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           William Alburger , Forest, 2013, 65" x 108" x 9"  rescued spalted birch, in an solo exhibition at GRACE       Eco-friendly art is meeting the world of high art, if we're to take a cue from what's showing at local art centers and galleries.  It can be stated that the earliest environmental art started with the artists' visions and applied those visions to the environment, with little interest in sustainability.        Quite the opposite trend is developing now.  Several emerging  artists, the “environmental artists” of the 21 st century put nature in the center--not the artist or the idea.  Nature is the subject and the artist is nature's follower. The following artists' creations are about the land and earth; other artists interested in the environment have been more concerned with a world under the sea .   William Alburger, Non-traditional Backwards One-Door, ...

Diego Velázquez, Las Hilanderas ( The Spinners ), oil on canvas, H: 220 cm (86.6 in) x W: 289 cm (113.8 in) The Prado, Madrid ( Not for beginning art students; I was not able to understand or interpret this painting at all until teaching a class in Mythology. )  The study of myths in all cultures, like the study of art, may seem obscure but it can illuminate some truths about humanity.  Around the world, the beauty of weaving has some association with magic. So we look to Diego Velázquez's Las Hilanderas ( also called The Spinners, The Tapestry Weavers or The Fable of Arachne) which focuses on the weaving contest between Pallas Minerva and Arachne described in Ovid's Metamorphoses .  The foreground scene is about a competition which includes spinning and carding, preparations that come before the weaving of tapestries. The final outcome of the story is implied, not shown. Velázquez used a complex composition of diagonals to weave a tale,  a fable that lovers of ...

The Hyperbolic Coral Reef project has spread around the globe Nature is mysterious and some of the magical colors and patterns of the coral reef are a wonder of nature's artistry. Surprisingly, vegetables such as kale, frissée and other lettuces mimic the free-flowing, wild patterns found in the coral reef.  These products of nature form hyperbolic planes, not explained by Euclidean Geometry.  Crochet, a fiber art that traditionally has utilitarian purpose, holds the power to make this mystery visible to our eyes.  With this in mind, various hyperbolic coral reef projects have sprung up around the globe, bringing together crochet artists to call attention to the fact that this natural wonder -- something akin to the oceans' natural forest -- is vastly disappearing as a result of pollution, human waste and climate change. Photo of satellite reef, Föhr, Germany, courtesy Uta Lenk The Hyperbolic Coral Reef Project is the brainstorm of Margaret and Christine Wertheim, ...

Since 1993, Martin Schongauer's 10" x 13" drawing of Peonies has been in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Too fragile for permanent display, it may be in the Getty's exhibition of Renaissance Drawings from Germany and Switzerland, 1470-1600, March 27-June 17, 2012. A painting of peonies came up for auction in 1990 under the vague label of Northern Italian. However, a museum curator at the Albertina in Vienna recognized it as an important drawing from about 1472-73 by Martin Schongauer , an artist who lived in Alsace on the French-German border. The drawing, now in the Getty Museum, is a study for the flowers in Madonna of the Rosary , 1473, painted by Schongauer for a church in Colmar (now in France). Albrecht Durer traveled to Colmar to visit Schongauer in 1491, but the great Alsatian master had died by the time 21-year old Durer arrived. Martin's brothers met with him and gave him some of the master's drawings. This drawing may have been one of the drawings ow...

Georgia Nassikas's triptych , Stone Wall, is in the very old technique of encaustic. . McLean Project for the Arts is currently exhibiting three contemporary artists whose techniques involve layering. I was initially attracted there to look at Georgia Nassikas' paintings made in an encaustic technique. In this medium, paint pigment mixes with beeswax to create a very thick and rugged texture, as seen in Stone Wall, above. Paint must be kept hot during application and it sets quickly. The technique was introduced in Egypt during the Roman Empire, in portraits of the deceased encased in mummies. Nassikas uses the wax from the hives of bees she keeps, as it is necessary to cover the large areas of the multi-layered canvases she paints. Many diverse, uneven shades of color show through the wax in both abstract and landscape paintings. Carolyn Case has small intimate paintings of oil which also feature layering of a different kind. Her exhibition is called Accidently, On Purpose, ...

Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman at Inn, 1623 Metropolitan Museum of Art Willem de Kooning, Merritt Parkway, 1959, from the Detroit Institute of Art, Bequest of Hawkins Ferry, is in a n exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (called MoMA), New York At first glance, Frans Hals and Willem de Kooning have nothing in common, other than being artists who originally came from the Netherlands. More than three hundred years separate their art and two very different New York Museums, the Met and MoMA, have exhibitions of their work. Hals was vividly realistic and de Kooning was a founder of Abstract Expressionism, but their common grounds are looseness of brushwork, luscious paint and bold energies going in all directions. In short, it is their painterly techniques. Women, II, in MoMA, part of the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Collection, is one of many paintings of women that de Kooning did in the 50s Analyzing the radiating diagonals of Hals' compositions and paint quality, we might won...

J ean-Francois Millet, The Gust of Wind, 1871-73, National Museum of Wa les It's disappointing that the Corcoran exhibition, Fro m Turner to Cezanne , had to be taken down early as a precaution over environmental concerns......I was counting on going Friday, April 9, three days after it abruptly closed. What am I missing? A spectacular collection from the National Gallery of Wales, little-known paintings of well-known artists that are seldom seen in the US..................... Torrents of Rain and Gusts of Wind..... Vincent Van Gogh, Rain, Auvers, 1890, from the National Museum of Wales Vincent Van Gogh's suns, stars and flowers from sunny Provence express the intensity he experienced while living there. But in May, 1890, he moved north of Paris to Auvers-sur-Oise and painted Rain, Auvers in July. Van Gogh used such a heavy impasto of paint that this painting conveys a heavy impact of rain. Van Gogh had an uncommon ability to combine actual texture of the paint itself w...