Two Coats of Paint has recently learned of the death of Gordon Fraser, a talented artist and art blogger who penned The Blind Swimmer, of a heart attack after undergoing a series of treatments for colon cancer.
Histories and stories
Bushwick’s Tim Gowan
Even though making art is often an experience that happens in the solitude of one’s studio, it rarely occurs in a vacuum. Artists rely on each other for support, reinforcement, inspiration, and challenge, forming communities to avoid feeling like fish out of water in this world. Tim Gowan was one of those artists who cherished being part of a community and played a role in its formation.
Siri Berg: A life in color
Siri Berg, 98, died April 8, 2020 in her home, in New York City. Born in 1921, in Stockholm, Sweden, Ms. Berg was an accomplished painter and artist of mixed-media who enjoyed a late-career renaissance in her final two decades. In recent years, her work was the subject of several […]
April Kingsley (1941-2023): Art Historian, Critic, and Curator
Written by Tom Recchio of The Provincetown Independent / An art historian, curator, scholar, and critic, April Kingsley of Wellfleet and Truro lived her life amidst art. “I wouldn’t go anyplace if there wasn’t art to see,” she once said. She explored American Abstract Expressionism, including the work of African-American and Greek-American painters, and contemporary craft art; she curated more than 75 major exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the U.S.; and she published reviews, catalogues, and books at an astounding rate.
Cora Cohen (1943-2023)
New York-based painter Cora Cohen died at a hospice in Brooklyn on June 22 at the age of 79. As Barry Schwabsky wrote in ArtForum International reviewing her 2022 exhibition at Morgan Presents, she was “one of the most underrated painters in New York.”
Louise H. McCagg (1936-2020)
Louise McCagg, a member of the A.I.R. gallery, exhibited widely, both in the United States and internationally. She also collaborated with a new generation of Hungarians on many projects, one of them being part of the Hungarian Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale.
In memory of Susanna Heller (1956 – 2021)
Contributed by Medrie MacPhee / Susanna Heller and I have been friends going all the way back to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design [NASCAD] in Halifax from which I graduated in 1976, and Susanna in 1977. Our first studios in New York were our first apartments, mine on 3rd St. in the East Village and hers on 5th. Our lives consisted largely of many a night of visiting each other’s studios, museum and gallery visits, and talking painting, painting, painting.
Robert Andriulli (1948-2023)
Robert Andriulli had an extensive exhibition record over the past 25 years, with numerous shows in Maine, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Among awards he earned are Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 1979 and 1985. He had residencies at Yaddo, Millay, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweet Briar.
William Graham Anthony, ironic icon (1934–2022)
William Graham Anthony died on December 24, 2022, of complications suffered after having rushed into a fire in his Westbeth apartment a week earlier.
In Memoriam: Paul Vexler, 1947 – 2022
By the time Paul Vexler chose to pursue his art full time in 2006, he already had decades of experience and a unique command over his favored material. Observing nature and the movement of trees, Paul understood the flexible properties of wood and created sculpture of remarkable elegance and beauty with seemingly impossible arrays of loops and knots.
