ANNA WELTNER

Mark Velasquez was just 13 when he first encountered the obstacle that would make his artistic career the frustrating, delicious thing it is today: He was unabashedly fascinated by the human figure. The young Velasquez had asked his mother for a book by artist Boris Vallejo, whose highly photorealistic depictions of ripplingly muscled men and […]

The first thing to strike you about “Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912” may well be Pablo Picasso’s enigmatic Man with a Clarinet, which greets viewers upon entry. Or it may be the exhibit’s unorthodox color scheme, which eschews a sterile white cube aesthetic in favor of the palette and style of the artists’ […]

It’s not uncommon for Joanne Ruggles to work from nude models. But at her current show, “Hanging by a Thread: Mother Earth in Peril,” it’s the artist, and not her subjects, who is exposed. While her gray and black figures are charitably cloaked in abstraction and anonymity, Ruggles is the one whose dreams, hopes, and […]

Julie spotted a fly and began to salivate. She hopped a bit closer to it, and—zap!—she snapped it up with her long tongue. After all, Julie is a frog. There are a number of formulas that writers of the world’s shortest stories have adopted over the years since New Times and Sun founder Steve Moss […]

When Evansville, Indiana-based philosophy professor Dr. Anthony Beavers spoke at Cal Poly in 2009, it was to share his optimistic view of what social media—and Facebook in particular—could mean for the next generation. Hailing it as “a wonderfully open world of information exchange,” Beavers saw it as a platform to immediately exchange news, opinions, and […]

Forget braving some of the highest gas prices in the state. Forget the wear and tear on your vehicle. Forget hours spent on various highways. Every once in a while, you should hop in your car and get out of the area to see something new. And what better excuse to do so than a […]

Think about this for a second,” venerable photographer Santi Visalli told me. “You see an image, and your eye will tell your brain to tell your finger to click. And it is maybe a millionth of a second that passes, but there is a lapse of time. You have to be so sharp, so ahead […]