Painter

Kurt Andersen thinks the artist Thomas Kinkade makes Norman Rockwell look like an edgy avant-gardist. (Originally aired: April 25, 2002)

To take another artist’s masterpiece as your text ought to demand that you observe it closely and pick it apart. Suzanne Bocanegra has been doing that steadily for years now: the New York painter works from the floral paintings of the Flemish master Jan Brueghel.

The steel storefront gates along 125thStreet become brightly colored canvases for one of Harlem’s most prolific mural painters. (Originally aired: July 4, 2002)

The art world uses the label “outsider artist” to apply to a whole range of self-taught creative types — from people in prison to folk painters. But for many people the term is personified by the late Reverend Howard Finster. The Baptist preacher from Summerville, Georgia first began to paint in the mid 1970s after […]