Pep Talks for Artists

I was so excited to have painter, Melissa Capasso, whose visionary style is inspired by daydreaming, join me this week to continue my series on the Dream in Art. Melissa makes charcoal drawings and oil and acrylic paintings that explore themes of mother and child, St. Lucia and Catholic icons, vision, blindness, and the vanitas...all in a wavy gestural style with vibrant color or primal black and...

Come along on a ~~Dream Quest~~ with me to discover works of art that show real dreams...not just images of sleepers or "dream-like" paintings. I set out to discover the bonafides. I began in 1525 with Albrecht Durer, then moved to France with Odilon Rédon in the 1800's, the Surrealists and André Masson in the 1920's, and then shot over and up to the US in the 50's to Jasper Johns, and finally lan...

Sculptor, Shari Mendelson joined me this week to discuss her work. Shari lives and works in Brooklyn and Upstate NY. She is represented in New York by Tibor de Nagy Gallery and has won many prestigious grants, including 4 NYFA-NYSCA Fellowship awards, a Pollock-Krasner grant and most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.  She makes human & animal figures & vessels made up of cut-u...

Mandy Wilson Rosen is back to co-host another Book Talks for Artists! Welcome back, Mandy! This week we are discussing "How to Work a Room" by Susan RoAne to see if it jusssttt might have some helpful tips inside for artists. Spoiler alert: It does. It's chock full of helpful tips for surviving an opening and we can't wait to talk about it. I even found some cocktail party lounge music for the ep....

This episode I look at the plusses of slowing down and taking our own sweet time in the studio. Artist slow-poke examples include Giorgio Morandi (read by Frank Bango ), Jay Defeo , Charles Burchfield 's "reconstructions" like "Sun and Rocks," Michelangelo , Cy Twombly , and, last but not least: Agnes Pelton and her silver baby. I didn't hold back on the crazy effects on this one, guys...it's a fu...

Installation artist, painter and photographer, Portia Munson, joined me on the podcast to talk about her work with cast-off objects, cultural waste, and girl kitsch. Tune in to hear our conversation about her work's feminist and ecological themes. We also spoke about how the objectification of women persists...in objects. And how endless inspiration can be found simply by roaming around an antique...

Think you can't make work unless you have a big palatial studio? Think again! Great art can also be made in kitchens!  Here's proof: Ida Appelbroog : Art 21 episode "Power" & Jo Applin essay Martha Rosler: "Semiotics of the Kitchen" Mimi Smith at White Columns in "Gloria" 2002 and at her website: https://mimismith.com/1970.html Betye Saar's "Black Girl's Window" Joseph Cornell's works &am...

Catherine Haggarty, a friend of the show, painter and Executive Director of NYC Crit Club stopped by this week for a Bonus Episode to tell me a bit about her upcoming summer courses online and in person. She's got some great faculty lined up too, including Claire Grill, Clarity Haynes, Erika Ranee, Paul Gagner and Jared Linge. We also got talking about how it was for each of us starting out and ho...

Painters, Keisha Prioleau Martin and Emilia Olsen joined me this week to talk about their work. Both painter's painters, they work primarily with the figure and use vibrant luscious color to add to the content of their work. Listen in to hear about why the "bather" is still a rich subject to paint (especially by women or female-identifying artists), why the city's character and quirks can inspire...

Friend of the show, Paddy Johnson, is back on Peps! Welcome back, Paddy!  She gave me tons of Instagram tips for artists (that old enigma wrapped in a riddle) and she also told me a bit more about " Netvvrk ," her business network providing training for professional working fine artists. You may remember that she came on as part of a panel for "Episode 3: Alternative Art Programs" back in 202...

Where did the phrase "That gave me the willies" come from and how did it kick off the American Sublime? And what was the first landscape on Earth? Find out in this week's episode as my guest, collage artist, Todd Bartel joins me to talk about our favorite subjects: Collage and Landscape. Click here to see images of Todd's work: https://www.toddbartel.com/ Click here to read Todd's writings on coll...

This weeks on Pep Talks, I am taking a quick dive into Roland Barthe's concept of the "Punctum" from his book "Camera Lucida," to explain why some artworks and films stick in your mind and others don't. Find out why Stanley Kubrick's choice of music for scoring "2001: A Space Odyssey" & Ingrid Bergman's turn as a boxing nun made both of these films punctum-y and stick in my brain. Also, come h...

Come along this week to find out why I think an episode of the Twilight Zone is the perfect analogy for going on an artist residency ...AND also hear a little radio play I made about going to a Provincetown/Truro dune shack for a week as an Artist in Residence and all about my neighbors: 1,000 gray seals and a single white-footed dune mouse. It will be "Ever so much fun." Further reading/watching/...

This week on Peps, we're going to tackle the metaphysical question: When is a work finished? I explore some texts that try to pin down a definition and also share some of my own thoughts and metaphors... But I am most excited to share that this episode contains recorded messages from listener-artist contributors! 6 generous artist listeners sent in their own unique ways of describing this indescri...

This week I had 4 fellow collage enthusiasts join me for a great roundtable about contemporary collage: Curator, Kathy Greenwood and Artists, Ginnie Gardiner, Todd Bartel and Michael Oatman. If you love collage, aka "the finding, minding & binding," (thanks, Todd!) then you'll love this episode. And my obsesh w/ glue became next level as we explored both its physical and metaphysical propertie...

Friend of the show, Mandy Wilson Rosen is back to co-host with me this week! Welcome back, Mandy! At a recent artist meet up on Clubhouse, we learned that many many artists cite "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985" ed. Maurice Tuchman/LACMA as their most prized book on their studio bookshelf. Neither of us had heard of the book before, so we set about to find out what all the fuss w...

Gather 'round, me hearties, for a tale of a fearsome creature of the deep: a sea monster that feeds on #wip posts, called the "Leave-It-Like-That." This week's podcast is about how this unsolicited comment on our social media posts and in the studio can derail us if we aren't hyper vigilant against their meddling shenanigans. Hoist the main mast and scuttle the jib, as we set sail into Leave-It-Li...

I was so thrilled to have Ann Toebbe in my clutches this week as she joined me on the Peps Pod this week to discuss her show "Cooler by the Lake" at Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 11 Rivington through Jan 27, 2022. We talked about her exquisite gouache and oil collage paintings, the space in Indian miniature paintings, the dollhouse in art, her project of recreating friends' homes via their Facebook pho...

This week I was really excited to have Sharon Butler on the podcast for the second installment of my "Interview the Interviewer" series. Sharon is a painter, writer and founder of the Two Coats of Paint Blog-azine which offers a space for alternative critical writing for the arts in the New York/Tri-State area. We nerd-ed out about paint brushes, spoke about her "Good Morning" drawings, and about...

It was a complete honor to interview painter, Jennifer Coates , during the run of her solo exhibition in NYC at High Noon Gallery titled 'Lesser Gods of Lakewood, PA" that featured both large and small stunning acrylic and spray paint magical landscapes, populated by Bacchanals and classical female figures. We discussed 4 paintings in depth: "Three Dryads," "Fire Watcher," "Dryads and Pollinators...

In this episode, artist, Mandy Wilson Rosen and I did a deep dive into Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art." We criticized where criticism was due, but we also highlighted many of the helpful and brilliant insights about the phenomenon of creative "Resistance" that the author outlines in the book. After much deliberation, we decided it is a worthy addition to any artist's bookshelf.  And P.S....

This week on the Peps pod, I look at the exact minute that Philip Guston switched his work from abstraction to the radical cartoony style he is famous for today - as proof that change is hard, but worth everything if you can manage to brazen it out.    Readings this episode were from: "Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations" Ed. by Clark Coolidge &nb...

This week I am launching a new miniseries called "Interview the Interviewer" and I'm excited to welcome my first "Interviewer," Brian Alfred, an accomplished painter and the host of Sound & Vision podcast to the pod. I enjoyed turning the mic back on Brian and hearing about his work and process in the studio and also his insights into podcasting and interviewing artists. Please check out his w...

If you've ever felt old and uncool as an artist (like I have, and often), then this episode is for you. I set about to get hard data about when the artists that we revere in museums created their most admired works. What I uncovered will simultaneously astound and soothe you.  Texts mentioned in this episode were: "Late Bloomers" by Rich Karlgaard "Old Masters and Young Geniuses" by David Gal...

This week on Peps, I interviewed Courtney Puckett and Carl D'Alvia (2 amazing contemporary artists working in sculpture) and we really got down to the nitty gritty of what it takes to be a sculptor in this year or our lord 2021 AD. We talked storage spaces, alternate uses for Civil War plinths and outdoor storage for anything "bigger than a dog," as well as how they got started in the medium and t...