Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Mar 28 2025
Everett Ruess: Art, Wilderness & an Unsolved Mystery
Everett Ruess was only 20 years old when he disappeared into the canyon country of southern Utah in 1934. He left behind two burros, a campsite, an enigmatic inscription reading “NEMO 1934,” hundreds of letters and journal pages, and a remarkable collection of woodcuts, drawings, and watercolors inspired by the landscapes he loved. What happened …
Mar 27 2025
Jules Olitski: Color, Surface & the Art of Painting
Jules Olitski spent more than half a century asking what paint could do when almost everything traditionally expected of a painting was stripped away. Figures disappeared. Landscapes dissolved. Drawing retreated toward the edges. Brushstrokes sometimes vanished almost completely. In their place came enormous expanses of color that appeared to hover, drift, glow, or dissolve across …
Mar 26 2025
Norman Ackroyd: Etching the Wild Coasts of Britain and Ireland
Norman Ackroyd spent much of his life traveling toward the edges of maps. He sought islands battered by Atlantic weather, distant cliffs, estuaries, remote headlands, rocky stacks, and stretches of sea where land seems almost temporary. He traveled by fishing boat to places many people would never see, made watercolors and drawings while the weather …
Mar 23 2025
Akira Kurosawa: Samurai, Humanism & the Art of Cinema
“I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.” -Akira Kurosawa Rain pours through a ruined gate. Seven warriors stand against an approaching band of horsemen. A dying bureaucrat sits alone on a playground swing. A samurai waits calmly while two rival gangs destroy one another. A wealthy executive looks down …
Mar 21 2025
Éric Rohmer: Desire, Conversation & the French New Wave
A man meets a woman. He talks to her. Then he talks some more. He explains what he believes, what he wants, what he intends to do, and why his behavior is completely reasonable. The longer he speaks, the clearer it becomes that he may understand himself far less than he thinks. That deceptively simple …
Mar 19 2025
Poul Gernes: Color, Geometry & Art for Everyone
Poul Gernes believed that art could improve the places where people actually lived their lives. That conviction carried him far beyond the conventional boundaries of painting. He covered canvases and hardboard panels with circles, stripes, targets, grids, flowers, letters, and brilliantly contrasting colors, but he also transformed hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas, and other public buildings …
Mar 17 2025
Ken Anderson: Disney’s Jack of All Trades
Ken Anderson was difficult to fit into a single job description. He was trained as an architect, became an art director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, helped shape the worlds of Pinocchio and Fantasia, experimented with new approaches to animated design, contributed to Disneyland, designed characters ranging from Shere Khan to Elliott the …
Mar 14 2025
Adolph Gottlieb: Symbols, Bursts & Abstract Expressionism
A glowing red circle floats above a violent black mass. Nothing in the painting tells us precisely what either shape represents, yet the relationship feels immediately charged. The circle might be a sun, a planet, an eye, a warning light, or simply a field of color. The black form beneath it could resemble earth, wreckage, …
Mar 12 2025
Rita Angus: Portraits, Landscapes & New Zealand Modernism
Rita Angus painted New Zealand as though every hill, railway station, face, tree, road, and stretch of sky deserved to be looked at with complete attention. Her landscapes are often quiet, but they are never casual. Mountains rise in sharply defined layers. Small buildings sit beneath enormous skies. Roads and railway lines cut through dry …
Mar 11 2025
Wanda Gág: Millions of Cats, Printmaking & the Art of Storytelling
Millions of cats fill a hillside. Trees bend as though they are alive. A staircase seems to twist upward under its own power. Furniture leans into a room with almost human personality, while plants, houses, fireplaces, roads, and fields appear to breathe, stretch, and move. This was Wanda Gág’s world. Born in New Ulm, Minnesota, …
