Gwarlingo is a place where creative people can connect, explore, and share challenges, ideas, and resources. Gwarlingo is different because of its personal perspective, accessibility, and unique curation. Our articles offer you quality over quantity, clarity over clutter, and stories over sound bytes. At Gwarlingo, we share real conversations with real artists about ideas and process, as well as some of our own exciting discoveries. Our goal is to bring you the best work, period—regardless of its genre or popularity, while also having some fun along the way. Browse articles by category or just pull up the most recent in the list below.
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Recent Articles
Susan Marie Dopp’s Lacewing
Susan Marie Dopp's Lacewing exhibit at the Roswell Museum is an enchanting collection of abstract, organic sculptures bathed in colored light that both joyfully celebrate life and poignantly meditate on aging and death.
Sarah Williams’ Pretty Rural
Walking into Sarah Williams' show "Pretty Rural" at Andrea Schwartz in San Francisco, viewers are teleported across the country by her newest paintings. Specifically, they are transported into a dark winter evening complete with Christmas lights in Brookfield, Missouri, where Williams grew up.
Amy Casey’s Teeter Totter in Hotter Water
Amy Casey's solo exhibition at Chicago's Zg Gallery, Teeter Totter in Hotter Water, is full of paintings that capture our current crises. Her detailed acrylic paintings include exploding buildings, houses falling into the sea, teetering towers that barely stand up, and constructions reclaimed by nature—in environments that one could easily assume are post-apocalyptic.
July 4th
This year, working from the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada Day on July 1 gets all the attention. But with July 4 quickly approaching, I find myself looking through firework photos from years past across American towns.
Tremont’s Trained Trees
Recently, I've come to appreciate the otherworldly powerline pruning of Historic Tremont in Cleveland, Ohio. "Training" trees to avoid overhead electrical lines isn't uncommon across America, but the wide swaths of space given to them in Tremont is quite something to behold.
Where the Earth Meets the Sky Meets the Sky
A while ago now, driving through the outskirts of Las Vegas NM, I came across this artifact in a large, empty field...
Your Town, USA
Driving across America, it actually isn't unusual to end up passing through several towns with the same name. (For example, there are at least 25 Springfields alone, one reason Matt Groening chose it as the hometown of the Simpsons.)
Flower Fragments, Full of Love
One windy afternoon, as I was walking through a cemetery in Eastport, Maine, something caught my eye where the cemetery's edge receded into the woods.
The Sharpest Tools in the Shed
Driving through the middle of Ohio, somewhere in the small town of Logan you see a small shed with brightly colored pencils painted on the outside. You might think "oh, what a nice space for art classes!" or "my, what a quaint art supply store!" Both excellent guesses. But if you instead said, "I bet that's a pencil sharpener museum!" then you were spot on.
Valentines of Yesteryear
With Valentine's Day now behind us, the big box stores have already cleared out their seasonal shelves for the next holiday. At the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, however, I found myself surrounded by several hundred years of old valentine cards and mementos adorning the walls, halls, and chairs.
A Small, Polychrome Palace
Just down the street, I stumbled on this unique piece of ...art? Graffiti? Visual goodness.
A Window to the Stars
riving through east Cleveland, you might stumble across the abandoned Warner and Swasey Observatory nestled into the edge of a residential community. Constructed in 1920, it was abandoned in 1980 when creeping light pollution had long since prevented it from serving its function of astronomical research.
Polychrome Paths
While New Year's is now behind us, I was reminded of the holidays while looking at this vintage game board sitting on my shelf. Games have always been a staple of my family's gatherings, when we let go of our differences each year to compete over a rainbow-colored board with a common set of rules.
Louie and Baccus in 1968
I recently had the pleasure to be reminded that beautiful artworks are not the sole domain of museums and galleries. Finding myself in a friend's basement, I was introduced to this gorgeous, fantastical painting by her half-uncle leaning against the wall. Shimmering shades of gold paint capture Walter James Lewis's ("Louie's") self-portrait from 1968.
The Power of the Pen
There's something singularly special about a pencil or a pen resting in our hand. It is a direct vehicle to channel our words, drawings, plans, ideas, and any other number of wonders residing in our heads. With that in mind, it's not unusual to see writers' and artists' graves covered in creative implements that visitors have deposited.