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So. I originally intended this interview to air and stream on Superbowl Sunday, Feb 12. But then I realized that my vast global audience will be occupied with watching the pregame festivities then, so consider today’s episode a pre-pre-game festivity. It’s an interview with a Providence Journal photographer, Bob Breidenbach, who shot all of the 11 Super Bowl games in which the New England Patriots played. Bob and I worked together at the Journal for more than a dozen years.; I was a reporter. I left the paper at the turn of the millennium and after 38 years on the job he just recently retired. I loved our Zoom visit. Bob is the same good-natured guy I knew back in the day and you’re going to love his lively reminiscences about the shots he got and the ones he missed. As a bonus for you, having listened to this show, you’ll be able to impress everyone at your party with your superior behind-the-scenes knowledge of covering the big game.

As for you listeners who couldn’t care less about the Super Bowl or about football generally, on Feb 12, you can listen to the stunning audio I collected about art in sunny Hawaii during my recent trip there: Lei making, tattooing, painting, printmaking, museumgoing – the whole Polynesian megillah. And maybe your family will still let you dip a chip in the five-layer dip and will make room on the couch during the halftime show.

But now, photographer Bob Breidenbach.

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Today, a visit with mixed media artist Kelly Taylor, whose work is abstract and inspired by her love of nature. I find it deliciously goozhy. The work looks to be built up of layers and layers of thickly applied paint, but as we’ll learn as she describes her process, there’s more than paint under there. And as for her tools, we’re talking everything from palette knives to dental picks. Kelly started her art life making collages, but over years of art making, taking workshops, doing residencies, and meeting regularly with likeminded artists in what she calls her tribe, she’s worked in all manner of media. “I’ve never wanted to be idn that little square of just doing one thing. …You have to be willing to experiment and make a mess, not thinking you’re creating a finished piece of art.”

“We really like leaving and the excitement of what’s next.”

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Merry Christmas and happy every other holiday in this joyous season! Today, because you’ve been very good, a special treat! We catch up with Holly and Joe Whiting, to whom we last talked in March 2021 when they were about to start their retirement years as nomads, living on the move in the small bus they retooled – called a skoolie — named Sandy. The headline on the openstudioradio.org blog post says it all: “A coupla crazy old people moving into a bus.”

Here’s a link to that show.

So. A year and three quarters in, how’s it going? We talked via Zoom from where they were parked – now in a new smaller, if you can believe it, vehicle, which they call their Nowhere Van, at a Texas truck stop. (We were reliant on the kindness of the hot spot gods so apologies for any audio anomalies!)

Follow their adventures @the.nowhere.van and nowherevan.blog.

Before we join Holly and Joe, I’d like to remind you that WESU is a community radio station, which means it largely depends on the generosity of listeners like you. Please, if you’re writing checks to worthy causes, spare a thought for the station, which brings you the kind of unusual programming you can’t find anywhere else. Just go here and give what you can. There are way cool Thanks!

It’s a tight squeeze, man. Case in point: “We have a toilet. It pulls out from under the bed.”

Top row: That’s their bed in the background; the kitchen; minimal decor

Middle row: Little is right!; a deep thought; they took their bikes

Last row: This is a still from a music video by favorite band Bright Eyes, from which they took the name Nowhere Van.

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Today, he may be the hardest working man in photography. Wesley Bunnell shoots your kid’s heartbreaking championship game, the town’s fourth of July parade, the cloud of cherry blossoms in bloom at Wooster Square, soft mist over the water in Branford, anything and everything that’s photoworthy and some subjects that you wouldn’t think are photoworthy but that, with his poetic eye, he makes so. Wesley is the chief of photography for Shore Publishing, a group of seven local newspapers between the Connecticut and Quinnipiac rivers. Chief of photography is a grand title but really he’s pretty much a one-man band. I met him this past summer at an art fair where I was exhibiting and he was on the job, and busy as he is, he agreed to a chat for Open Studio. You can get a sense of Wes’s work at his website, wesleybunnell.com. As you’ll hear in our interview and see from his photos, he likes finding interesting juxtapositions, and, as a self-described introvert who enjoys meeting people, he’s something of an interesting juxtaposition himself. All I can say is, his heart is in it.

Oh, and if you enjoy this kind of programming — and really, where else are you going to find it but at WESU? — please donate during our current pledge drive by clicking here and giving what you can. It’s you who put the community in community radio! Thanks!

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If you’re listening to a radio show about art, it’s a safe bet you know who Jerry Saltz is. He’s an author and New York magazine’s senior art critic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018 for his essay, “My Life as a Failed Artist” and his first book, in 2020, was How To Be An Artist. His Instagram account has 581,000 followers, of which I am the most avid.

His latest book, a collection of his criticism, is called Art is Life: Icons & Iconoclasts, Visionaries & Vigilantes, & Flashes of Hope in the Night.

This episode is a recording of his talk, sponsored by House of Books, a small bookstore in arty Kent, CT. Largely directed to artists, it offered Jerry’s down-to-earth, tough-love motivational advice (after all, how hard can it be to make our [expletive deleted] mediocre work?); his views on art, of course, and his personal history (he drove a truck and has no formal art training). He also threw in a few mean impressions — of thinking David, by Michelangelo, and active David, by Bernini — and their significance to art history.

Mensch that he is, Jerry even bought the audience pizza. Everyone left smiling.

Thanks to Jerry and to House of Books for letting me record the talk.

The last thing I’ll say is that, like independent bookstores, and like artists,  community radio depends on the support of people who love those things, which add so much to life. Please, during this, WESU’s fall pledge drive, give what you can by clicking here. Thanks!

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Today, a blast from my Rhode Island past. More than two decades ago, when I was a reporter in Providence, I knew a writer named Carol Bonomo Albright and she crossed my radar recently to let me know she’d gotten a novel published. It features a plot element about art – the art of 17^th century painter Artemesia Gentilleschi. If the name is familiar it may be because the Wadsworth Atheneum put on an exhibit of her work not long ago, and I toured it for Open Studio with my art historian friend Fran Altvater. I’ll put a link to that episode on the openstudioradio.org blog post. But back to Carol. She didn’t even know I had this radio show but of course I invited her on. Our conversation touched on Carol’s writing life, the novel – Hold Up The Head of Holofernes – and how art heals the three main characters. She reads three sections of the book, each set in a different time period, and we even had enough time to touch on Carol’s growing up in New York’s Greenwich Village. It’s a yeasty episode about art and writing. You’re going to enjoy it.

Mentioned in the episode: Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holofernes, left, and Gentileschi’s. Which do you favor?

A link to the discussion of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s traveling Artemesia Gentileschi exhibit

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Today, in the spirit of the season, we tour a Stafford Springs, CT, shop that designs, carves, and sells magic wands. Harry Potter fans especially, take notice! Are these lovely carved sticks really magic? you ask.

Well, it was a certain kind of magic that compelled Ed Bareiss to pay attention when, a little more than 10 years ago, the parents at his daughter Hillary’s birthday party marveled at the dozen or so wands he’d made as party favors and urged him to start selling them.

Fast forward to today when Orchard Works Magic Wands is an international business that’s about to have two locations in tiny, out-of-the-way Stafford Springs, and that sells all over the country at loads of comic con style events, with buyers including some way cool celebrities you younger listeners will recognize.

That birthday girl Hillary, by the way, is now a student at Hartford Art School, which is how I met her and learned about the family’s magical business. Ed tells the whole story and give us a tour.

You can access the shop at orchardworksCT.com and orchardworksCT@gmail.com.

Oh, and BOO!

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Paul Baldassini uses the same techniques as Peter Paul Rubens to paint his close-up “portraits” of flowers he shoots with a highly technical digital camera

Below, a visit to my genius neighbor’s studio.

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Welcome to the first Open Studio episode of the new WESU-FM season!

Last September, I did an episode about the graphic novel featuring interviews with two professors who teach the form. Because there’s so much to the graphic novel — and because I’ll be teaching a course in it for the first time at the college where I teach, the University of Hartford’s Hillyer College, I thought we’d revisit the subject.

Graphic novels, for those unfamiliar with the term, take the comic book into the deep end of the pool. One graphic novel you may have heard of is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, set in Nazi Germany. Another is Alison Bechtel’s Fun Home, which was made into a Broadway musical.

As with last year’s guests, both of today’s, interviewed via Zoom, have developed creative approaches to reading, analyzing, and even creating graphic novels.

Prof Patrick Gonder, left, teaches at the College of Lake County in Illinois and Rocco Versaci teaches at Palomar College in California. Both specialize in the graphic novel.

Here are their syllabi:

Prof Versaci has used this transcript of the Tennessee hearing on banning Art Spiegelman’s Maus from the curriculum.

One of Versaci’s students, an art major, was inspired to create this as a gift to his professor:

Prof. Gondor uses this page from Files on the Ceiling to illustrate how graphic novels can tell a story more effectively than film or novels:

Some titles mentioned in the episode:

Blankets, by Craig Thompson; Flies on the Ceiling by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez; Hot Comb by Ebony FLowers; Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross; Mr. Miracle by Tom King and artist Mitch Gerads;100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso; Fables by Bill Willingham; This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki; Unflattening by Nick Sousanis; Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing series; Ms Marvel by G. Willard Wilson; Syllabus by Lynda Barry; and of course Maus by Art Spiegelman and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

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Today, we caught up with Rachel as she did last-minute prep for the August festival and then we took in the event itself, talking with artists and musicians and vendors and shoppers. For those of you who didn’t get to any of these summertime first Friday events – and, sorry to tell you, it’s too late for this year – it was an opportunity for artists and craftspeople to display and sell their wares on the wide sidewalks of Middletown’s wide main street, for performers to strut their stuff, and for visitors to discover and rediscover what a cool and creative community Middletown is.

This was the last installment of this year’s series about making Middletown more of an arts destination. Find the previous two — and last year’s — in the blog’s archives.

Images from the event