Sometimes it’s delightful to notice the different messages that can be sent by similar visual information. Not profound, not unexpected, simply delightful.                 Dia de los Muertos

Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891) was the inventor and only transcendent practitioner of pointillism–the rendering of form in dots of pigment rather than free-flowing brushstrokes and fields of color.                     Seurat was most successful with this method on a fairly small scale, where he produced images…

Gail Chadell Nanao paints figures so freely and wetly that it’s surprising to see how much description there is. She maintains that exciting tension between image and paint where you see both at the same time, with neither overwhelming the other.                            …

We are taught to admire strong art, but not to notice how different it is from daily life, or why. The difference is that art is after something specific. So here we have Goya’s famous painting of French troops executing rebellious Spanish civilians during the Napoleonic wars. Goya arranges the elements so that we get…

The 16th Century was a rough time, which perhaps explains why the subjects of many portraits from that period don’t shrink from displaying toughness. Witness these two portraits of Anna Jagiellonka, Queen of Poland. The first, by an unknown court painter c.1555, was painted when she was 32, before she was queen. The second is…

The art of China’s Tang period (618 to 907) has delighted me ever since I happened across this piece a few years ago in the Chicago Art Institute, where I took the sadly discolored snap on the right. But the two views are from slightly different angles. Together they give a sense of the action.…

My interest in art history died slowly back in art school, where the professors in that subject were historians, not artists. Their lectures were social history lite, with slides of the hoary old standards blinking grayly and grimly on the wavering screen behind. They didn’t talk about the art as art at all–pointing out and…

These two pieces are divided by several hundred years, to say nothing of culture. Nor do they have the same expressive intent: Zhang Xuan’s piece is about lightness and delight, while Robert Peake was showing off the majesty of Queen Elizabeth and her nobles. But there is a fun reflection in the liveliness of the…

We visited the Great Wall of China in the spring of 2010. The Wall has magnificent sweeps that have been beautifully restored, and project strong to the max. Those are the parts you see as background for visiting swells. What astonished me when I saw the actual thing was not hugeness or grandeur, but the…

I draw a broad distinction between self-portraits intended to function as monuments, as statements about who the artist is, by golly, and those which are more in the nature of  self-exploration. It’s the difference between a declaration and an inquiry. The first category can be more productive of laughs— self-portrait as David – Johann Zoffany…