Bradley Rubenstein: Can you give me a little of your backstory? I know you went to Yale for painting, but you have also been a sign painter and worked in movies and TV, and you are also a musician. How has all of that informed your work?

John Paul: In St. Louis I had solid training, and at Yale exposure to cutting-edge thinking.

The St. Louis years were dominated by the importance of Max Beckmann, who taught there after the war until the Fifties. His canvases were a part of a student's daily diet, lining a corridor between the schools of art and architecture. Read more »

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist who lives in New York. Bee is represented by Accola Griefen Gallery, New York, where she will have a solo show of new paintings from May 23 to June 29, 2013.

Criss Cross: New Paintings will be accompanied by a catalog with an essay by art critic and poet Raphael Rubinstein.

Bradley Rubenstein: Susan, I just saw this piece by Roger Denson in the Huffington Post: "Mira Schor and Susan Bee, the Thelma and Louise of the Feminist Painting and Crit set, pose the biggest threat to male domination of the medium and criticism of painting in that they are critics as wellas painters, and editors to boot, whose joint imprimatur has been pulsing out the feminist-left political art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G since the mid-1980s." (Huffington Post, May 1, 2012) Read more »

Peter Williams

For Peter Williams's first solo exhibition at Foxy Production, he is showing work from two distinct but interconnected bodies of work:large figurative paintings depict fanciful, fractured narratives that mix cultural and personal histories with fields of pattern and color; and a set of smaller paintings that distil and intensify visual moments from the larger works, magnifying and expanding them. Williams's paintings tell entropic tales, with figures caught in moments that show their fragility -- scenes of everyday life, both seen and imagined. Read more »

Bradley Rubenstein: You are known primarily for your film work, but this show, Robots, is paintings. Is painting a new venture for you, like an extension of filmmaking, or something new?

Amos Poe: I am a filmmaker and have been making various art objects for years; the similarity is that they both take over my conscious and subconscious, and I'm compelled to get them out. Painting is a new discovery, or at least the pleasures of it are new. A new love. I started having dreams of robots in May of 2012, and the first painting came about a week later. I've been painting these robots since then, and the dreams still come regularly. I think everyone should have a robot in her or his life.

BR: You are a seminal New York filmmaker, so it almost seems beside the point where you are from, or studied, or whatnot -- but I'm going to ask you anyway. Read more »

Dieter Roth. Björn Roth

Bruno Alfieri, one of the most outspoken writers on Jackson Pollock’s work, was not so impressed by an exhibition of Pollock's poured paintings. To Alfieri, the artwork seemed to be thrown together randomly, with little thought. In 1950, Time magazine's article "Chaos, Damn It!" quoted Alfieri on Pollock's work: There is "nothing but uncontrolled impulse. ... It is easy to detect the following things in all of his paintings: chaos; absolute lack of harmony; complete lack of structural organization; total absence of technique, however rudimentary; once again, chaos."” A cursory appraisal of the work of Dieter Roth, and his son Björn Roth, might initially elicit the same response.  Read more »

Deborah Kass is an artist whose paintings examine the intersection of art history, popular culture, and the self. She received her BFA in Painting at Carnegie-Mellon University, and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and at the Art Students' League. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of Art; the Solomon Guggenheim Museum; the Jewish Museum; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the Cincinnati Museum; the New Orleans Museum; the Weatherspoon Museum; and numerous public and private collections. Read more »

Henri Matisse: In Search of True Painting

From the start Matisse was an equal-opportunity gatherer and collector of other artists' styles and sensibilities: Giotto, Moreau, Cézanne, and van Gogh, to name a few. This is apparent right from the start of the show. Read more »

Innovative artist Arcady Kotler is not associated with any particular creed, religion, or tradition, but excludes none. At the core of his works lies a profound sense of intimacy that hopefully initiates a dialog, for which the artist always longs.  Kotler's work presents the evolution of a concept bearing form: from elaborately adorned yet impeccably harmonious ("Clothed Maja") to minimalist, with a strong reference to Russian supremacy; in "The Red Square" [left], the rigid geometry of a square intrudes on the organic form of the intentionally excessively decorated Russian nesting doll. It feels as if complexity has reached its limit and collapsed into the simplicity of the red square.

A matryoshka is a traditional Russian toy, the skill level of which rests on the number of nesting dolls it consists of. The last and smallest doll of Arcady's matryotshka is not hollow. It is solid. Read more »

Breathtaking and horrifying, Hurricane Sandy's devastating aftermath left many speechless and others still talking. "Go Home Sandy," "Boo! Go Away Sandy We Want Candy," "Better Safe than Sandy," and a slew of other witty taunts graffitied onto boarded windows and doors tried to disguise mass fear. Hundreds of 3x3 white hate-notes with brief messages to Sandy veiled shop windows in New York City. Written in different languages, the sentiment was the same. The superstormdid not discriminate, decimating already poverty-stricken and economically challenged islands including Cuba and Haiti but also sweeping away multi-million dollar homes along the gold coast of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Read more »

I open one eye. Sunlight pours in through my Zaha Hadid-designed venetian blinds, casting horizontal shadows on the walls, turning the room into a recumbent prison cell. I was supposed to meet James Franco (who is still a little sore at me for beating him out for the part of Cocktimus Prime in Sue de Beer's hardcore version of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) in Central Park an hour ago, but my Philippe Starck alarm clock (which I fully believe is haunted) failed to wake me. Read more »