Listen to the episode

ART IN THE TIME OF COVID — For Hartford painter Matt Best, shown above in self-portraits highlighting the tattoos he says were prompted by the pandemic, the crisis has had a marked effect on his art He feels freer to follow his instincts and not paint in a reliable style. He also believes society as a whole will benefit, that “everything’s going to be restructured in a better way.”

The tiers of a wedding cake suggest the kind of hierarchies that don’t work anymore. “The rules have been rewritten.”.

Older “structural” works, a depiction of Matt’s anxiety, above;

Newer, featuring Madonna and Marilyn Monroe, below. In a long-ago dream, Marilyn told Matt, “You don’t need me anymore.”

MATT TELLS ABOUT HIS TATTOOS

I waited until I was in my 40s to get my first tattoo.

My tattoos are a physical reminder that I have changed on the inside. Years of therapy and living through a pandemic was liberating. I wanted my first tattoo as literal mark on my skin to remind me that something new has happened. It was meant as a reminder that I am free. I don’t need to hold on to old ideas that don’t work, I’m free of the past. I’m free to recreate myself.

My first tattoo was of a poppy (my favorite flower). In 2019 I went to the Netherlands with my sister and I found a large mound of dirt in the countryside that was covered in hundreds of poppies. I spent time drawing those poppies, filling many pages my sketchbook. I made one drawing in particular that when I looked at it later I thought, “this would be a great tattoo.” But I didn’t do it.

2020, the pandemic. Getting a tattoo fell by the wayside because it wasn’t possible. The idea was still there but like so many other things that year, it went dormant.

Summer 2020, things are opening up a bit. A former student finds me on Instagram and he has become a tattoo artist. This gets me thinking about the tattoo idea again. I still don’t do anything until I mention my tattoo idea to a friend and by coincidence that day my former student posts a photo of a tattoo he did of a flower. I decided screw it and contacted him immediately. I had my first tattoo on my left arm a few weeks later. He executed my drawing beautifully.

As many people warned me, tattoos are addictive. A month later I got two more poppies on the same arm.

In 2021 I added more poppies to my forearm. My idea is to recreate that small mountain of poppies on my arm. My poppy arm reminds me of times before the pandemic when I was lucky enough to travel and see beautiful poppies blowing in the wind. My arm looks like my sketchbook now.

A friend told me my right arm is boring so I added a larger tattoo of three lady slippers to my right arm this year. Every spring my partner Paul and I go on a lady slipper “hunt.” This tattoo is a representation of the two of us (the third flower being our cat). For me this tattoo represents spring, it’s a celebration of my second vaccine dose (I got the tattoo on the two weeks past my second vaccination date), and a reminder that things grow and change.

IT’S YOU WHO PUT THE COMMUNITY IN COMMUNITY RADIO! PLEASE GO TO WESUFM.ORG/PLEDGE AND GIVE WHAT YOU CAN!

Listen to the episode

On March 18, 1990, 13 works of art were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. A recent four-part Netflix documentary, This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, told the story.

Art historian Fran Altvater at her desk at the University of Hartford’s Hillyer College, where she is the associate dean.
Images of the stolen Gardner works and others over the decades

Film critic Richard Alleva, who writes for commonwealmagazine.org, sizes up the Netflix documentary, plus, for good measure, Mare of Easttown.

Listen to the episode

Last in a three-part series: a walk downtown to look at what it would take to make way-cool Middletown even cooler by accentuating its considerable positives: its restaurants, classic Main Street, proximity to Wesleyan University, and creative community. 

What about something in here?

Listen to the episode

Today, we continue our deep dive into how Middletown, CT, already a way cool city, might become even cooler by developing its potential to be an arts destination. In case you’re unfamiliar with Middletown, it’s well-known for its excellent restaurants. It’s got the Connecticut River running alongside it. It’s got Wesleyan University. And a classic wide main street. And an excellent library. Plus, as I can’t resist pointing out, but which you seem to already know, since you’re listening to it: an amazing college radio station. In this second installment of the series, we talk to Middletown artist Pierre Sylvain, the executive director of the Buttonwood Tree arts venue on Main Street, and last but not least, the mayor himself. What’s he think of the idea of artifying Middletown? In an upcoming episode, we take our portable mic for a walk downtown with the head of the Downtown Business District and the director of the city’s arts commission.

Listen to the episode

Great restaurants. That classic wide main street. Wesleyan. Excellent library. Way-cool college radio station. Middletown’s got it all, right? Well, except for visual art. In the first of a series about how to make Middletown an art destination, Open Studio talks with an artist, a former arts administrator, and a Realtor. They consider the sad proposition that maybe the city just isn’t into art.

Upcoming episodes will feature the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, the executive director of The Buttonwood Tree arts venue and other smart, creative people. We’ll even go for a downtown walking tour with the head of the Downtown Business District and the current city arts administrator.

Listen to Part One.

A free LIVE-STREAMED concert Trevor Davis helped bring to town: TOMORROW!

PLEASE SHOW WESU SOME LOVE DURING OUR SPRING PLEDGE DRIVE! YOU PUT THE COMMUNITY IN COMMUNITY RADIO! THANKS!

Click here to donate to WESU.

Listen to the episode

Listen to the episode

Painter Peter Waite says he works at the intersection of private and public memory. A classroom, for example, may remind the viewer of their own school days. His subject matter is largely drawn from his domestic and international travels, and, except in occasional paintings of statuary, devoid of figures, instead depicting “a scene just before you enter and one last take before you leave.”

He sketches and takes photos on site — “It’s difficult for people to think I’m working but I am”…

Back in his studio, he paints on panels he can stack — “It isn’t art unless it fits ifn the back of your vehicle”….

Panels are “materials from the trades” that recall various graphic art jobs he’s held …

He uses thinned acrylic paints, applying them in “a regime of stains”…

Of the intended effect, he says, “Things are never really in focus, but they are — and they can fall apart.”

A typical good day? “I paint, I eat, I take a nap, I go for a bike ride.”

“Sower/KewGarden/London,” 1991, acrylic on panels, 6×8′

From left: “Greenhouses,” 2016, acrylic on panels, 8×8′; “Crystal Palace, Retiro/Madrid,” 2017, acrylic on panels, 6×8′; “Middle School,” 2020, acrylic on panel, 44×38″

Mentioned in the interview, from left, my recovery from having failed to record our first interview; jazz musician Eric Dolphy

Drawings from Spring 2008 in my Wesleyan Graduate Liberal Studies course, “Monster Drawing: Large Scale Rendering,” with Peter Waite:

A twig, charcoal on brown paper, 36.5×48″; Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s Metamorphosis, charcoal on gray paper, 19×25″. (I added the yellow hair as a political commentary this year.)

I regret that I can’t find my salmon head! 😦

Listen to the episode

Retired RI Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams helps us close out Presidents Month and Black History Month by weighing in on what should be done with problematic — especially Confederate — statues. Should they be pulled down? Stored in warehouses? The Chief votes nay.

Besides writing, speaking and teaching about Lincoln — and quoting him liberally in his court rulings — Chief Williams was a collector of Lincoln art and artifacts since childhood. He and his wife Virginia have donated some 30,000 items to Mississippi State University, choosing that repository in order to increase the store of knowledge in the South about Lincoln and the Civil War.

But he held onto a few favorites:

Clockwise from top left: “Hermes Bust” by Leonard Volk; “The Council of War” by John Rogers; “Lincoln the Railsplitter,” inscribed with “best wishes” to the Chief, by the artist,Norman Rockwell; “Lincoln” by Leroy Neiman

This bust, on the Chief’s desk in his Providence chambers, is also by Leonard Volk:

See items from The Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana, at Mississippi State University

This statue, by Thomas Ball, depicts a former slave kneeling before Lincoln, who holds the Emancipation Proclamation. It is controversial for seeming to show African Americans in a subordinate stance. Chief Williams says that’s a misreading of the artist’s intent.

Listen to the episode

Following along with University of Hartford art historian Fran Altvater, the busiest person in academe, as she unpacks for us 10 artists’ takes on love:

Love the pink hair! Happy birthday, Fran!

Also mentioned in the episode:

My Robert Indiana-inspired LOVE necklace; and WIlliam listening to our chat:

Also, a link to Waldy & Bendy’s Adventures in Art, a terrific podcast:

https://zczfilms.com/podcasts/waldy-bendy/

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Stay safe out there!

Listen to the episode

… Not more diverse architecture. Architects. Did you ever notice? Though your doctor may be black, and your lawyer may be a Latina, and other professionals in your life may be gay or trans, most architects are plain vanilla white men. What’s up with that?

We’ll talk with a progressive-minded architecture professor –  a white man, as it happens – who places at least part of the blame on the academy. University of Hartford Associate Professor of Architecture Theodore Sawruk  says that although college architecture programs may work to attract a diverse student body, and congratulate themselves for it, those students may actually fail to graduate because they have few mentors and role models like them to model success.

But why take the professor’s white male word for it? He’s assembled a lovely panel of underrepresented architecture students for us – three undergrads and a grad student – who can tell us what it’s like to be black, female, queer, or trans as they try to make their way in the competitive, even backbiting, field of architecture.  

Ted Sawruk and a Connecticut Verizon store he designed in 2019

Jason McDonald and his masterplan for a residential eco-tower in Florence, Italy

Aurora Perrault and her five-story mixed-use building with retail and office spaces on the ground and second floor and residential spaces on the floors above. The goal of the building was to create a sense of community and a connection to nature for building residents and neighbors.

Renee Parry’s New Haven mixed use residential/commercial complex plan

Grad student Magic Santos and her Phillips Metropolitan CME Church in North Hartford, CT