Arditi wants to infuse the future of visual art with the power of its primitive past. “I want to be as close as possible to what art started as, but with a modern twist,” he said when I visited his studio this month. He pulls pigments from natural sources like flowers, rocks, dirt, soil, clay, crystals — anything earth-produced that has a distinct color. He dyes a thick lacquer with the pigment, and then uses the solution to paint. “I want my art to be simple and accessible. I want art for the masses because that’s where art began. It has since turned into pretense and facade. The earth was the original canvas.”

I was originally trained as an architect, but abandoned the career to pursue other interests. Architecture school, however, provided sound training in the fundamentals of drawing and design, which have served me well as I pursue an artistic career. Shunning the current tired artistic trend of re-tread conceptualism, I seek to simply create unique works of beauty. 

Brooklyn-based artist Nicholas Forker has a rare talent, and it is one that is quickly earning him recognition in a city that is virtually filled to the brim with aspiring young artists.  In today’s art landscape, traditional skills like figurative drawing are not always as visible as they once were.  Benefiting as he does from undeniable technical ability, and a reverence for the way things used to be done, Forker creates masterful works in ballpoint, in some cases pouring hundreds of hours into a single work. What has caught his attention lately is the way that adventurers, and in his most recent work, astronauts in particular, can be used as a stand-in for American culture.  

Few artists were featured in the media in 2011 as frequently as Ai Weiwei. His placement on Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential figures came at the end of a year when he was taken into custody by the Chinese government for alleged economic crimes. Ai’s supporters believe these charges are a ruse, and the media have questioned their validity as well. As Andrew Stout of More Intelligent Life explains, the accusation of economic crimes is “a catch-all charge often used by Chinese officials to publicly discredit dissidents”. 

A little over a year ago, Mac Premo found himself with a problem.  He needed to move his studio from Boerum Hill, where he had spent the last several years, to a new but smaller location at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.  As an artist whose stock-in-trade was working with found materials, Mac had accumulated a fair amount of cultural debris, as it were.  The move meant that a purge would be necessary.  “This is sort of indicative of my problem as a human, or my greatest attribute as a human, I’m not sure which,” says Premo.  “My solution was to make an art project.”

In another great departure from convention, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has mounted the comprehensive retrospective of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, rewriting the playbook for how an exhibition of this kind ought to be done. Cattelan has become famous in the art world for his irreverent sense of humor and penchant for artistic high jinks.  He has made a career out of defying expectations.

Born and raised in New York City, artist Clarisse Perrette currently lives and works in Chicago. Her paintings have been featured at a number of galleries around the country, including s.e.e.d. Gallery (Brooklyn), Artist’s Museum (Washington D.C.), the Art Students League (New York City) and the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago.