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.
The Blind Swimmer: Gordon Grant Fraser (December 2, 1975 – November 1, 2020)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.
Bushwick’s Tim GowanEven 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 […]
Siri Berg: A life in colorSiri 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 CuratorWritten 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 […]
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.”
Contributed by Jason Andrew / With her paintings fetching millions at auction, Shara Hughes has been on a tear. Since 2020, she has had nine solo shows, presenting work from Shanghai to London, Åalborg to Luzern, Aspen to Manhattan. All but three of the 17 paintings in her first show in Los Angeles, titled “Light the Dark” and presently up at David Kordansky Gallery, were made in 2023. Fueling Hughes’s remarkable pace is an unrelenting embrace of paint, with which she balances descriptive and imaginative motifs. Notwithstanding her commercial success, she retains a fearless approach to dismantling conventions, the paintings a cutting edge. As she noted in a 2020 interview, the more she attempts to control the creative direction in her paintings “the worse they are.”
October is a special month for Two Coats of Paint because we will be hosting our first annual Hudson Valley Gallery Crawl on October 14 and 15. More than thirty galleries are participating, offering an array of special events and activities. Please join Sharon Butler (publisher of Two Coats of […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Reaching for Something High,”Leslie Smith III’s first NYC solo show, on view at Chart, is a virtuosic blending of influences and themes, reflected in the delicate complexity of eight shaped paintings on thick stretchers floating with trenchant awkwardness on the wall. Each painting comprises many smaller, oddly shaped canvases, each of them individually constructed and stretched and, for the most part, lightly painted.