Georgia O’Keeffe: She Lived Deliciously Alone in the Wild, Wild West

In 1934, Georgia O’Keeffe gutted the passenger seats from her A-Model Ford. It was time to make way for the only companion she needed, and wanted, out west: her art. There, in the dry heat of New Mexico, the pioneering female artist drove, hiked, and schlepped her canvases to the farthest corners of its blackened…

Art History’s Hidden Sexual Innuendo: The Weasel

Elevated to divine status, unicorns, lions, eagles and the occasional white rabbit are the loved and familiar characters in our romantic bestiaries, but the little weasel has never managed to secure such a position. Always wild, always wayward, it was the ideal material for folklore and fable. Early Macedonian culture saw them as a good…

Discovering Black Outsider Art in a Whitewashed World

Their abilities don’t come from any artistic establishment. They didn’t have any formal training and they were not influenced by other mainstream artists. Hailing from places like Mississippi, Tallapoosa, and other rural pockets of the deep south, they’re the African American Outsider and Folk artists whose voices and colour palettes explored a world that wasn’t…

Artist du Jour: The Bohemian Moments of Józef Mehoffer

Today we’re escaping a gloomy fall afternoon with a visit to the colourful, extravagant world of Józef Mehoffer. Care to join us in our virtual art gallery? Born in 1869 in what was then Austro-Hungary, Mehoffer studied art in Krakow, Vienna, and Paris. He led the Young Poland movement, a group of artists formed around…

Missing Renoir Painting bought at a Flea Market for $7

You just don’t hear stories like this anymore… A painting by the French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir that hasn’t been seen since 1926, presumed lost forever, has turned up in a flea market in Virginia for the bargain price of $7. Sitting in a box of bric-a-brac, neither the vendor nor the woman who bought it…

Before Pantone, there was a 19th Century Colour Dictionary for Nature’s Poetry

“Streak from the eye of the kingfisher” for a buff orange. “Flower of deadly nightshade” for a brownish purple red. “Decayed leaves of none-so-pretty” for cochineal red. “Beauty spot on wing of Mallard Drake” for a Prussian blue. These were the poetic descriptions inspired by nature to describe colour in a book used by Charles…

The Secret Language of Still Lifes

Still-lifes make delicious little voyeurs out of all of us. No matter the era to which they belong, they always give us the sense that we’re spying on a table set for a night of romance, gluttony, or a secret rendez-vous; a clandestine scene where only the finest cornucopia of treats will do, or a…

She Was Surrealism’s Black Sheep

“Pure psychic automatism.” That was Ithell Colquhoun in a nutshell, according to fellow Surrealist André Breton. The flattery is a bit of a suprise, given that Breton – one of several founders of a movement that has made little room to uplift its women – was somewhat of a vocal hater of women in the…

Reviving the Art of Cutaway with a Femme Twist

We’ve always got time for some incredible cutaway art. There’s just something about the attention to detail – the pure voyeurism – that makes it the ultimate eye candy. Today’s escape comes courtesy of American artist Hilary Harkness, whose cutaways are a veritable Where’s Waldo for adults, filled with raucous scenes of women dominating traditionally…

Take a Surreal Brain Break with our Artist of the Week, Jacek Yerka

Ah, to visit Yerkaland in the fall, where the clouds have a strange surrealist sheen, and the trees a soft otherworldly glow. If you’ve never heard of the imaginary universe of Jacek Yerka, you’re in for a treat. You may have seen bits and pieces of his work around the interweb but perhaps not had…