An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
In this thoughtful exchange, artist Erin Lawlor talks to Diana Copperwhite about the role of intuition and emotion in their work, their love of music, and their mutual interest in painter Howard Hodgkin. Copperwhite’s paintings will be on view alongside Hodgkin’s work at the Auckland Art Fair from May 1-4, and Lawlor ‘s solo “Divining” opens at the Highlanes Municipal Gallery in Ireland on April 26.
Contributed by Elizabeth Hazan / During the night of election-related insomnia, I was thinking about how we find meaning in this crazy world and that reading personal histories can be life-affirming in a time of chaos. One of the delights of Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women was learning how all these artists who were fixtures in the art world when I was a child came to New York to start making art in the first place. For a number of years, I shared a studio with the artist Trevor Winkfield. While he has done some long-form interviews, I think his lively storytelling deserves fresh attention.
Contributed by Christopher Stout / Over the past 15 years, Patricia Fabricant has experimented with distinctive heroic elements within her work, some figurative and some that seem to be extracted from nature. “Horror Vacui,” her solo show at Equity Gallery, presents 26 inventively patterned gouache paintings that follow the conceptual approach the show’s title – meaning “fear of empty spaces” – suggests, filling the entire surface with detail and composition….
Contributed by Adam Simon / This year’s Upstate Art Weekend (July 19 – 21) included a most unusual venue. The Zero Art Fair exhibited the work of over seventy artists in a barn in Elizaville, New York, owned by Manon Slome. All the work was available to take home and none of it was for sale once the fair began. Surprisingly, or not, many of the artists that were included normally sell their work for prices that would have been out of the question for most browsers at UAW. Yet here those browsers were taking art home for free. The Zero Art Fair was scheduled to last for three days but by the end of the second day almost nothing was left. The following is a Two Coats of Paint interview with Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, the two people primarily responsible for the Zero Art Fair.
Contributed by Adriana Furlong / Emma Helene Moriconi’s solo show “you and i are made from a worm eaten wood,” up earlier this summer at Galerie Timonier, prompted viewers to consider natural processes, large and small, more closely than usual. It was an interesting approach that seemed worth a conversation.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / During “Apophanies,” Gabbi Grill and Orli Swergold’s two-person show at Stephen Street Gallery, an artists’ collective and exhibition space in Ridgewood, Queens, funded by NYFA, I invited the artists to tell me about their work and art practices.
Contributed by Leslie Wayne / Deborah Buck’s energy is preternatural and her generosity of spirit seems to flow from the same deep well. We met at a wedding several years ago, and as I got to know, I learned that her path to becoming a full-time artist was not the usual one, largely because her creative drive was broad, democratic, and highly entrepreneurial. I sat down with Deborah during the run of her show, “Witches Bridge” at Jennifer Baahng Gallery.
Contributed by Adam Simon / With a solo show at Rosebud Contemporary, work on view at Slag, and an upcoming two-person show at 490 Atlantic, Larry Greenberg is having a moment. After stepping away from the art world to raise a family, now, at the age of 73, he’s back. We talked about why, after a decades-long hiatus, he returned.
Contributed by Rebecca Chace / I met Massinissa Selmani at Civitella Ranieri, an artist residency in Umbria, Italy where we were part of the first group of artists they welcomed coming out of the pandemic in spring 2021. We became a very close-knit group and several collaborations have emerged from our time together. “A Fault in the Mirage,” Selmani’s first New York solo show, is on view at Jane Lombard Gallery through April 27. We spent time at the opening and followed up with a conversation about his work.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I had some questions for Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens — artists, writers, spouses who have a two-person exhibition of abstract paintings on view at Texas Gallery in Houston through December 16. After they were evicted from their Tribeca loft a couple years ago, they decamped to Litchfield County, where they both have studios in their home — a beautifully converted auto body shop. In her seventies, Fendrich is a Professor Emerita of Fine Arts and Art History at Hofstra University and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood. After writing regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education for many years, she now writes fiction and contributes art reviews to Two Coats of Paint. Plagens, in his eighties, is the art critic at The Wall Street Journal and is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. My interrogation about the evolution of their painting lives over the course of some fifty years started during an early morning text exchange that became so rich and resonant I asked if Two Coats of Paint could publish an expanded version.
Contributed by Leslie Wayne / If you meet Holly Miller on the street, you will encounter a warm, exuberant, emotionally expressive, and funny person who immediately pulls you into her space. You would not expect her art to be highly controlled, minimal, and geometric. Yet she has built her career on paintings that are just that – slightly irregular geometric shapes, flatly painted and intersected by lines sewn with thread. But Miller is now at a crossroads and her work is suddenly exploding outward, making room for new materials, chance encounters, and unpredictable forms. Perhaps, as with many artists, COVID has had something to do with this shift. Life seems a little more precious these days, and taking new aesthetic chances is a small way of asserting courage in the face of the unknown.
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Daniel Giordano’s sculptures, some of them currently on view at MassMoCA and Visitor Center in Newburgh, NY, it is possible to decipher a deeply personal language ensconced in forms and symbols. His works defy easy classification while honoring memories that inhabit his industrially tinged studio in Newburgh, NY, once his family’s clothing factory. His freewheeling use of materials and evocative titles suggest a comprehensive embrace of sculpture as a repository of humor, narrative, and poetics, as well as a means of integration and rupture alike. There is a logic underpinning the wild combinations and ambiguous forms in his work. It resonates with echoes from the past and suggestions of the future, like a postcard from someone we have not yet met.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Letha Wilson’s work reflects her persistent intention to unite two sometimes antagonistic processes: photography and sculpture. Over the last decade, she has expanded my (and no doubt others’) understanding of the potential visual and physical convergence of these two mediums. On the occasion of her completion of a Windgate Artist Residency at Purchase College and a solo exhibition at Higher Pictures, I asked Wilson five questions about her past and process.
Widely known as the talented producer and amusing host of the popular podcast Pep Talks for Artists, Amy Talluto uses the tagline “shuffling along the […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In the early days of the Covid lockdown, Laura Dana Smith, a former organizer of Bushwick Open Studios, left Brooklyn and moved to Taos, New Mexico. I reached out to learn what Smith’s experience leaving Brooklyn and relocating in Taos has been like.
