Here’s a little home-improvement magic trick: Take a room with the same couch, the same rug, the same layout, and the same natural light. Change only the wall color, and suddenly, the entire space feels different.
Nothing was purchased or rearranged, yet a dim, cramped room can feel brighter and more spacious, while a cold, uninviting space becomes somewhere you actually want to curl up and relax. Few home improvements deliver such a dramatic transformation with so little disruption.
Rich purples lend lushness to this overstuffed interior, whose piles of clothing and jumble of furnishings suggest the morning after a raucous night of mayhem. The painting’s title, Hangover Square(2005), is a pun on London’s upscale green Hanover Square, one that artist Cecily Brown gladly borrowed from a 1941 novel. With its unabashed clutter, the disarrayed room foreshadows Brown’s return to painting crowded interiors 15 years later, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Knight Horrors looks like some sort of surreal still life extracted from a child’s fever dream — and the longer you look, the stranger it gets. A tiny armored knight on horseback occupies the center of the scene, surrounded by an outrageous assortment of creatures and characters: a grinning finger puppet-style monster perched on the helmet of a Roman soldier, a grimacing gremlin, a colorful parrot, a rat, a flamingo, a skull and assorted other fantastical beings. It’s part cabinet of curiosities, part nightmare, and part seriously weird family portrait.
Painted in 1985 by American artist Aaron Bohrod, Knight Horrors is an oil painting on gesso panel measuring just 12 by 16 inches. The title itself seems to contain a little visual joke: Knight Horrors sounds suspiciously like “night terrors,” which makes the painting feel like a parade of creatures that have escaped from somebody’s particularly bizarre dream. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Knight Horrors by Aaron Bohrod→
Creative hobbies aren’t just a pandemic-era holdover anymore; they’ve settled into daily life as a real coping tool. A 2024 American Psychiatric Association “Healthy Minds Monthly” poll found that 46% of Americans use creative activities such as painting, crocheting, or puzzles specifically to relieve stress or anxiety, and among adults who rate their mental health as very good or excellent, that figure climbs to 71%. Paint by numbers sits right in the middle of this trend. It doesn’t require a background in art, a studio, or even much confidence, just a canvas, a handful of paints, and twenty quiet minutes.
That accessibility is exactly why the hobby has outgrown its reputation as a nostalgic craft-store novelty. It’s becoming something closer to a low-barrier mindfulness practice, one with a growing body of clinical research behind it. Continue reading Why Paint by Numbers Is Having a Wellness Moment→
George Morrison (1919–2000) was one of the most significant yet often underrecognized figures in twentieth-century American art. A member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe), Morrison became known for his richly textured abstract paintings and later for his celebrated wood collages inspired by the rugged shoreline of Lake Superior. After studying at the Art Students League in New York, he became part of the city’s vibrant postwar art scene, exhibiting alongside many of the leading Abstract Expressionists. While his Indigenous heritage informed his deep appreciation for the natural world, Morrison resisted being defined solely as a Native American artist, preferring to be recognized first and foremost for the strength and originality of his modernist vision. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: George Morrison, The Antagonist→
