narrative painting – Art Spiel

June 4, 2025June 4, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Salman Toor and Intimate Histories at Luhring Augustine

Salman Toor - Wish Maker - Exhibitions - Luhring Augustine — Salman Toor at Luhring Augustine

This exhibition of Salman Toor’s paintings acts like snapshots in a story or a movie, each depicting a separate experience. Every piece draws you in and carries a true push and pull within the composition. The push and pull that drew me in was the idea of public versus private that emanates from within the work, the dream and reality, and just how much intimacy Toor decides to share with us. The feelings of intimacy and vulnerability come from witnessing the lives of the figures Toor presents, leaving us to wonder if we are allowed to bear witness to these moments, or if we’ve just “walked into” something meant to be entirely private.

February 20, 2025March 3, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Robert Yarber- Regard and Abandon at Nicodim Gallery

Robert Yarber, *Error’s Conquest*, 1986, acrylic on canvas, 71 by 130 inches. Photo courtesy of Nicodim Gallery

Neon nights are brought to life within Robert Yarber’s paintings. The large-scale paintings in Nicodim Gallery’s survey of his works bring viewers along for a wild ride. Whether it’s pulling us into a dark hotel room, lit solely by the blue light of a droning, static television set, or throwing us outside, into the life of the party, and possibly, over the balcony and into the air- we are left in suspense of what comes next. It’s as if we were sitting in a dark movie theater, watching someone’s life story unfold.

July 21, 2022December 30, 2022, by Hovey Brock

The Lands of Kats Kill

The Lands of Kats Kill is the second in a series of three interrelated experimental pieces that combine graphics, text, and hyperlinks based on themes coming out of my Crazy River project, for which I gave an interview on this website on May 16th. Crazy River takes a wide-angle view of the climate crisis, ranging from my own climate grief to an in-depth focus on the many causes and effects of rapid environmental changes on the West Branch of the Neversink in Ulster County. In this piece I investigate the idea of the Catskills as a region, and an incongruous bundle of contradictions and coincidences. The Lands of Kats Kill weaves three timelines together: the geologic, the historical, and the personal. This structure repeats throughout my Crazy River project. The previous piece in this series, Invaders, took apart the idea of invasive species. The following will explore the concept of the Golden Spike in stratigraphy as fact and metaphor.

December 4, 2021December 2, 2021, by Joan Sullivan

In the Beginning There Was Only Water

Map

Description automatically generated — In the Beginning There Was Only Water: Panels 19-22, each panel 30″ x 15″, acrylic, oil pigment stick and mixed media on paper, 2021

While some of us taught ourselves to bake sourdough bread or to mend socks during the pandemic, the American painter and arts writer Susan Hoffman Fishman plunged herself into her studio and emerged, a year later, with a revised creation story. The result: a magnificent, nearly 50-foot (15 meters) opus entitled In The Beginning There Was Only Water. Currently on exhibit at the Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut through December 19, 2021, In The Beginning There Was Only Water reframes the biblical creation myth – in which “man” was granted “dominion” over all the Earth’s plants and animals – into a new, non-human-centric story.

October 11, 2021October 6, 2024, by Art Spiel

MVA Open Studios: Philemona Williamson

Philemona Williamson in studio with work in progress, oil on canvas

Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.

September 13, 2021August 2, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Becky Yazdan: Finding the Edge of Experience

A person sitting in a chair

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Becky Yazdan in studio, 2021

Becky Yazdan’s paintings are based on things she encounters in her daily life as well as her memory of events, feelings, and colors. For her the painting process is an active dialogue with the nature of things around her. “The paintings are like dreams—the events of the day reorganized and combined with other events and memories until a new, often surprising reality has taken shape,” she says.

June 5, 2021June 3, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club

In Dialogue with Dee Shapiro

A picture containing indoor, floor, wall, ceiling

Description automatically generated — Installation view

In the group exhibition Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club in New York City the artist Dee Shapiro brings together six contemporary artists who explore content and form of narrative painting ranging from interiors to landscapes, personal to imagined, realistic to fantastic. Featured artists: Jennifer Coates, Laura Karetzky, Judith Linhares, Ernesto Renda, Kyle Staver, and George Towne. The show runs through June 28^th.

January 19, 2021January 19, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Christopher Ulivo: The Present is Nonsense

Christopher Ulivo, the LA based painter, takes us in his vivid paintings to imaginary places, from time travel to ancestral family spirits to rewritten myths and histories. His worlds are filled with idiosyncratic, wildly imaginative narratives, where you can sense the painter’s presence as a prolific storyteller.

September 15, 2020September 17, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Ashley Norwood Cooper in Domestic Brutes at Pelham Art Center

In Dialogue with Ashley Norwood Cooper

”How to Draw Your Shoe”, oil on panel, 36” x 30”, 2020.

Ashley Norwood Cooper is an artist and a mother, raising three teenagers in a small town in upstate NY. Her paintings have always dealt with family and home and how the personal connects us to the global and political. She is interested in the schizophrenic role of the artist-mother-wife-teacher and in how to redefine the heroic from a woman’s perspective. Ashley Norwood Cooper is participating in Domestic Brutes and she will present her work in a virtual studio visit hosted by Pelham Art Center on Thursday, October 15th, 5-6pm.

May 16, 2020May 16, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Barbara Friedman

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

Barbara Friedman in front of “Hard Rain” at the opening of “Hauntings”, February 29^th, 2020, at Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn. The show was supposed to be up through March but closed after a week due to the pandemic. Photo from the Bogliasco Foundation’s weekly newsletter *courtesy of* Arielle Moreau.

Barbara Friedman makes painterly paintings of unreliable narrators in scenarios that are unsettling both narratively and formally. She has had thirty-six solo shows throughout the United States, and reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Sun, The Irish Times, Newsday, Art in America, ARTS Magazine, and Artweek. A group of Friedman’s paintings were selected for the 2007 issue of New American Paintings, and another group for the 2010 issue. She lives, paints, and teaches in New York City, where she has been a professor of art at Pace University since 1983.