplex and painted with a devotion that filled all [...]
With my own nose pressed firmly to the glass of a miniscule window on “the holiday retail season”, an old friend reminded me of a larger world spinning beyond the spheres of American consumerism.
At the turn of the millennium, Iowa City artist, Aaron Sinift, traveled to India. His work was forever changed by [...]
The thing about Larry Welo being consistently winning is that when I prepare to write about him, the same adjectives spring right to mind. With work that is informed by a dry, self-effacing humor and a dash of romanticism that plays out as poignancy, Larry Welo is one of the stars gleaming brightly among the [...]
“Talk in the M.U.D.” started this fall to explore, quite simply, why artists care about the things that they do, and why we should- or shouldn’t care. It’s free and open to the public.
Pit-fired stoneware vessels, Dean Dunkel
Trying to wrestle the mythic, transformative “power of art” to the ground in casual conversational terms is the [...]
I’ll tell you a story.
I first met Carlos Ferguson in the summer between his junior and senior year at Grinnell College. He was venturing into the fabled printmaking program at the U. of IA, where I was a graduate student. My hours at that point in my life were ungodly. I got up at 4:30 [...]
Our Maggie’s Matt was describing to me a business trip that took him from Brooklyn N.Y., where he and Maggie live, to San Francisco. In terms shaded by an unspoken sense of the irretrievable nature of the past, this transplanted Midwesterner recounted his feelings as he flew over Iowa at 35,000 feet and 700 m.p.h.
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Miss Myers
It’s a little intimidating when a person is described as an “institution”. Mental images of bricks, mortar and imposing classical columns spring readily to mind. But, in fact, Professor Virginia Myers IS an institution in the printmaking department at the University of Iowa. “Miss Myers”, as she has been known to generations of Iowa [...]
“Impressionism as a technique devoted to capturing the effects of light out of doors is exemplified most purely in the painting of Claude Monet, who forced it to its limits, and then beyond.” John Canaday
Recognizing the stylistic differences amongst the painters who since 1874 when they were first ridiculed by critics as “Impressionists”, was [...]
“The world is so full of a number of things I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Robert Louis Stevenson
It’s high summer in Iowa. The restored tall grass prairie that my pup, Buddy, and I jog through daily is teeming with life, scents, sounds, and color. Likewise, our own Karen Hoyt’s flowerbeds [...]
Shikishi board #1 / 9.5″ x 10.5″ / $150 (framed) / Karen Kurka Jensen
“Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; … refusing to be disheartened… this is what [...]