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Brett Sokol on Bannard and Basel
Post #1511 • February 6, 2012, 9:32 AM • 2 Comments
Friend of the blog and one of my favorite Miamians, Brett Sokol, profiled regular Artblog.net commenter Walter Darby Bannard in this month's Ocean Drive Magazine.
There are splatters of paint everywhere—on the floor, on some nearby chairs, and not least, on the dozens of canvases tacked to the walls inside Darby Bannard’s studio at the University of Miami, where he teaches as a professor in the art department. In fact, gazing around the room is liable to produce a bit of sensory overload. In his latest series of paintings, a riot of multicolored brushstrokes crash over one another in densely built layers—a playful squiggle here, a violent wave there, cohering into an often-hypnotic whole.
Read the whole article.
Mr. Sokol has also cast his withering eye at the latest Art Basel Miami Beach.
Not least, there was a dizzying array of, ahem, art-themed corporate product launches: a pop-up shop hawking a new line of Dior handbags customized by German abstract painter Anselm Reyle? Why not! Perrier copresenting a night with drag queen-cum-videographer Kalup Linzy and post-punkers TV on the Radio? Sure! A poolside fête with alt-rockers Soulwax, courtesy of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Maybach autos, and… the Kingdom of Morocco? “The same publicist who brought us Maybach was working with Morocco,” LA MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch helpfully explained to The Wall Street Journal. “Everybody wants to connect with contemporary art.” Well, pass the lamb tagine.
I approve.
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February 6, 2012, 1:55 PM
I'm remninded that Mr. Sokol has also rendered due praise to the artist John Sanchez this month.
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Walter Darby Bannard
February 6, 2012, 11:12 AM
Thanks for the mention, Franklin.
Yes, Sokol is not your run-of-the-mill feature writer. He is very curious, thorough, fact-hungry, and quick-minded, and at the same time skeptical, with that "withering eye" you mentioned, all of which makes him quite entertaining to talk to and to read.