More on: Visual Art

Photographer, printmaker, graphic designer, and book artist Kathy Hettinga is on familiar terms with death. While very young, she lost her husband in a farming accident, and she has survived cancer. As an artist, she approaches her old acquaintance with clear-eyed delicacy. Like Emily Dickinson, she seems able to look at death with respect but…

Karen Mulder lives under the sign of the ampersand: she is a both/and kind of person. As writer & speaker on art, art history, architecture & spirituality, she is deeply committed to an interdisciplinary way of reading the world. Her charism is for seeing—& showing us—the subtle interconnections among disparate artifacts & different disciplines. She…

Paradoxically, the work of sculptor John Frame is at once unsettling and profoundly peaceful. His animals, human figures, and tableaux, carved in wood, bronze, lead, and stone and adorned with found objects, are graceful and touchable, mesmerizing as toys. The work is playful, like something from Geppetto’s workshop, but like the unsanitized fairy tales of…

Assemblage artist Barry Krammes uses found objects to create miniature worlds with cathedral-sized impact. Layered with detail, mixing whimsy and tragedy, pathos with weirdness, his beautifully composed tableaux have the scale and scope of Dickens novels. Antique carousel figures, tiny, glowing paper lanterns, and gimcrack plastic people and animals mix with mushrooms, chess pieces, and…

Kim Alexander, who profiled the Austin-based collage artist Lance Letscher in Image issue 44, is also a delightful artist in her own right. Her quirky, surrealistic paintings mix crisp, playful design elements and trompe l’oeil images with deeply compassionate portraits of pain and loss. At once intellectual and humane, witty and emotive, her work bears the…

Saying that Barry Moser is an illustrator is like saying that Bach wrote ditties or that Shakespeare scribbled verse. Yes, the core achievement of Moser’s career is the production of world-class illustrations to some of the greatest literary works ever produced, including the Bible, The Divine Comedy, Moby Dick, even Alice in Wonderland. But Moser’s…

In the seventies and eighties, we saw our share of roadside religious signs from the back seat of our family’s Datsun station wagon. As you speed by in your car, there’s a temptation to distance yourself from people who make billboards that say things like Are You Telling Anyone about Jesus Christ? and Obey God…

Eleanor Dickinson is a painter whose work exhibits, at different moments, the qualities of dramatist and documentarian. As documentarian, she created a body of work over several decades that contains the searching but compassionate gaze of friend and observer, whether she is creating works that record lovers embracing or Pentecostalists in moments of ecstatic prayer…

Painter Jim Morphesis creates works suffused with passion. Not passion in the superficial sense of “enthusiasm,” but in something closer to the dramatic, scriptural meaning of the word. When you encounter his work you have to brace for some pain, for the suffering and sin and violence and awareness of mortality that characterize our human…

On Wayne Forte’s website, along with over a hundred of his paintings, is an invitation to send the painter “suggestions, comments, concerns, questions, rebukes, rebuttals and replies,” with a link that lets you send email to Forte’s personal account. Probably Forte is the only painter in America who issues viewers a standing invitation to rebuke him—and…