THE ART OF MARK GRAHAM

Everyone has war on their minds now. I'm thinking about how much I hate what Russia is doing to Ukraine--and I'm hating how racist the West's response is to the conflict. CBS News said Friday that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to h

This week I'm sharing another image from Deep Time, a wordless novel I'm creating about a little dinosaur from Jurassic China named Caihong. Some pictures take me weeks to conceptualize, draw, and paint. Others--a very small number--emerge as if they were waiting for the chance to spring out of my imagination, fully-developed. The painting I made above was one of those. I think this had something to do with a fortuitous coalescing of images in my visual library. I tend to

This is why I love painting. It stills the world and condenses experience into a single potent image that allows us to reencounter unexpected emotions and memories we thought were lost. It preserves colors and conventions from another age, a time when the world was an endless source of mystery and beauty and wonderment. The art we see as children stays with us. It is, for many of us, the first intimation of a world beyond our backyard. My mother read a lot of Richard Sca

There are many reasons why the average person detests contemporary "fine" art. Most of the reasons can be summed up by this sculpture, which Artnet reported was recently installed in Central Park. It's a 400-lb, 24-karat gold cube worth 12 million dollars. It has its own security detail as well as an NFT counterpart (What's stupider than a gold cube? A gold cube that doesn't exist). The "sculpture" which looks, as one article put it, "illustrious" in the photo above , is r