The Pencil Review
Articles by Talking Pictures
What Meets the Eye
The New Yorkers: Susanna Heller, Karlis Rekevics and Rackstraw Downes
What happened was that after my painter friend and I saw the show at the Studio School we headed down to the Lower East Side and it was so hot we decided to stop in […]
Featured Posts
Sketchbook #23: Willie Kohler
What I like about Kohler’s work is that he makes me feel the Age of Exploration (external and internal) is not over. He’s a contemporary and playful Caspar David Friedrich, a Romantic, but not corny, […]
Featured Posts
“The Five Demands” at Firehouse Cinema Friday, July 14 to Thursday July 20
In 1969 a group of black and Puerto Rican Students chained the gates to the campus of the City College of New York, put up posters with their demands for racial justice and inclusivity and […]
Der Defätist / The Defeatist
Featured Posts
Sketchbook #22: Cathy Diamond
To draw the forest is to study complex relationships. Below are a few of the direct studies Diamond has made that indirectly underlie and inform her complex and dynamic paintings. This is how she describes […]
Letters to the Editor
Gail Vachon responds to “A Pretty Good Show…”
I gave up trying to figure out which paintings were paired together and why, it was an unnecessary exercise for viewing what for me was a spectacularly exciting show. One painting after another thrilled […]
What Meets the Eye
Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained–A Pretty Good Show With “Such a Flimsy Premise”*
A long time ago a dealer visited David Salle’s studio and commented “Oh, I get it, Francis Bacon for straight people.” As he explains in an essay that accompanies the show, Salle has been thinking […]
Featured Posts
Sketchbook #21: Joanne Carson
“You can learn a lot of things from the flowers For especially in the month of June There’s a wealth of happiness and romance All in the golden afternoon” the song the flowers sing in […]
Featured Posts
Sketchbook # 20: Antonio Canova
The first time Canova surprised me was in Berlin at the Bode Museum. I was looking at Female Dancer and a red train flew by in the adjacent window and suddenly I saw how beautiful […]