Artists on Coping: Miles Hall

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Deconstructing the Apocalypse in her own Image, 72 x 84, Oil on panel, 2018. (in studio)

Miles Hall is a painter and draftsman. He has lived in California, Massachusetts, Japan, and New York, but now resides in Richmond, VA. His work explores the mythological relationship between the landscape and human figure. The science and psychology of visual perception is important to his practice. He currently teaches in the Communication Arts Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and maintains a critical visual arts review for the Richmond area called Lucid.

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Rachel MacFarlane’s Paradise at Super Dutchess Gallery

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Rachel MacFarlane | Beacon | Single-channel video | 32” (Animation still) | 2020

I haven’t seen Rachel MacFarlane’s painting Sliver (2020). It would be reasonable to assume that I had, because Sliver is the centerpiece of Paradise, the show that this review is about. In fact, Sliver is the only painting in Paradise.

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Artists on Coping: Melanie Vote

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Melanie Vote, In Studio, photo credit: Jessica Glick

Though Melanie Vote has lived in NYC for over 20 years, she grew up on a functional farm in Iowa. Her work straddles these two worlds, investigating the complexities of the human-land relationship, the cyclical nature of all life, and the impossibility of permanence. In temperate months she works remotely, painting outside. She is a visual scavenger collecting passages, then returns to the studio to reconstruct layers of a place, weaving them together into open-ended narratives. Her most recent body of work, The Washhouse, Nothing Ever Happened Here, at Equity gallery is on view virtually, via Artsy.

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Artists on Coping: Jane Swavely

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping. This interview includes questions by both Art Spiel and Cultbytes as part of an Art Spiel x Cultbytes content collaboration.

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Jane Swavely. Photographed by Peter Leece. All images courtesy of the artist if not otherwise stated.

Jane Swavely is a painter based in New York City. She studied at Boston University and the School of Visual Arts and was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Previously represented by CDS Gallery, she is currently a member of A.I.R gallery.

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Artists on Coping: Lizbeth Mitty

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Studio View

Born in Queens, New York to a family of artists, inventors and actors, Lizbeth Mitty grew up painting and writing. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and abroad, and is held in public and private collections including the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York State Museum, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Zimmerli Archive, The U.S. State Department, and Trierenberg Holding AG in Austria. Her studio is in Brooklyn, New York.

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Artists on Coping: Diane Drescher

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Highline Hotel, 2018

Diane Drescher‘s light filled landscapes straddle the line between traditional and modern. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and continued her art training at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Student’s League, and the National Academy in New York. A 10-year period of traveling to Europe to research design trends for fashion projects provided the opportunity to study the tradition of landscape painting in the museums of Paris and London. Inspired, she began refining her style using vivid colors, thick application of paint, and distinctive brushstrokes.

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Artists on Coping: Elisabeth Condon

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Elisabeth Condon in front of Urban Idyll at Ditmars Blvd., Queens, in 2019. Photo Phillip Reed

Informed by scroll painting and 20th century abstraction, Elisabeth Condon’s landscapes intersect nature and décor. While the overlap of New York and Florida inspire the majority of her compositions, Condon frequently travels to numerous residency fellowships from Shanghai and Mexico City, to the Grand Canyon and Florida Everglades. She recently completed Urban Idyll, thirty-six laminated glass panels for the NYCT Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. Station in Queens, commissioned by MTA Art & Design. Her work has been recognized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, and State of Florida Individual Fellowships.

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Valeri Larko – Sign of the Times at Lyons Wier

Valeri Larko in dialogue with Art Spiel

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Valeri Larko, “In the Beginning” on site in the Bronx, 2019, oil/canvas, 30” x 24” Courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery

Valeri Larko’s paintings in Sign of the Times, her solo exhibition at Lyons Wier Gallery depict urban environments at the fringes, where motels past their time, colossal billboards with bombastic one liners, neglected industrial buildings, and dead trees pepper the landscape. The imagery is familiar yet uncanny. Valeri Larko shares with Art Spiel on the body of work in this show, what draws her to this landscape painting, and how she approaches her painting on-site. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic the show is available online but the physical exhibition has been postponed.

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Ron Milewicz – Axis Mundi at Elizabeth Harris

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Pink Moon, 2019 oil on linen, 18 x 13.5 inches, courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

In Axis Mundi, his current painting exhibition at Elizabeth Harris, Ron Milewicz shows a body of work that reveals his continuous fascination with the mystery of trees. While focusing his gaze on a specific woodland landscape ,the Hudson Valley woodlands, Ron Milewicz is opening a portal not only to the universal meaning of trees, but also to the overall vulnerability and wonder of life on this planet. Ron Milewicz shares with Art Spiel some reflections on his approach to painting and on what draws him to his consistent thematic exploration.

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Lily Prince: Honing Plein Air

Lily Prince, Arles,1, Acrylic on canvas paper, 16”x16”, 2019, photo courtesy of the artist

Lily Prince makes lush plein air paintings depicting the essence of specific places around the world. By utilizing linear and color vocabularies, she creates pictorial fields which resemble disorienting topographical maps where time is fluid and frozen simultaneously. Lily prince shares with Art Spiel her background, ideas. process, and projects.

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