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Essays, criticism and dispatches on art and culture — painting and painters, folk art and folk music — from a global cast of critics, curators and correspondents.
The Essay
For a decade the discourse belonged to spectacle. But in the painters' studios I have visited this spring, the mood has turned inward, unhurried, almost stubborn. This is a defence of the slow picture — the canvas built up over months, one considered brushstroke at a time.
Painters
Folk Music
Folk Art
Painters
Folk Music
A generation of ballad-singers is fading from the hills. A small team is preserving both their songs and the painted banners that once travelled with them from village to village.
Painting
A wave of younger painters is treating classical ink painting not as heritage to be guarded but as a living language — a folk grammar of the brush, reworked for now.
Essay
The debate over whether machine images are 'real art' has grown tired. The quieter question is what happens to the painter's hand — and to the slow craft of learning to see.
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