The still life is an artistic form that has captured the interest of Pieter Aertsen, Pieter Claesz, Diego Velázquez, Eugène Delacroix, and Giorgio Morandi, to name just a few. Boston-based artist Tara Sellios has also delved deeply into the construction of the still life and the ideas often associated with it—life, death, the question of permanence, and the intricate use of symbolism. What makes Sellios’s[…..]
In 1776 Benjamin Franklin was a celebrity in France. In a series of portraits made during that year, Franklin was depicted wearing a fur hat, the same chapeau that French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was known for wearing. According to the French, this made Franklin an enlightened thinker, like Rousseau. In his painting A Momentary Enlightenment (2010), Philadelphia artist Alexander Rosenberg depicts himself in the same[…..]
Boston-based painter Andrew Fish is working out solutions—proofs perhaps—to a complex problem we all deal with on some level, every day: what is the difference between an analog and a digital visual experience? Fish, interestingly, has chosen painting—arguably the most antiquated form of visual production—to seek answers to this query. His choice of medium confronts the proliferation of digital image making and publishing made possible[…..]
