Undoubtedly Seattle artist Victoria Haven is having a good week. As mentioned previously, she just won Seattle’s Betty Bowen award, the Stranger’s Genius Award and now has a solo show currently running at Howard House. PI critic Regina Hacket gives an overview today of how a few years ago Haven decided to leave Seattle, attend school in London at Goldsmiths College and basically change her life. Now she is back in Seattle and by all accounts doing okay.

+++

Painter Jaq Chartier who shows with local gallery Platform is reviewed on artnet this week (See Stephen Maine’s Dateline Brooklyn). Chartier currently has a solo show up in New York at Schroeder Romero gallery in Williamsburg.

“The artist, a paint tester for Golden Artist Colors, fruitfully brings her day job home with her. Hazy circles of saturated hues, arranged in loose grids or in roughly parallel streaks across fields of milky white, look at first like sparse abstractions by some kind of Arte Povera-influenced Zen master, but as the show’s title suggests, an empirical method is in full effect.”

Her color experiments are reminiscent of Polly Apfelbaum’s velvet dyes. Chartier had one of the few paintings that caught my eye recently at a Tacoma Art Museum’s group exhibit.

+++

From the art-blog-world: From the Floor’s Todd Gibson has been kicking up a lot of great words on his blog lately and I am late in reporting he crafted a survey for all us folks out there who read art blogs. Undoubtedly if you are here you have already heard about it, but if not, give it a whirl here. It is truly painless.

Todd also spilled the beans about Tyler Green over at MAN being humble in his lack of mention about being new art critic for Bloomberg News, undoubtedly more to come on that order. Anyway, Tyler undoubtedly is one of the most dedicated folks out there at the keyboard and deserves a hearty round of applause.

+++

I have to slip in one last plug for Portland’s Having Words symposium and subsequent art fair: AFFAIR. Got it.