Failure

If I Hear This Comment One More Time Dept.

Failure

By KARL STEVENS | December 7, 2011

I should stick to drawing comics
This is going nowhere
Review: New work by C.W. Roelle and Nick Hollibaugh
C.W. Roelle of Providence twists black wire into dazzling optical illusion magic tricks resembling pen drawings whose lines have wandered off pages and into the air. His show "Lamp Lit" at Craftland (235 Westminster Street, Providence, through November 13) is more evidence that he's one of our most exciting artists.
Captive audience
Karl cracks a few jokes for his nude models.
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I should stick to drawing comics
This is going nowhere
Review: New work by C.W. Roelle and Nick Hollibaugh
C.W. Roelle of Providence twists black wire into dazzling optical illusion magic tricks resembling pen drawings whose lines have wandered off pages and into the air. His show "Lamp Lit" at Craftland (235 Westminster Street, Providence, through November 13) is more evidence that he's one of our most exciting artists.
Captive audience
Karl cracks a few jokes for his nude models.
Alternative universe
In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.
What is this place?
Bertolt Brecht asks, "In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes," he answers, "there will be singing. About the dark times."
Living history
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Bert Gallery, which Catherine Little Bert and her father-in-law Hugo Bert (who'd run Cottage Gallery in North Providence) opened in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Providence in 1985.
Little surprise
At the tag end of a dispiriting day of gallery visiting I happened into the Bowdoin College Museum to see their collection of Warhol Polaroids matched with a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting. That's a sure recipe for ongoing gloom, but it was on my way, so I stopped.
Bon appétit!
Luis Meléndez himself greets you at the outset of "Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life" at the Museum of Fine Arts. He seems a haughty 31-year-old in this 1746 self-portrait, standing in a fine silk coat and ruffled shirt and holding up a chalk drawing (note the chalk in his hand) of a hunky nude dude.
Slideshow: The MFA's Luis Melendez exhibit
Images of Luis Melendez's show at the MFA
5 Traverse is shutting its doors
Last week 5 Traverse gallery announced that it was closing.
Purposeful randomness
"How do I absorb all this beauty," Leslie Schomp writes in Diary (2010), an open cloth notebook resting on a wood stand.
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