Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Sep 19 2026
The Creature From the Black Lagoon
In 1954, something strange emerged from the water. Universal Pictures had already given movie audiences Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Wolf Man. Most of those characters belonged to an earlier generation of horror, however. By the 1950s, movie screens were increasingly populated by extraterrestrials, radioactive mutations, scientific experiments, and creatures …
Sep 18 2026
Dracula in Mid-Century Pop Culture
By the 1950s and 1960s, Count Dracula had escaped his Transylvanian castle. He was on television, in monster magazines, on model-kit boxes, in toy aisles, at Halloween parties, and even represented by a lovable vampire grandfather on a prime-time sitcom. The terrifying aristocrat of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel had become one of the most recognizable …
Sep 17 2026
Raymond White Skolfield: A New Deal Artist Who Captured American Life
Born on this day, September 17, 1909, in Portland, Maine, Raymond White Skolfield was an American painter and printmaker whose work preserved scenes of city streets, working people, industry, waterfronts, and the landscapes of his native Maine. Although his name is less familiar today than many artists of the twentieth century, his work survives in …
Sep 16 2026
The Color of Pomegranates: Surrealism, Poetry & Visual Art
Few films look quite like The Color of Pomegranates. Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary work feels less like a conventional motion picture than an illuminated manuscript brought to life. Figures stand inside carefully arranged compositions. Books flutter in the wind. Pomegranates bleed their juice onto pale fabric. Carpets, fruit, lace, stone, water, animals, religious objects, and human …
Sep 15 2026
Yuri Norstein: Master of Animated Dreams
Every September 15 offers an opportunity to celebrate Yuri Norstein, the Soviet and Russian animator whose relatively small body of films has had an influence far beyond its size. Born on September 15, 1941, Norstein became one of the great artists of world animation through films that seem almost impossible to separate from dreams, memory, …
Sep 13 2026
Yma Sumac, the Peruvian Songbird
Few singers have ever sounded quite like Yma Sumac. At one moment, her voice could descend into a dark, resonant register that seemed almost impossibly low. Seconds later, she could leap upward into brilliant coloratura, trills, birdlike calls, and piercing high notes that appeared to come from an entirely different singer. Even among the flamboyant …
Sep 12 2026
Robert Irwin: Light, Space & the Art of Perception
Robert Irwin spent much of his career asking a deceptively simple question: What if the most important part of an artwork is not the object itself, but the way we experience the space around it? That question eventually led him away from conventional painting and toward light, shadow, translucent fabric, architecture, gardens, windows, fluorescent tubes, …
Sep 11 2026
Bola de Nieve: The Cuban Pianist Who Made Every Song His Own
Bola de Nieve did not have the kind of voice the recording industry usually tries to manufacture into perfection. It could be rough, intimate, conversational, playful, weary, tender, and suddenly enormous with feeling. He did not smooth away those qualities. He built an entire art around them. Sitting at the piano in immaculate evening clothes, …
Sep 10 2026
Israel Abramofsky: From Kyiv to Paris and the Art World of Toledo
Israel Abramofsky built an artistic life across borders. Born near Kyiv in 1888, when the city was part of the Russian Empire, he eventually made his way through Europe, studied art in Paris, absorbed the rapidly changing currents of early 20th-century modernism, and settled in Toledo, Ohio. There he became not simply a working painter …
Sep 09 2026
Sol LeWitt: The Artist Who Made Ideas Into Art
What happens if an artist creates the idea for an artwork but does not personally make the finished object? For Sol LeWitt, that question became the foundation of an extraordinary career. LeWitt helped transform contemporary art during the 1960s by arguing that the idea behind a work could matter more than the artist’s physical touch. …
