Archives: PoP Academy

I first discovered the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich in the mid-1980’s when I was an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis…

In July 1869, American painter William Bradford, alongside photographers John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson, embarked on the first expedition to the Arctic devoted principally to art.

I’ve always disliked the Rococo, and pretty much any artist who paints pink cheeks (Rubens, Renoir, Hals, etc.). For me, it’s not the pleasure, desire, or playfulness of the Rococo and other similar confections, but it is the one-note, overly-sweet eagerness to please that irritates.

There is a small painting by Bellotto at the Chicago Art Institute – a view of a street in the small town of Pirna, Germany a short distance from Dresden – that I used to see every day when I was a student there and which always fascinated me.

A number of years ago a well-known and influential New York art gallerist was brought to my studio by a private dealer I’d been working with.

He was not a particularly remarkable painter. There is no dazzling brushstroke or consummate gesture. They are paintings that get the job done and punch the clock.

I first saw Frederic Church’s “Twilight in the Wilderness” in 1996 on my first trip to Cleveland; I was wandering aimlessly through the galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art when this painting stopped me dead in my tracks.

My son’s breath warmed my neck as I lost myself in the wrinkle of his wrist. Blackness. Quiet. Then the skeleton.

“Our Banner in the Sky” is a painting made almost entirely of belief, which is why I liked it at first sight, in reproduction no less, advertising the Met’s 2013 Civil War and American Art exhibition in a newsletter.