Mural by Reid Jenkins and Scott Hillis, located in Pinellas Park, Florida.
It is one of several murals outside a group of buildings that includes Studios at 5663 and Saint Paint Arts.
Oct 302025
Oct 302025
Betsy Lester, “The Weyward Sisters”, Acrylic and collage on canvas
Florida artist Betsy Orbe Lester‘s mixed media work blends the familiar with the mysterious. The works pictured are from a 2023 visit to her studio at ArtLofts in St. Pete.
Oct 292025
“Pianist’s Dress Impression”, 2005, cast glass, cold-worked
This ghostly glass sculpture by Karen LaMonte is part of Palm Springs Art Museum‘s exhibition Meditations in Glass, on view until 11/23/25.
From the museum about the work-
This life-size figure of a pianist projects a ghostly aura, yet the sculpture holds light in its mass like the spirit is held in the physical body. We can see how flesh once filled out the figure, noting how the buttons of the dress strain over the chest. Glass is “air, ethereal, material/non-material, ungraspable, fleeting, spiritual,” says LaMonte. “The absent figure is important to me because it tempers the undemanding pleasure of beauty with insinuations of loss and mortality.”
Oct 282025
Brooklyn-based artists Doug Cunningham and Jason Noto (aka Morning Breath) created the mural above for the 2019 edition of SHINE Mural Festival in St. Pete, Florida.
Below are a few of the references in the mural from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance website–
At 250 Dr. Martin Luther King Junior Street North, a scattering of images in the style of a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” ad spreads out on a light blue wall, as if the wall were an old comic book-style pamphlet held out wide.
The design was brush painted, inspired by the business that’s been at this location since 1926 — the Coney Island Sandwich Shop. That business and the artists have roots in New York, so there are subtle nods to the city throughout.
On the left is a large cartoon man’s face tilted slightly, with a garish, wide-open grin. Hair parted in the middle with old-fashioned waves on each side of the temple, arched black eyebrows over wide red eyes. The mad grin is missing a tooth.
This face is the artists’ version of the iconic Coney Island Steeplechase “Funny Face” that welcomed guests from 1908 through 1964. So the family who founded this shop would have seen it, when they visited. Even now, that grinning face appears on shops and merchandise at Coney Island.
Just below the face, the word “Look” in red, with white snow resting on the letters, next to an arrow pointing to the left, that points to a small cut-out in the wall. This was where African Americans would be served if they came to the restaurant in its early days.
To the right of Popeye, in another section of the wall, is a large pair of old-fashioned glasses with angled black frames and red lenses, and wide-open white eyes. The glasses are a tribute to the artist Casey Paquet, who passed away in 2018. Below the glasses, the phrase “Ideas are a Dime a Dozen” is painted above a red hand pointing to the left, and a large hardback book with a black cover. The spine of the book reads “CP 1977 through 2018,” another tribute to Paquet. The front cover spells out “Para CP” vertically, in red, beside a line drawing of a sword swallower, a trick Casey practiced.
In the center of the wall, a huge red hand holds a pamphlet almost as tall as the wall, that reads “Welcome to Fear City,” with a skeleton in a black cowl. This is a reference to a 1970s scaremongering pamphlet called “Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” published by the New York Council on Public Safety.
You can also find Morning Breath on Instagram. For more on the SHINE murals including the upcoming 2025 festival in November, head here.
Oct 262025
In Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Mirror (1975) we follow the history of a dying poet, told through his dreamlike memories. It’s one of Tarkovsky’s most personal films and is semi-autobiographical. His older mother appears in the film, and he includes poetry by his father, Arseny Tarkovsky. Alternating between black-and-white and color film, as well as Russian archival footage, the film is nonlinear. Different characters are at times played by the same actor, like the younger version of his mother and his wife.
The visual poetry of the film captures something universal that is hard to describe in words, but is very affecting. Mirrors, reflections, flooding, fire, a gust of wind- even just watching the condensation from a cup disappear from a table- there’s so much to take in and contemplate.
Filled with his famous long takes, time moves more slowly in Mirror, and provides a much-needed break from our often too fast-paced world.
Oct 242025
Threshold, 2020, a painting by Orlando-based artist Ericka Sobrack, was on view in 2021 as part of Morean Arts Center‘s Fresh Squeezed 5. The annual Fresh Squeezed exhibitions focus on a selection of emerging artists currently living in Florida.
Her solo exhibition, Witching Hour, is currently on view at Cat Eye Creative in Decatur, Georgia, until 11/2/25.
From the artist about her work-
“My paintings are disorientations of everyday spaces, offering the viewer access into a realm of the unknown, ripe with psychological strangeness. Suburban environments are often subverted into a hyper-reality, revealing juxtapositions between the mundane and the eerie to create conflict and tension. I’m interested in how form, light and color within unassuming settings can be manipulated and orchestrated into uncomfortable, almost uncanny depictions of the banal. By deconstructing the mundane and colliding it with the abnormal, these familiar suburban settings transform into strange, otherworldly scenes that amplify human drama, usually suggesting an implied event, a vague story, or fragmentations of memory. Behind these charged scenes often lie personal yet common experiences that linger in a heightened state of uncertainty.
I often explore the idea of safety and threat within domestic spaces, where the viewer becomes a witness, an observer, or a participant of the narratives that unfold before them. These intimate scenes are an embodiment of the emotional discord many of us share, where vulnerability materializes, and we are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of both physical and psychological isolation.”
Oct 232025
The paintings above by Nicole Parker were part of the exhibition, Phantasia, on view earlier this year at The Delaware Contemporary.
The artist’s statement about her work from her website-
I am a representational artist specializing in narrative and symbolic paintings and hand-pulled intaglio prints. In my current body of work, I’m exploring the triangular relationship between my sense of self, my perception of what “home” means, and the physical spaces and environments that I’ve occupied throughout my life. My imagery often involves structures, spaces and objects that represent a story or dream from a specific period in my life. They are places and things that evoke strong emotions like love, loneliness, joy, or fear. I’m often unable to physically visit or return to the things I’m rendering, so in the studio I work from memory and cobbled references.
Although memory is always unreliable and changing by nature, I’m interested in the potency of my own sensory memories, and the way that light, color and the smell of the air stick in my mind. These concrete sensory ideas are always at the core of my practice.
Oct 202025
The Solitude-Funnel, 1921, was created by Suzanne Duchamp, who was born today, October 20th in 1889.
From the Museum of Modern Art about the work-
In Solitude-Funnel (1921), one of the last works that Duchamp made in the context of Dada in Paris, she combined fields of pigment with cut-out circles of metallic foil in a composition that juxtaposes painted and collaged geometric forms with a puzzling inscription. The thin, black lines emanating from the black circle at the center resemble the funnel described in the title, or the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
Her first comprehensive solo exhibition ever is currently on view at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt until 1/11/26.
Oct 182025
The Recap, my Substack newsletter, returns today with a focus on abstract art, punk rock, the American flag, the 90s, and more. It adds a little more dimension to what I post on the website and ties things together thematically.
Check it out and subscribe!
Oct 162025
Sahara Longe “Skull”, 2024, Oil on Linen
“As We Are (after Otto Friedrich)”, 2024, Oil on Linen
“Liar”, 2024, Oil on linen
This week’s throwback is to Sahara Longe‘s paintings from her 2024 exhibition at Timothy Taylor gallery in NYC, Sugar.
From the gallery about the work-
Featuring twelve vivid and haunting canvases, Longe’s second exhibition with the gallery sees the artist reconceiving various art histories to arrive at an uncanny interplay of figures, allegories, and enigmatic landscapes. The show will be accompanied by an essay by Ferren Gipson, art historian and writer based in London.
In paintings characterised by a preternatural handling of line, colour, and figuration, Longe depicts partially abstracted subjects in atmospheric environments. Working on thick grain linen with raw pigment in a distinct palette of vermillion, lilac, raw sienna, and ochre, she renders her scenes with a fluid painterly freedom that is nevertheless quiet and precise in its effect. Across her work, she recalls aspects of the Symbolist ethos, which moved between nostalgia and rupture, seeking not to capture something directly, but rather convey the sensations it produces.
In her new paintings, Longe focuses on the nude. Articulated in spare, suggestive gestures, her subjects, largely women, are pictured huddled together, embracing a lover, or striding alone. Some set their gaze on an unknown distance, others stare down the viewer, and one confronts a fish. Each seems possessed by a disquieting tension that is emphasised by a shadowy apparition lurking in many of the works. Masculine in stature, the incubus perches over a scene or cradles another figure therein. Where Longe’s previous series reflect on social dynamics, depicting parties and crowds, these paintings are more personal; the artist explains that the new works look inward rather than outward. Expressive, brushy marks bring subtle notions of agitation, dreaminess, and intimacy to otherwise minimal passages of colour.
These paintings further explore the ideas set out in Longe’s earliest work, which emerged from her study of classical portraiture at Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence; in her early canvases, Longe integrated and recontextualised themes and styles of old-master paintings. Here, her compositions draw from Secessionist painter Otto Friedrich’s nudes and Symbolist Ferdinand Hodler’s ominous portraits. They likewise reveal the influence of a recent trip to Oslo, where Longe was taken by Henrik Sorensen’s mural (1938–50) in Oslo City Hall (where the Nobel Peace Prize is selected), and the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts. Ushering these disparate sources and traditions into her singular aesthetic, Longe poses subtle questions about representation—who it serves, and what narratives it upholds—just as she underscores figuration’s expressive potential.