From an email from Seattle arts writer Tim Appelo, lamenting the fact that the new, online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer has virtually no arts coverage:Culture doesn't seem on these people's radar. They never seemed to notice that in the coffee shop, nobody steals the sports section or the editorial page or the business section -- it's always the arts section that's missing. True, but let's give the PI a couple of weeks to shake out and dig in. The final day for the print version (and the vast majority of the staff, including the entire arts … [Read more...]

A dog limped into a barand said, I'm looking for the manwho shot my paw. The Dalai Lama would let it go,but the dog being dog wanted to knowwho sold him a seatin a sink hole. I'm with the dog and with the pigwho leapt after leaningon the electric fence,her lardy self landing on little feet. Let other bless what bounty brings(not felled by fracture).She replied with a toothy rakeacross the rearof the swine beside her, believing, like Burroughs,there are no innocent bystanders.(All images, John Feodorov. Feodorov on Art21 here.) … [Read more...]

From Gary Faigin on Artdish:Lucinda Parker speaks of taking her inspiration from nature, but Thoreau would have had her thrown out of Walden Pond for disturbing the peace.  Her big, noisy paintings are celebrations of energy, movement, and conflict.  To the extent that they are inspired by the natural world, it is the realm of tsunamis, windstorms, icebergs, and waterfalls  - force colliding with force. Go, Gary. I love that lead. Based in Portland, Oregon, the painter in question is well into the third decade of her career. … [Read more...]

Working with his childhood friend, chemist and botanist Joe Piecuch, Elias Hansen celebrates the cheesy weirdness of Tacoma.Tacoma is the kind of town artists flee from. Art Chantry, who left and came back, refers to it as a "little piece of New Jersey that broke off." The term flying saucer was coined there in 1947, when a Tacoma man reported seeing silver discs flying over Mount Rainier and along the crest of the Cascade Range. When asked what they looked like, he said, "Like saucers without cups." Chantry also claims that the term new age … [Read more...]

I hail from a newspaper, now gone, although it continues online. I wish it well, although I wouldn't want to be part of it. The job is to do everything at once - 20 people (give or take) on a 24-hour news cycle. The pace of the old PI, which I considered brisk, now looks plodding. Three editors looked at everything on its day-long journey toward print. Blogs at the paper were a different story. One editor took a fast look, usually after the item was printed.When I started blogging a couple of years ago, the prospect of that fast read … [Read more...]

Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik emailed yesterday to say he was the victim of a drive-by Twitter post. Somebody's impersonating him in the department of Tweet Tweet. I saw the item about his Twitter post on MAN. Note Tyler Green's question mark, which I ignored: Look who's Twittering? Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik? Here's a sample -- and one which manages to miss many points at once: "I, for one, won't miss the Rose Art Museum. It was always a second-rate collection in a city full of first-rate art." I responded with this … [Read more...]

An exhibit that meant little to me when it was on view won't go away now that it's gone - Bas Louter's Dust (Asphalt) at Ambach & Rice. Paintings fanned out across the walls like pages of a book riffling in the wind. The images in black and white were muted and deliberately vague. A woman stood beside a car in a pose familiar from advertising: Buy this car and get the girl. But car and girl were a myopic blur drained of color. Clowns gazed into the middle distance, where no performance takes place. A portrait of a humanoid ape lifted the … [Read more...]

You found me. I'm the art critic for the Seattle PI, which is breathing its last in intensive care. When the Hearst Corp. pulls the plug, look in this space for my next post. Until then, you can still catch me at Art To Go. My PI email will soon expire. My new email is anotherbb(at)gmail.com.EDITOR's NOTE: Today (March 16) is the last day of the P-I. This blog will begin tomorrow. … [Read more...]

With photography, painting, interactive installation and video, Claudia X. Valdes considers a nuclear explosion at a point of its impact, the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the atom bomb was tested in 1945. Her exhibit at Lawrimore Project, titled Ten Million Degrees, runs through March 14. In 1983, Jacob Lawrence completed a series titled Hiroshima. Several years ago I was invited by the Limited Editions Club of New York to illustrate a book of my choosing from a list of the club's many titles. I selected the book Hiroshima, written by … [Read more...]