Cartoons

“I’m not trying to make post-Internet paintings. What the fuck is post-Internet? It’s life.”

“Humor teaches us that you can be a good person but also have bad thoughts.”

“Traditionally, a painting treats you to the front and center seats. I like the idea you might get a seat that’s off to the side.”

I don’t remember when Amy and I first met—it must have been in the mid ’90s. However, I do remember that she saved my life by being one of the few artists who genuinely seemed to admire and enjoy what I was doing at a time when my work was barely known.

Joyce Pensato starts with the most iconic cartoon figures—Mickey, Minnie, Daffy, Krazy, Stan, and Homer—but her representations of them couldn’t be further from their usual plastic media.

Roberto Juarez on the way that Robert Brinker’s paper cutouts balance warm, Disney-like comfort with strident sensuality.

Amy Sillman on the delirious tension between knowing and not-knowing in the paintings of Ellen Birkenblit, whose new work is on view at Anton Kern Gallery through March 30.

An artists on artists text on Painter Camille Rose Garcia by Ryan Nole, accompanied by four paintings by Camille Rose Garcia, the first titled Antarctic Suburban Outpost.

In Chicago, where I live, I can eat a cup of decent pea soup at a bakery across the street from the Richard J. Daley Center, a sharp steel and glass courthouse tower. 

Herrera’s use of profane materials—familiar, commonplace images—“contaminate” the carefully circumscribed world of the abstract.

Sometimes I see a new artist who is surprising because she brings certain images and qualities to painting. Inka Essenhigh’s images span a range from funky and cartoony to elegant, like science fiction rendered into Ming Dynasty decoration, Chinoise screens, or lacquered bowls. 

Melissa Marks’s character Volitia cavorts through her drawings with the impudence of Nabokov’s Lolita and the sly pleasure of a cherub. 

Inside Billy Copley’s subconscious, cartoon characters, declarative statements, and phonetic alphabets battle for attention.

Keith Mayerson is hard to pin down. Just when you have a handle on his work, he shifts in some unforeseeable but intuitively right way. He made a splash in 1994 with a 60-plus drawing suite retelling the story of Pinocchio from a queer perspective.

Parades have complex social and psychological agendas and the same can be said for their participants.