OLD NEWS

TODAY'S ARTIST WITHOUT A (KNOWN) BIRTHDAY: CLARA PEETERS OF ANTWERP & AMSTERDAM.
Here in 1618 w/ collection of luxury goods,
reminding us that they'd be vain & fleeting
(if she hadn't painted them).
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Clara Peeters -- a tough cookie.
No soap bubble she.
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Signs her name on the knife handle.
Don't mess with her!
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Clara Peeters in her studio,
reflected in the objects she painted.
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Still life with pie, olives, & wine in a really fab pitcher, 1611.
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Bread, butter, & cheese. Cherries.
And a split artichoke.
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Cheesestack with knife, shrimp, crawfish,
glass of wine and bread, 1620s.
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Flowers, shells, and things of gold -
the coins, the chain, the elaborate cups.
And reflected within them,
Clara Peeters, who painted this in 1612.
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There she is, caught in the gold cup.
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Because her art is a thing of value.
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Still life with a bit of everything --
wine, flowers, nuts, dried fruit, pretzels, candy, gold cup...
but especially the peony.
Brilliantly painted in 1611
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And she’s all over the place!
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Shells. Collected & painted
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Element of Water:
a fishy still life, plus artichoke, 1611.
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How could so much glory
fit into a single simple glass?
It couldn't, of course:
Clara Peeters made it up, in 1612,
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More glorious flowers in an earthenware jug,
plus a carnation plant, from Clara Peeters.
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A uniquely well-decorated tart
surrounded by other delicious and fascinating things,
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Elegant table, simple table,
although both look pretty tasty to me!
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Including sweet shaped as P for artist Clara Peeters
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Marvelously tiny still life of flowers in a glass,
surrounded by various insects and a snail.
Painted on copper in around 1615
by the infinitely talented Clara Peeters
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Flowers in a roemer, with mouse.
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Basket of fruit, dead birds, live monkey, 1615.
By Clara, in a more exuberant mood than usual.
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Beautiful flowers, delicious fruit, wine...
and of course money.
May all of those things be yours in 2026!
Thanks to Clara in 1615:
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May the new year be filled with beauty and abundance!
From Clara Peeters (& me).
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Raise a glass to welcome 2026,
May this year bring us all health, friendship, & beauty!
<https://tinyurl.com/4wuhmzte> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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MEET ESPHYR SLOBODKINA
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Her art kept an eye toward the future, but her life was shaped by the global turmoil of the 20th century. Born in Russia in 1908 to a Jewish family, the artist Esphyr Slobodkina spent her adolescence in exile, eventually moving to New York at the age of 19. In the city’s bohemian mid-century art scene, she made a name for herself as a dynamic and multi-faceted talent working across painting, sculpture, writing, and fashion.
Her accomplishments were not overlooked. She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, a pivotal association that helped foster acceptance for non-representational art in the United States and paved the way for Abstract Expressionism. Later, from 1963 to 1966, she served as its president. Collectors and museums took note of Slobodkina, too. In 1942, painter and prominent patron A. E. Gallatin presented the first major solo exhibition of Slobodkina’s work at his influential Museum of Living Art. Peggy Guggenheim included Slobodkina’s work in the pivotal “Exhibition of 31 Women” at Art of This Century Gallery in 1943. In 1945, she was one of just three women included in the influential exhibition “Eight by Eight: Abstract Painting Since 1940” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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Still, today, many are unfamiliar with Slobodkina’s name. In fact, Esphyr Slobodkina is best known to many as the writer and illustrator of the now-classic children’s book Caps for Sale (1940), the story of a hat peddler who gets caught up in some monkey business. The book has sold over 7.5 million copies to date. Slobodkina produced over 22 children’s books, as either author or illustrator, including several collaborations with Margaret Wise Brown, famed children’s author of Goodnight Moon (1947), among others.
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Esphyr Slobodkina was born in Russia and became a prominent American abstract artist by way of Manchuria. Her multinational story is one of both survival and creative optimism. She was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia, the youngest of five children. Following the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the civil war, her family fled Russia, which had become increasingly dangerous for Jews. In 1919, the family took the Trans-Siberian Railway to its Eastern-most stop, the port city of Vladivostok, and crossed into Harbin, China. Her mother, Itta L’vovna Slobodkina, a talented seamstress, supported the family by opening a dressmaking salon, where a teenage Esphyr worked and learned alongside her sisters.
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In 1928, she came to New York on a student visa (one of her brothers had already immigrated to the U.S. and was living in the city). She enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where she studied painting, though she found the traditionalist education stifling.
“We were warned not to follow people like Picasso, Cézanne, and such like because Picasso never learned how to draw and Cézanne never learned how to paint, and other advice of this nature,” she recalled of the National Academy of Design. She did find two instructors, Arthur Sinclair Covey and Ivan Olinsky, whom she admired. In 1931, she also noticed the work of student Ilya Bolotowsky, a fellow Russian Jewish expatriate. Bolotowsky, who was several years Slobodkina’s senior, would become both an artistic mentor as well as a romantic partner. In 1932, Bolotowsky traveled to Europe, where he became familiar with the emergent avant-garde art scenes. Returning in October of that year, he imparted what he had learned about the European avant garde to Slobodkina.
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In 1933, the two artists would wed, and a tender portrait Slobodkina painted of Ilya in that year is included in the exhibition. The marriage was ultimately confining for Slobodkina, however, (she had likely agreed to it for citizenship). The pair would separate in 1935 and divorce in 1938, but remained close friends and artistic compatriots for at least a decade afterward.
Slobodkina’s development over these early years, as she embraced aspects of Cubism, Surrealism, and Constructivism—from an early Self-Portrait in 1932, almost Expressionist in style, to a Cubist-inspired still life from 1934, to more boldly geometric, mechanical forms in the 1940s and 1950s, and through to impactful, intensely visceral assemblage sculptures made in the 1960s.
“She worked across media simultaneously—painting, clothing, design, writing—never sequentially, always at once,” Across all these shifting visual languages, there are throughlines—an interest in the industrial and mechanical, an acute sense of color, and an embrace of material recycling or repurposing. Along with more traditional materials of oil and gesso, her works include collages made with repurposed textiles and sculptures made with parts of machines.
Paralleling Slobodkina’s artistic development was her political consciousness. Throughout her lifetime, she advocated for the rights of artists. Besides her active involvement with American Abstract Artists, throughout the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, she was a member of the Artists’ Union and found employment with the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. Her work, which reimagined the possibility of materials that had been cast off, mirrored a longstanding set of principles focused on care and retrieval.
For Slobodkina, fashion was but one more mode of creative expression—and also a ticket to independence. Working in her mother’s dressmaking shop in Harbin, the young Slobodkina had developed a keen eye and hand, and was especially gifted at embroidery.
“Tying bows, arranging loops, making up designs for the embroidery gradually became my specialty,” she wrote. “With increasing frequency, I was being called in to give my opinion of this or that detail. It was amusing because I was still so young, but the ladies liked it, and I wasn’t too shy to speak my mind.”
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Throughout her life, Slobodkina experimented with fashion. Her embrace of fashion and her artwork were syncretic aspects of her creative persona. While a student at the National Academy of Design, she won a prize for her costume for an annual students’ ball, where she dressed as a pearl enclosed in a shell, from which she emerged to applause.
During her marriage to Bolotowsky, she found financial freedom through fashion as well. In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, she found a job at a New Jersey factory that produced patterned silk fabric. She worked her way up to a role that was both creative director and factory manager and earned a remarkable salary there until the factory closed in 1941. “For Esphyr, clothing was survival. It began with her mother saving the family through dressmaking, and Esphyr continued that legacy,” said Walworth, “Clothing is politics, economics, and modernism—it’s just another design language.”
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Slobodkina’s fashion designs served many purposes in her life and often found synergy with her artworks. Her paintings were often described as interlocking mechanical forms. One of the necklaces she designed is composed of parts of a metal typewriter and chain. “There is a purse that looks like a painting,” “And she had what she called her ‘Arp’ coat, too, which was a white fur coat that had these biomorphic shapes on it that she liked to wear.” But amid moments of struggle, her ability to create her own clothing allowed her a sense of control over her destiny. “Clothing allowed Esphyr to move through the world with elegance at moments when life itself was anything but elegant,”
The desire to fashion herself was elemental to Slobodkina’s larger world-building impulses. “Clothes, like scenery and lighting in the theater, are my props, creating the mood and the impression I am to produce,” the artist wrote. In 1948, Slobodkina moved out of New York City and, with her savings, built a house in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island, where she lived with her mother. While in school in Harbinm Manchuria, Slobodkina had taken a series of courses that focused on engineering and architecture, including mechanical drawings. Her initial ambitions had been to become an architect. Designing her home and particularly her studio enlivened these latent interests in the built environment, and in this very space, she created many of her most impressive large-scale paintings. Slobodkina lived in the house until 1977, with her mother, and for a time with her second husband, William Urquhart, who passed away after an illness in 1963. Over the decades, her outsize role in the art world of midcentury New York began to fade from memory. “Even as her reputation faded, the quality of her work never did,” “She never became afraid of technology or mechanics. She never became a flower painter. She stayed absolutely steadfast to the project she set out for herself decades earlier.”
In 2000, at the age of 91, the artist established the Slobodkina Foundation to preserve her work and legacy, but most importantly, to encourage people to embrace the creative life. Now, a new generation seems ready to take courage from her work. _artnet

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I'M OBSESSED WITH THIS KIND OF HEARTBREAKING PAINTING ON PAPER
of Nancy and Sluggo available for $7 on eBay:
<https://tinyurl.com/yk9htynx> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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DIGITAL PRINTING BLURRING BOUNDARIES BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART by James Welling
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In the late 1980s, I noticed photography’s transition from analog to digital in small ways in printed media. I saw it in typography in the East Village Eye that was elongated on a computer, and in the artificially sharpened images that occasionally cropped up in the New York Times. But only after the turn of the millennium did the powerful, digital prepress tools we know today—ultra-high-resolution scanners, imagesetters, and inkjet printers—become widely available to photographers in their darkrooms and studios.
Observing the transition in 2005, Richard Benson, a photographer and dean of the Yale School of Art, singled out mimicry as“… one of the miracles of digitization.” He wrote that digital imagery “has the power, when used with the proper tools, to take on the character of almost anything else,” adding that “files of binary numbers can generate music, display text, and even lay down ink- or dye-based color photographs.” Quickly though, generations of photographers took advantage of the tools newly at their fingertips to other ends, creating images that went far beyond Benson’s mimicry. Advances in digital printing, such as introducing pigments to make inkjet prints more permanent, enabled works that went beyond—imperceptibly or dramatically—what was possible in the analog darkroom. Quickly but quietly, new printers changed what a photograph could be, even blurring the line between image and art object.
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Like many photographers, I was never formally trained. Fifty years ago, I learned from technical books and by talking to other photographers as I made work. Because I had learned on the fly, when digital arrived, getting a handle on this new technology had a familiar learning curve. Everyone was feeling their way around, reading whatever they could, and talking to anyone who might know a little more than they did about digital. There were always conflicting opinions about how to do everything from scanning to printing to Photoshop in the early 2000s, and to some extent today. With no unitary path forward, there were six ways to Sunday; a lot of delightful experimentation ensued.
In 1995 I started using an Iris printer in my own work. An Iris printer—a large-format inkjet printer introduced by Intel in 1985—prints an image on a spinning sheet of paper affixed to a plexiglass drum, inscribing the image in ink line-by-line as it moves across the paper. A few years after I made my first Iris prints, I noticed photographs printed with a new device, the Lambda digital printer. This game-changing exposure device, introduced in 1994, combines analog and digital processes: A rapidly moving laser beam exposes light sensitive paper to create precisely controlled color—and later, black-and-white—prints.
I first saw the transformative power of the digital enlarger in Anne Collier’s early 2000 photographs of book spreads and album covers, photographed head-on against stark white backdrops. Collier’s photographs required these white surfaces to be rendered in perfectly neutral tones, that is, without warm or cool color casts, to convey the quiddity of her subjects. Anyone who has attempted to print a photograph of a blank white wall using an analog color enlarger will know that this sort of neutral tonality is nearly impossible to maintain. The whites shift either toward cyan or magenta, and after multiple test exposures, eye fatigue is inevitable. The digital device creates an entirely new type of color print in which the most subtle color hues are fixed, as they are in Collier’s exquisitely accurate neutrals.
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Dawoud Bey also used a similar laser-based machine to make his series of landscape photographs, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2017). Bey’s gelatin silver prints in this magisterial series, shot during daylight but printed to replicate deep twilight, trace the imagined journey of an enslaved person northward through Ohio, to arrive at the tree-lined margin of Lake Erie. The photographs are printed quite dark, and Bey has referenced the Acheronian prints of Roy DeCarava as an influence. What floored me when I saw “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was the precise separation and legibility of the darkest tones in Bey’s prints. In a traditional darkroom, printing values so close in range while keeping them still distinct would have been nearly impossible, especially across the series’ many individual images. Using the digital print process, Bey controlled the entire lower end of tonal registry to illuminate his rigorous vision.
While Collier and Bey craft their images with the laser devices, other artists, such as Wade Guyton and Isabel Gouveia, use glitchy printers to introduce visual disturbances in their prints. Guyton became known for making extra-wide inkjet “paintings” by printing on folded canvas that he forced through his 44-inch Epson printer. The stern grayscale typographic content of these early works, paired with Guyton’s off-road approach to inkjet printing, produces an intensely material viewing experience. Isabel Gouveia, meanwhile, prints lyrical botanical portrayals on her badly behaving smaller-format Canon printer that she then scans and collages together to create long scrolls of imagery. Richly colored and romantic, Gouveia’s images suggest the unending plenitude of natural forms. Somewhat unexpectedly, as photography was becoming more digital, it was also becoming more material.
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Digital technology hasn’t rendered the darkroom completely obsolete. Rather, scanning and inkjet printing have catalyzed new printing possibilities through analog-digital hybrids. In the mid-1990s, photographers began printing high-resolution negatives on their inkjet printers for use in the analog darkroom. In 2015 Jeff Whetstone harnessed this hybrid digital/analog workflow to create “Crossing the Delaware,” a 20-foot-long gelatin silver print. To do this, Whetstone gathered a slew of his analog and digital photographs of the Lower Trenton Bridge and converted them to inkjet negatives. He then taped dozens of these digital negatives together to form an enormous collage that he contact-printed on a 40-inch roll of photographic paper. The print is not only Herculean in scale, but impressively even: Whetstone took advantage of the precise control that digital negatives offer to produce consistent light and dark values.
Shannon Ebner works resolutely in black and white—which may seem straightforward enough, but before 2006, no inkjet printer could produce a consistently neutral black-and-white print. In that year, Epson introduced a package of hardware and software that could finally generate a black-and-white print that looked, well, black and white. When I first saw Ebner’s tough grayscale prints, I realized that for Ebner and other photographers, such as Mark Armijo McKnight, black-and-white digital printing was becoming, as the expression goes, “the new black.”
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Before the advent of full-frame digital SLR cameras in about 2005, the flatbed scanner was the only way to make digital files large enough for high-res prints. So, in 2001, Brandon Lattu made his 30-inch prints using an Epson scanner, recording all six sides of multicolored boxes of food products, crackers, cereals, and teas. In Photoshop, Lattu joined the edges of the scans to form 3D-seeming representations. Lattu’s final move was to adjust the transparency of each product so that the boxes looked as if they were made in multicolored plexiglas.
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The possibilities, size-wise, have increased dramatically. Louise Lawler’s “(adjusted to fit),” series, begun in 2011, requires that industrial inkjet printers be employed to “adjust” the size of her photograph to cover the entirety of the wall it will occupy. Instructions for installing the work involve typing the dimensions into Photoshop and then specifying that the image be “unconstrained.” This creates what is called a ratio distortion: The image covers the entire wall, but gets stretched or squished. Lawler is not specific about the type of printer to use, leaving open the opportunity to re-create the work far into the future as the technology evolves. One “(adjusted to fit)” work was recently “wall papered” over the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. This immersive and architecturally scaled photograph still manages to capture Lawler’s witty institutional critique vibe: A sculpture of Picasso’s head glares at the viewer in front of an impossibly stretched photograph by Thomas Struth of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum.
Wall murals like Lawler’s require behemoth industrial printers. But now, everyday consumers can use this technology to order a custom-made carpet, or a birthday cake with a digital snapshot printed on it. For Thomas Ruff’s 2022 “d.o.pe.” series—the initials refer to Aldous Huxley’s 1954 autobiographical Doors of Perception—the artist ordered gigantic inkjet tapestries emblazoned with his digitally created fractal dragons. The deep-pile surface of each carpet burns with chromatic intensity. Ruff, who in his 2009 inkjet “Zycles” created large abstract images with three-dimensional rendering software of algorithms based on cycloids, is fascinated by mathematics and by the most advanced research into visual phenomena. Yet despite his interest in the present, the textiles and extreme imagery in “d.o.pe’” feel surprisingly retro, and recall the craze for all things fractal that washed over visual culture in the 1980s.
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Industrial printing technologies now permit artists to put an image on almost any surface. Liz Deschenes took advantage of this for her 2023 series using the newest technology: UV inkjet printing. The UV process is so named because the inks are mixed with a glue that hardens, much like a gel manicure, under the bright light of an ultraviolet lamp that trails the print head. Instant dry allows Deschenes to seamlessly attach her pastel-colored monochrome inks to medium-size square sheets of Gorilla glass. Deschenes has long aspired to create dimensional photographs. Moves like this go far beyond digital’s analog mimicry to generate work that is neither photographic nor anything but. _ArtInAmerica

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SHALL WE TRY A CONSTABLE CLOUD THREAD?
We must, we must.
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Clouds, 1822
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"Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset", 1821-22
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Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, 1828
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Summer Evening with Storm Clouds
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Cloud Study, 1821
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Cloud Study (detail)
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'Cloud Study', 1822
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The Sea near Brighton - 1826
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loud Study - 1830/35
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Cloud Study, circa 1821-1822
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Cloud Study, ca. 1821-22,
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Cloud Study, Early Morning, Looking East from Hampstead, 1821
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I hereby award John Constable
a posthumous, honorary phd in the study of clouds.
He studied them so studiously.
Dr. Constable has a nice ring to it
<https://tinyurl.com/4sm6c745> _RabihAlameddine