“Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.” -Andrei Tarkovsky Chicago-based artist Audrey Niffenegger has always had a strong sense of storytelling: A compelling grasp of contradiction, humor, tragedy, and fantasy permeates the twenty odd years of her visual art career. Her work, an affirmation of Chicago’s…

“His sculptures are matrices, in which a mysterious emptiness is embedded” While returning home to Manhattan via Amtrak after my interview with Jon Isherwood I realized that the experience of living with his sculptures for a few hours had transformed my way of seeing natural rock formations. The rocks that occasionally appeared to the sides…

MR: There is of course always idle speculation on the state of painting as it might relate to the cultural vacuum. One cannot dismiss the fact that painting provides an entertainment for the masses, as do all the other mutant forms of so-called fine art. But its popularity at any given moment is certainly irrelevant. Would…

I’m Saul Ostrow’s first official guest in his new apartment, and he’s happy to be cooking for someone other than himself. Saul has just transplanted from New York to become Dean of Fine Arts and Chair of Painting for the Cleveland Institute of Arts. His wife, the painter Shirley Kaneda, helped him move in, having…

Canaletto of the Skies Yvonne Jacquette has had a busy summer. Most of it, as usual, has been spent in Maine – she’s summered in the state since 1954. But there have been trips back to the city to make the final choice of photographs for the definitive book about the work of her late…

Renewal and Resistance “Where are all the beautiful women?” a lady asks R.B. Kitaj during the packed opening of his recent show at L.A. Louver, a leading gallery in Venice, California. “What?”, he replies, incredulously. Mr. Kitaj has battled deafness for many years, but even so would have had difficulty comprehending this question. The lady…

Ashik Mene, a Turkish Cypriot artist living in the north part of Nicosia, was welcoming and unsurprised when he heard American English on his mobile phone. In a typically Cypriot way, word had already arrived that a foreign artist wanted to speak with him. It happened when he was waiting at the border crossing from…

Melissa Meyer is big in Japan. Not in the euphemistic sense applied to rock stars, but literally. She has just completed her largest paintings to date there. Tokyo’s newest skyscraper, the Shiodome City Center, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates, is also, at 43 floors, the tallest. Ms. Meyer has created a pair…

You have said that your paintings are “family disputes between order and derangement.” Can you talk about that? That’s just a metaphor that came to me; it doesn’t reveal itself in the final product in a literal way. It’s something that happens in my brain, the working out of the painting process. And I guess…