painting technique – Art Spiel

November 25, 2025November 25, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Frank Lind: Time and Tide, Homage and Seascapes at Georges Berges

*MLK, 2000, Seascapes and Studies, Oil on canvas. 60 x 50 in. Photo courtesy of Georges Berges Gallery*

Getting to see the works of Frank Lind in person gives you an experience of a moment, the capture of a motion, and the building up of an atmosphere. Lind works “en plein air” within nature. Capturing immediate impressions and moments that captivate him, he then carries sketches to canvas. Stemming from the on-site sketches, the larger studio works take on a glow. Using traditional oil painting processes and many old master methods, both of Lind’s series displayed in this exhibition show the end result of a painter’s process.

June 30, 2025June 27, 2025, by Katie Hanson

Cambridge-based Contemporary Landscape Painter Julia S. Powell in Conversation with MFA Boston Curator of Painting Katie Hanson

In Dialogue

Julia S. Powell, Kitchen Morning, 2024. Oil on canvas

MFA Boston Curator of Painting Katie Hanson visited the studio of the landscape painter Julia S. Powell. The resulting interview gives us an insight into Powell’s artistic process and her concept of a “fiction painter,” one that creates work at the intersection of abstraction and realism. Besides references to contemporary Impressionism, the interview addresses creating thickly-layered artworks that inspire introspection and acceptance of previous experiences—especially the unwanted ones. These layers serve as metaphors for embracing past struggles without regret. Powell’s work also provides an emotional refuge as a response to a chaotic and increasingly anxious life.

June 5, 2025June 6, 2025, by Jan Dickey

The Bone and Muscle: A Conversation with Dona Nelson

In Dialogue

For decades, Dona Nelson has dissolved the formal boundaries of painting: refusing to apply pigment to just one side of the canvas, mounting the stretchers of her double-sided paintings on freestanding metal stands, and letting them occupy gallery floors like sculptural interlopers. In her current two-person show with Andrew Ross at Thomas Erben Gallery, however, the painter has ceded the floor space entirely, anchoring her three new works squarely to the wall.

March 13, 2025March 12, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Barbara Friedman’s All Rude and Lumpy Matter at Frosch&Co

Installation view. Photo courtesy of Barbara Friedman

Barbara Friedman’s first solo exhibition at FROSCH&CO presents commanding paintings—unsettling, visceral, and electric—resembling a Rorschach test on acid. Poured paint mutates into shifting forms: eyes, rabbit ears, chicken legs. The grotesque, the horrific, the sublime, and the comical coexist, each intensifying the other.

October 7, 2024December 7, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Dorothy Robinson: Paint Through Space and Time

End of Story, 2022, oil on panel, 48×60 inches, photo courtesy of Bill Massey

Dorothy Robinson’s family moved often during her childhood, starting in rural Iowa, where they farmed for generations and eventually settled in California. After high school, she bounced between colleges before landing at UC Berkeley. Studying art never crossed her mind, but she was drawn to geography, “probably because of its strong visual component—map making, field trips, slide shows,” Robinson says. During an internship, she learned darkroom skills and later worked in commercial photo labs, shaping her sense of color while making color prints. An invitation from an artist friend to join a drawing group was transformative, and started Robinson on the path to a life of making art.

May 7, 2024May 12, 2024, by Wallace Whitney

Vom Abend, Joe Bradley at David Zwirner

A room with paintings on the wall

Description automatically generated — Installation view, Joe Bradley: Vom Abend, David Zwirner, New York, 2024. Photo courtesy of the gallery

The ten paintings in Vom Abend, Joe Bradley’s current show at David Zwirner, measure up to 93 x 120 inches and are all dated 2023-2024. They are big and, with one exception, are in landscape orientations. Framed with white oak strips, they have stately feel, yet they are hardly genteel. They are full of crusty skins of dry paint that seem randomly attached to the surfaces. They are creased and folded. They reek of oil paint. And while the color is buoyant, joyous even, they are also dark. Bradley isn’t afraid of black, and he explores shit brown with an alarming gusto. There are passages where the paint seems to have been aggressively ripped off the surface of the canvas, only to be tenderly painted over again. There are staccato stippling marks. There is erasure and heavy impasto in stretches. Although this may sound like the paintings are heavily labored and full of themselves, they aren’t. And careful examination reveals worlds to explore.

December 1, 2023November 27, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Elizabeth Gilfilen: Denouement at Yi Gallery

In Dialogue

*Unearth,* 2023, oil on canvas, 64 x 72 inches

Elizabeth Gilfilen’s debut solo show at YI Gallery presents oil paintings that exhibit a meticulous yet bold exploration of color and texture. Her strokes span from boldly assertive to gently nuanced, each adding to her work’s visual depth and dynamic feel. Eschewing neat conclusions, her paintings are presented as evolving works, with each layer suggesting new narratives in an unfolding journey. The synergy of color and form in her paintings creates a dynamic tableau, inviting viewers to interact with the canvas, drawing them into the active narrative of the art’s continuous unfolding.

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

Fear & Philip Guston

A painting of a chair

Description automatically generated — Philip Guston *Head* (detail), 1968 Oil on board, Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art © 2023 The Estate of Philip Guston

Born in 1913, Canadian American painter Philip Guston began his career in the 50’s in New York during the Abstract Expressionist movement. The Ab-Ex-ers were sweeping the country as the next great thing and developing a bit of a swagger. Painters everywhere were ditching representational painting for the new experimental style of pure abstraction, and Guston was no exception. Well-esteemed and well-reviewed, he was a part of the in-crowd. Everyone loved the guy.

February 27, 2023July 1, 2023, by Elisabeth Condon

Elisabeth Condon Describes a Painting – Wanderings, Bilbao

WANDERINGS: BILBAO, ORANGE, YELLOW AND BLUE, 45 1/2 X 39 1/2, Acrylic on Canvas, 2004 //Jules Olitski Art Foundation Inc. / 2022 Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY — Jules Olitski ,Wanderings: Bilbao, Orange, Yellow and Blue, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 45 ½ x 39 1/2 inches, from the exhibition Jules Olitski: Late Works at the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery on the campus of Golden Artist Colors in New Berlin, New York

Painter Elisabeth Condon’s reflections on a painting by Jules Olitski she had seen at the exhibition Jules Olitski: Late Works—were initially presented in the first episode of Elisabeth Condon Describes a Painting, a new series artist Amy Talluto has recently launched in her podcast Pep Talks for Artists. In each episode in this series Elisabeth Condon shares her way of looking at one painting, here, at the acrylic painting (2004) Wanderings, Bilbao: Orange Yellow and Blue, by Ukrainian- American artist Jules Olitski. The show at the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery in New Berlin, NY is up until March 2023 and another concurrent show of his works was up at Yares Gallery in New York (till February 11, 2023).

December 13, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Claire McConaughy: Nearby at 490 Atlantic Gallery

Featured Artist

A picture containing plant, colorful

Description automatically generated — Delicate Rainbow, 2021, 24”x30”, oil on canvas, photo courtesy of the artist

In her solo show at 490 Atlantic Gallery, New York based painter Claire McConaughy features landscapes depicted in vivid colors and expressive linear marks. In Delicate Rainbow for instance, the painting plays on tension between horizontal, vertical, and diagonal orientations – an unexpected pale pink flow becomes a backdrop horizon to green vegetation spreading its limb-like branches diagonally upwards; on the top, blue-purple brush strokes depicting sky or water, lead the eye sideways, and then right above, a surprising orange linear brush stroke with the other rainbow colors hinted, stretch across the middle top.