“Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued)”, 2022, Oil on wood panel
Clive Smith‘s incredibly detailed trompe-l’œil paintings of birds were part of the 2024 exhibition From Cellar to Garret at Marc Straus gallery in NYC.
The first image is of the painting Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued) which uses elements from fellow artist Lynne Drexler’s 1961 painting Blued.
Today’s flashback is to a few of the intricate works from Sofia Love‘s 2023 exhibition Vaquera at Shelter in NYC.
From the gallery about the exhibition-
Vaquera – not determined by an article, the word becomes both a noun and an adjective, an iconic figure and a way of being in the world. For Brooklyn-based painter Sofia Love’s debut solo exhibition in New York, vaquera is both a manifesto of queer self-fashioning and a patron saint.
Born and raised in Boston, but with deep family ties to the Mexican community of Laredo, TX, Love’s acrylic paintings serve as a negotiation between ancestral memory and contemporary identity. The titular cowgirl recurs throughout the exhibition – gun-slinging, brown, and frequently nude – framed by expanses of desert. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. She’s the artist traversing her own imagination. She’s a badass dyke. For Love, vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.
While there are traditional canvases, the majority of works on view take the form of nichos, intimate yet elaborately decorated altars that can be found in homes across Mexico. Dedicated to deceased ancestors or particular saints, nichos blend folk spirituality with Catholicism, smuggling pre-Colombian vernacular traditions into contemporary, Westernized culture. Love’s nichos draw on this history to produce art objects that exist at the border of painting and sculpture, with frames that extend the content and imagery of the paintings they enshrine.
The resulting works each have interiors and exteriors, the painting and the frame, in which ambivalent scenes are surrounded by totems and animals that seem to hint at the psychological subtext of the central image. Figures reappear across the framed nichos like characters in a narrative, each with its own personal connotation for the artist. Skulls, moths, storks tell stories that are only partially legible from an external perspective. Like the vaquera herself, Love’s layered compositions refuse any easy interpretation.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Theo Platt, “Chrome”, Oil on canvas
Theo Platt, “Sunstream”, Oil on canvas
Theo Platt, “Sunstream”, Oil on canvas (detail)
Theo Platt, “Deep Calm”, Oil on canvas
Somerville Manning Gallery is currently showing two painting exhibitions: Theo Platt‘s textured oil paintings from his Oceans series of works (pictured above) and Steven Nederveen‘s Stillness in the Shade of Green.
Below Nederveen describes his process for the work (pictured below)-
Using a mixed media approach to image making, I combine acrylic paint and C-print photographs. By layering these elements I can etch down into the emulsion of the photograph to reveal golden hues and also build up the surface with impasto and washes of colour. The result is an image with photo sharp detail in focal areas and painterly brush marks that obscure and create space for the imagination.
Both of these exhibitions close 10/11/25.
Steven Nederveen, “Gold Hidden Within”, Mixed Media
Steven Nederveen, “Gold Hidden Within”, Mixed Media (detail)
Steven Nederveen, “Breathe In the Forest Air”, Mixed Media
Jon Carsman‘s painting October Visions, 1975, was on view at Akron Art Museum in 2024 as part of their permanent collection.
From the museum about the artist-
Jon Carsman painted from photographs, but though his pictures have a clear quality of precision, his intention was never to simply recreate what he had recorded on film. In his own words: “I want to give you a feel of what it was like to be there when I was.” To achieve this goal, Carsman stylized many elements of his paintings, often working toward a visual equivalent of the rhythm, movement, and energy that he found in music. He also worked most frequently with the rural scenery of Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, where he was born and raised. As a result, images that began as still photographs take on new life through the artist’s personal experiences and memories.
“Imagine a World Without America”, 2007, Screen print and acrylic on canvas
The painting above is by Brooklyn-based artist Dread Scott and was on view as part of the 2019 group exhibition Borders at James Cohan gallery in NYC.
From the press release about the work-
His 2007 work, Imagine a World Without America, calls upon the viewer to participate in the titular thought experiment and contemplate that absence. The painting de-centers the United States of America from the middle of the map that most Americans are familiar with. Scott utilizes the language of cartography to encourage the exploration of social questions, not geography. Land mass and sea are depicted but—like the world as it actually is—borders don’t exist.
The work is currently on view as part of 15, a group exhibition at Cristin Tierney gallery, celebrating the gallery’s anniversary and new location. 15 will be on view until 10/4/25.
Dread Scott has created political works throughout his career in a variety of mediums. In the video below he discusses how one of his art installations, What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag (1989), drew controversy- including denouncement by then President George H.W. Bush.