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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Interviews
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.
Dan Mills: What’s in a Name? (The Secret Lives of Maps)
Dan Mills is, in addition to being a very talented painter, a wealth of piercing information: 31 states are named after indigenous words, one in 113 people worldwide are displaced from their homes, one in five Syrians are refugees, Maine is the state with the smallest number of incarcerated people per capita in America yet is only the median for this statistic among countries worldwide, and New Hampshire is considered the “most free” state.
Six Books’ Stories with Denise Markonish
MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish shares her stories of experiences with selected books featuring Nick Cave, Jen Bervin, Mary Ruefle, Barbara Bourland, Carl Belz, J.M. Arms Sheldon, and Camille Flammarion.
Jamie Franklin’s Collection of Self-Taught Art
Jamie Franklin has been the curator at the Bennington Museum in Vermont for almost 15 years. In that time, he has also assembled a personal collection of art from around the world ranging from calligraphic drawings to art created in prisons and psychiatric hospitals—a collection one might label “outsider art.” But Franklin says, “I don't like the term outsider art. There are art worlds; there is no Art World. There are artists working in many contexts, and many never get acclaim.”
Sylvan Esso: “Collaboration Should Make you Aware of your Own Strengths and Weaknesses”
Amelia Randall Meath and Nick Sanborn formed Sylvan Esso in 2013 (Photo via sylvanesso.com) Here in Harrisville, New Hampshire, our general store is the center of community life---where locals go for a cup of coffee, to buy eggs, or to learn if the next Nor'easter will leave six or [...]
On Home Turf: A Creative Spaces Interview with Artist Angus McCullough
Sometimes you have to leave home to discover surprises right in your own back yard. Such was the case with artist Angus McCullough, a Vermont-based artist I met this spring at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The town of Bennington, Vermont, [...]
Sonic Boom: Ted Apel & a New Generation of Artists Explore the Art of Sound
Marco Fusinato. Mass Black Implosion (Shaar, Iannis Xenakis). 2012. Ink on archival facsimile of score; framed. Part one of five parts. To make these drawings Fusinato chose a point on the page and then ruled a line from every note in the composition back to that point. This ongoing series, [...]
Writer Howard Mansfield on Clutter, Home Improvement & the Most Hated House on the Block
Lisa Dahl, Suburban Export, household cardboard, 1.5 x 2 x 2 inches (each), installation variable, 2011-12. View the finished installation Suburban Export here. (In-Progress photo of installation by Lisa Dahl courtesy the artist) "Everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul." -Samuel Mockbee The [...]
Joseph Bernard on Super 8, Collage, and Combining the Common & Uncommon
Joseph Bernard, Maze, 2008. Acrylic Paint on Wood Panel. 22 inches x 24 inches Artist Joseph Bernard in Conversation with Mary McNichols (Note: This is a guest post by curator and art historian Mary McNichols) Detroit-based artist, Joseph Bernard, once described a toy he had made as a [...]
Liquor, Perfume, Hair: Joan Wickersham Talks with Painter Julia Jacquette
Julia Jacquette, Blond, Shoulder, 2011. Oil on wood panel. 10 x 7.5 inches (Photo by Jean Vong) It's hard not to be mesmerized by Julia Jacquette 's hypnotic paintings. Their luminous, rich surfaces are intoxicating, and yet there is so much more happening in Jacquette's work than [...]
Rajesh Parameswaran’s Dazzling Tales of Captivity & Freedom : I Am An Executioner
If like me, you find most summer reading lists too beachy and lacking in inspiration, Rajesh Parameswaran's I Am an Executioner: Love Stories is the perfect antidote. (After all, our brains don't go on holiday just because we do). Over the past week, I've been savoring the imaginative, moving stories [...]
What Makes a Healthy Life? Writer Roger King Explores Love & Fatigue in America
"I always thought the novel, with it’s ability to show lives in their full emotional and social complexity was the best medium for understanding and illuminating the world. I thought it more important than any non-fiction I could write as an academic, or journalist, or 'expert'; It seems an almost [...]
Flimmaker Peter Hutton : It’s Not About the Pyrotechnics, It’s About Limitations
The first time I saw a Peter Hutton film was at a screening at The MacDowell Colony several years ago when Peter was in residence. A small group of us gathered in the Colony library to watch Study of a River. A 16mm projector hummed over our shoulders [...]
Creative Spaces: A Legendary Songcatcher Inspires Two Musicians on a Vermont Farm
Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons are Red Heart the Ticker (Photo by Doron Gild) Two weeks after Hurricane Irene I'm wandering the back-roads of Marlboro, Vermont, making my way to Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons, also known as the music duo Red Heart the Ticker. Route 9--the main thoroughfare [...]
MacArthur Fellow Anna Schuleit & the Whole Sweep of Trying
Anna Schuleit creating Room for Five, a collaborative project for the Eastman School of Music (Photo courtesy the artist) Welcome to the first installment of "Creative Spaces," a regular Gwarlingo series that will focus on the creative habits and work spaces of visual artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other [...]