Painters on Paintings is a conversation between contemporary artists and their influences across time.
PoP Highlights
Peter Saul on Paul Cadmus
Paul Cadmus, Coney Island, 1934, Oil on canvas, 32 7/16 × 36 5/16 inches Paul Cadmus’ Coney Island was the first picture I ever saw, in 1939 when I was 5 years old, in a book called American Art of the 1930’s. All the other pictures in the book were realistic, or...
Matt Bollinger on Gregory Gillespie
In Self-Portrait on Bed, made in 1973-74, Gregory Gillespie paints himself as a not-quite young man, some years older than I am as I write this. He sits on a mattress that sags toward the floor.
Doron Langberg on Jess
When I saw “The Enamored Mage” in person I was completely transfixed. Painted with heavy impasto, the protrusions of paint gush out of the surface, some following the image, some swelling under it.
Recent Articles
Alan Feltus on Susan Yanero
…her cast of characters played out dramas on a stage that is both circus and life as she knows it…
Elizabeth Neel on Francis Bacon
Regarding the Other in horror and finding that Other in myself, it’s impossible to look at “Study of a Baboon” and not be sucked into a vortex of abjection and a struggle for empathy.
Construction and Erasure: Matt Bollinger on Narrative in Catherine Murphy and David Byrd
While both Murphy and Byrd use form as a means to make narrative works, they also create paintings that exist on a spectrum between solidity and erasure.
Trenton Doyle Hancock on Kerry James Marshall
The cool confident stare of Marshall’s “Nat Turner” speaks directly to me as a painter, saying to accept without regret the task at hand and rewrite the master script of possibility.
Altoon Sultan on Piero di Cosimo
There I was, standing in front of this beautiful, tender, poignant painting, unable to stop weeping.
Michelle Stuart on Maya Art
They are simple yet complex, erotic yet spiritual, wildly designed yet perfectly rendered to fit both the scale of the object and the place in architecture.