Lois Dodd says she’s not an artist, but a painter. There is a knowledge that comes from making things. It cannot be reproduced by history, or philosophy, or criticism. Artists often say their hands are smarter than they are. She is a painters’ painter. Her work is a resolute refusal to conform to social, political,…

We were already blackened with charcoal that wouldn’t come out even with vigorous scrubbing after the first week of Gwen Strahle’s Drawing Marathon at RISD in 2005. It was a notorious Winter Session elective that locked students from every discipline at the School in the Foundation Studies drawing studios from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m….

The word “geometry” was coined in ancient Greece to describe the measurement (metron) of earth (geo). As such, it dealt with concerns regarding physical space, and the ways in which said space could be defined, illustrated and measured. With time, however, as notions of space began to shift from the physical to the abstract, so…

Ellen Phelan’s Field Through Trees, is built up and wiped away—built up again, and blurred. Purple, yellow, blue, the darkness of the tree trunks closest to us shows the strokes of paint as paint, and gives itself away even as it describes that which we are to look through. Past the trees there is a…