Doug Harvey

Roy Dowell’s timing is seriously out of wack. For more than three decades, as the art world has careened from poststudio praxis to neo-expressionist painting and back again, L.A.-based painter/collagist Dowell has been steadfastly mining a creative vein whose most conspicuous antecedents are the abstract-formalist vocabularies of early Modernism. A......

Temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE, is a localized form of the seizure-inducing family of brain problems. It usually affects only that part of the cerebral cortex that processes memory, emotions, and visual and verbal semantics, without producing the spectacular fits and spasms of grand mal epilepsy. TLE can, however, produce......

It’s been a weird couple of weeks for me in terms of the Philosophy of Art. Following the energetic but unadventurous fall openings weekend, I flew off to Chicago to participate in the Stone Summer Theory Institute’s seminar, “What Do Artists Know?” No definitive conclusions were forthcoming. Although the other......

September 11 is upon us, and we all know what that means — opening weekend for the new fall line of upscale home decorations! But, hey, given the profusion of cultural fanfare marking previous anniversaries of the whole chickens-coming-home-to-roost thing (and the brouhaha undoubtedly brewing in anticipation of the imminent......

Swinging by the Pasadena Museum of California Art is often like grazing some kind of far-fetched fusion buffet — blithely mixing collectible vinyl action figures with early California Impressionist landscape painting, wrapped in a custom rainbow fumigation tent with a side order of spray-painted Kenny Scharf legume entities. The gestalt......

In Australia in 1971, a 30-year-old white Sydney schoolteacher named Geoff Bardon took a posting in the Aboriginal-relocation community of Papunya in the outback west of Alice Springs, teaching art to the children of the patchwork indigenous community. When he began to encourage them to paint the traditional patterns they......

The impression most people have of the history and meaning of 20th-century abstract painting basically involves a bunch of can-do postwar East Coast American dudes systematically stripping away subjective frills such as “content” to arrive at the monochromatic squares and precise geometric diagrams of Minimalism and Conceptualism, which allegedly refer......

In his last couple of shows, L.A.-based painter Steve Canaday managed to stir up a fair bit of controversy with his cheerfully explicit portraits of ex-girlfriends sporting grotesquely enlarged secondary (and occasionally primary) sexual characteristics, and his even more aggressively adolescent depictions of drug-fueled hot-rod chickie-runs at the Heart of......