Artists. We know their work, but we don’t always know their faces. In “For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design,” on view through January 20 at the New Britain Museum of American Art, over 90 paintings spanning from 1809 to the present featuring the artist’s face in self-portrait form or as portraits by other artists are presented with examples of their representative work, personalizing what the artist makes as art, with who they are as people. The exhibition was organized to highlight the National Academy of Design’s (NAD) expansive collection, and to remind audiences of the Academy’s fundamental mission and educational goals as a teaching and collecting institution that is a “forward-thinking” place to train artists in the best academic practices and promote and exhibit their work. What’s important is the historical fact that from 1839 to 1994, the NAD required … [Read more...] about PORTRAIT PERFECT: A FACE TO FACE REVIEW IN NEW BRITAIN
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RE-PIECING THE SHELL: DARWIN “BROKEN, BUT NOT BAD” AT REGIS
What does an artist do after a devastating divorce and death of her mother? With the invention of psychoanalytical theory by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and others, the path was open for artists to make emotional self-examination a physical reality in painting, sculpture and the arts. Susan Darwin’s inventive oil paintings, that open the fall exhibition schedule at Regis College’s Carney Gallery, flow directly from the emotional highs and lows that she has faced in life. Her paintings belong to the genre of biographical artwork that has been in fashion for most of the modern era. Darwin’s “100 Broken Shells” explicitly deal with her unhappy divorce and the depression that resulted. While in a sad state, walking along Shaws Cove beach in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, she looked down at broken shells and an inspiring thought came to her: “They are broken, but not bad!” Picking up … [Read more...] about RE-PIECING THE SHELL: DARWIN “BROKEN, BUT NOT BAD” AT REGIS