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Annie Lapin’s astonishing canvases take us deep into nature, society, and human perception itself. By John Dorfman Annie Lapin’s paintings are like portals. Step inside, and you find yourself in a disquieting landscape, unfamiliar and yet eerily familiar at the same time. They shimmer with possibilities, almost in a quantum state, to the point that…

An exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts draws attention to the influence of the Arctic on Jean Paul Riopelle, Canada’s greatest postwar artist. By John Dorfman The history of the fascination of Surrealist and abstract artists with the indigenous art of the Arctic is a long one. It starts in the 1930s, when…

Feared moribund by the early 1960s, abstract painting continued to be a lively art in the decades that followed, as demonstrated by a wide-ranging exhibition at the Blanton Museum. By John Dorfman Although arguably all art is abstraction, the idea of painting “abstractly,” that is to say, without creating representations of external objects, dates back…

Never made for sale, plein air oil sketches of the late 18th and early 19th centuries have found an astute and scholarly audience that appreciates their greatness. By Sarah E. Fensom Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile, his treatise on education, “Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.” For young painters living…

Ernest Briggs, a California-born New York painter and teacher, charted his own path through abstraction, always exploring and never repeating himself. The notion of a “second-generation Abstract Expressionist” has entered the vocabulary of art history, but it is not very helpful in terms of actually understanding how and why artists created the works they did….

In Eric Aho’s paintings, we enter a mysterious and powerful realm of nature. The search for the sublime in nature, pursued by the Romantics in Northern Europe and the Hudson River School in this country, goes on in the work of Eric Aho. Aho, a 54-year-old New Englander, isn’t a landscape painter in the literal…

An exhibition devoted to Fairfield Porter’s home in Southampton, N.Y., and the circle of artists and poets who gathered there showcases an atmosphere of inspiration, leisure, and beauty. In his poem “June 30, 1974,” the poet James Schuyler describes an early summer morning in the Hamptons. He begins: “Let me tell you/that this weekend Sunday/morning…

As painter, printmaker, and teacher, Leonard Edmondson cultivated the possibilities of abstract modernism. By John Dorfman   “My painting is not art of rebellion but one of discovery and sharing. I have found satisfaction in the spontaneous, often compulsive, act of drawing and painting.” This personal statement by Leonard Edmondson manages, with extreme concision, to…

In her wildly energetic paintings, Jackie Saccoccio channels the sublimity of Old Masters and the chaos of 21st-century life. In the art of Jackie Saccoccio, it’s as if the souls of the Baroque and Mannerism were reincarnated in an Abstract Expressionist body. The visual complexity and explosive paint handling of her oils on canvas, coupled…