ink – Art Spiel

April 14, 2025April 14, 2025, by Art Spiel

DUMBO Open Studios 2025 with Rodney Ewing

Studies for “*The Architecture of Memory and Loss”* 2024-2025, Drawings: Ink and Colored Pencil on Paper.

On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Rodney Ewing has been in DUMBO since 2022. His studio is at 20 Jay Street, #M09.

November 22, 2024December 7, 2024, by Melissa Stern

Llyn Foulkes: The Untied State of America

A person with a face cut out of paper Description automatically generated — Pat, 2020. Pigment print, oil, acrylic, red oak, and found objects on wood. 31 3/8 x 25 3/8 x 1 7/8 inches

Llyn Foulkes is a 90-year-old painter, jazz musician, troublemaker and visionary. After making a splash entrée on the American art scene in 1961, he hopscotched around the artworld, changing genres and styles as his restless mind embraced new ideas. He has been “consistently inconsistent” (from his website), wonderful for an artist, but not always strategic for a career. The commercial art world can be somewhat conservative, preferring that an artist find a groove and stick to it. As a result, though brilliant, Foulkes has not yet achieved the wide recognition that he deserves.

October 30, 2024November 19, 2024, by Eva Zanardi

All you need is JUST LOVE: Michela Martello at Pen + Brush

*JUST LOVE*, (Mimi), 2024, Acrylic, pigments, ink, pastel on interfacing, Installation view

In the heart of Manhattan’s Flatiron district, Pen + Brush, a 130-year-old nonprofit dedicated to championing women in the arts, proudly presents JUST LOVE, an immersive, large-scale installation and exhibition by Italian-born Brooklynite Michela Martello. Drawing inspiration from the renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Martello’s 360-degree visual experience invites viewers to embark on an introspective and exhilarating journey, exploring the blurred boundaries between reality and the imagined. The narrative woven throughout the exhibition transports viewers into mythical domains, where the sacred and the fantastical coalesce seamlessly.

July 31, 2024July 31, 2024, by Riad Miah

Erika Ranee: Feelings at Duck Creek

Erika Ranee, Sunset Beach, 2024, ink, shellac and oil pastel on canvas, 10 x 8 inches

I’ve been following Erika Ranee’s work since the mid-90s after I saw a handful of her works in person throughout a collector’s home. I recall a few key elements from that earlier work: medium to large scale, painted using a poured technique, and figurative or rather stenciled elements like references of figures and faces. Early on, Ranee’s work recalled a similarity to Donald Baechler’s. Think of a series of expressively painted applications layered upon one another and then codifying with a silhouette or stenciled image atop the coated process. I lost track of Ranee’s work for over a decade, then I came across it when she had a studio at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Program in 2011. I’ve been following her work and have had the pleasure of seeing it evolve steadily. Since my first encounter with the work, she has done away with a direct reference to figuration and seems to use titles to locate outside influences. Her work has grown, and her career is blossoming.

July 29, 2024July 13, 2024, by Art Spiel

Nicola Ginzel: How Do You Restructure Form?

Featured Project

Composite AS.jpg — Process on-site and view of Palais Equitable in Vienna. (right image): from the Wien Museum’s Online Collection taken around 1899.

In March 2020, Nicola Ginzel arrived at the Q21 Art Residency at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria. This residency, which hosts international artists and selects one American artist every two months with the support of a Fulbright Scholar Grant, is designed to foster creative exchange through collaboration, networking, and studio visits.

April 24, 2024April 24, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

This Bitter Earth: Deborah Wasserman at Kuma Lisa

Photo Story

Deborah Wasserman, Rubble, 2021, ink and acrylic on paper, 28″ x35.5″

Rubble, mutated crop fields, floods, scorched earth, and occasional female figures floating or submerged unfold throughout the sixteen landscape paintings in Deborah Wasserman’s current solo show, The Bitter Earth at Kuma Lisa. Though the paintings differ in scale and media—from small acrylic and oil on panels to larger acrylic, oil, and stained clothes on canvas to medium-sized works on paper—they all share the sense of a world where multiple perspectives from different vantage points co-exist. Wasserman’s energetic strokes and searching lines create a rhythmic movement upward, downward, and sideways—reminiscent of the fluidity in Chinese and Japanese calligraphic scroll paintings and the clear, directional lines of a hand-drawn map. These linear dynamos intertwine with a palette of earthy tones, greens, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, and pure blacks, creating multiple vignettes within a layered landscape.

January 19, 2024January 18, 2024, by Art Spiel

Ceramics+ Drawing Into Sculpture at LIC

photo story

A colorful paper ball with barbed wire

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Sok Song,- SoNoBe: Legermain Barbed and Coiled. Clay, paper, plastic, 16”x16”x16”.2023, Me, Mom, and the War on Identity. Acrylic, screen print, collage on paper, 36”x28” 2023 ( on wall)

The Long Island City Artists, an art non-profit known as LIC-A, is currently presenting a bold exhibition that brings together artists who work simultaneously in two media not always thought of as compatible. Curator Matt Nolen has gathered a fascinating group of artists from the NYC metropolitan area who work in both clay and drawing–one influencing and bouncing off the other. The synthesis is a fascinating and genre-bending exhibition.

September 7, 2023September 6, 2023, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Myth Maker: Laleh Khorramian at SEPTEMBER Gallery

Installation view. Photo courtesy of Alon Koppol

Finally! What a joy to meander through a show that is not just a formulaic scaffolding rendered to execute a marketing plan rather than make art. Walking into the building that houses September Gallery’s new space in Kinderhook, NY, The first thing you see is not a wall or architectural ornamentation but a monumental scroll that immediately hints you might be here for a while. This colossal collage introduces Myth Maker, the second exhibition at September Gallery by Laleh Khorramian.

December 12, 2022December 18, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Myth Catchers: Manju Shandler, Rithika Merchant and Jacqueline Shatz

Manju Shandler, Wonder Whale 1, 2018, mixed media, 23×19 inch

Luckily, or to many art-mavens’ chagrin, our 21^st century art world—in line with the global techno-culture and socio-political processes—seems to have abandoned crusades of “right” or “wrong” related to artistic form (though sometimes that does not apply to content). We are experiencing a dizzying array of aesthetic expressions, where often fast-pace visual trends replace ideologies of form. Unlike some passing trends, visual narratives based on mythological iconography have been central in all art forms since archaic ages, except for the early-mid half of the 20^th century when narrative impetus was largely downplayed in most of what was called the “Avant Garde” art of the time.

August 27, 2022December 30, 2022, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Who Gets On The Front Cover?

*Study for “Mother/Son”*, 1984, Ink on Artforum magazine cover. (March 1977), 10.5″ x 10.5″, photo courtesy of the artist

Enter Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham NY and come face to face with what we as artists, curators, critics, gallerists and historians consciously and subconsciously know; we are missing greats. Arthur González’s exhibition, Ego Diaries confronts the art world and those who control the keys to the kingdom and anoint who is recognized and who is not.