As a longtime working artist, Natalie Frank has seen her fair share of visitors in and out of the studio. She’s come to realize that “people generally come to the studio with really good intentions,” she said. “It’s always important to remember that these people have complete lives and things going on that you have no idea about; that their schedules are insane and that you have their attention for a selection of time; and that it’s often not personal.”

I first met Dame Paula Rego on her inclusion in a School of London exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in 2000. I remember seeing her towering pastel “The Wedding Guest,” which Rego had said memorialized the moment she first consummated her relationship, as a virgin, with her late husband, the painter Victor Willing. In her telling, he saw her at a party, came into a private bedroom, and told her to remove her knickers. Rego, in and outside of her pictures, gutted you.

This spring, creatives gathered in their most elegant cocktail attire at the Fort Worth Modern to celebrate the launch of the “Women Painting Women” exhibition. 

Kemper Museum’s ‘Natalie Frank: Unbound’ exhibit finds truth in fairy tales. Who was the real Big Bad Wolf, with teeth gleaming, poised to sink into pale young flesh? Why did Sleeping Beauty drift into that deep, anesthetized slumber? Was the ever-gentle Cinderella who graced our childhood TV screens the same one who had birds peck out the eyes of her stepsisters on her wedding day?

What’s your favorite fairy tale? Do you like modern-day kids’ versions, or the old adult stories, filled with sex and violence? If you’re reading The Pitch, we’re fairly certain we know the answer.

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was born into a rich family in the fall of 1652. At thirteen, she was wed by her mother to the middle-aged Baron d’Aulnoy, who had purchased his title. Three months pregnant that same year, in the summer of 1666, she inked a jinx in the margins of a fifteenth-century religious play from their library:

It has been almost 200 years since this book was made, and whoever will have this Book should know that it was mine and that it belongs to our house. Written in Normandie near Honfleur. Adieu, Reader, if you have my book and I don’t know you and you don’t appreciate what’s inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies, fever, the plague, measles, and a broken neck. May God assist you against my maledictions.

Madame d’Aulnoy would bear six children. (The first two died young.) But she’d also become the mother of a best-selling genre in early modern France: the literary fairy tale, in which her curses would be very much at home.

From overhyped Banksys to Keith Haring lookalikes, artists weigh in on their pet peeves (and what they admire, too).

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but artists often see things differently from the rest of us. A masterpiece to a layperson’s eye might only make an artist roll theirs. On the other hand, we might be too quick to overlook an extraordinary work hiding in plain sight.

We asked six artists what they think are the most underrated and overrated works throughout art history. Here’s what they said.

Six new exhibits will open at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center Saturday, Oct. 23, including solo exhibitions by Natalie Frank, William Ransom, B. Lynch and Michael Abrams and group shows featuring work by members of the Guild of Vermont Furniture Makers and the Vermont Glass Guild.

Critics of Rego's work have failed to engage with it on a meaningful level.

Review of Natalie's newest body of work in “Paint, Porcelain and Pulp: Amy Bessone, Francesca DiMattio, and Natalie Frank” at Salon 94.

Inspired by the drawings of Natalie Frank, Grimm Tales opens Friday at Ballet Austin, Texas.

Natalie Frank’s drawings transformed into a new ballet at Ballet Austin.

Interview with the artist in light of her exhibition Natalie Frank: O at Half Gallery.

Review of Dancers and Dominas at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

A look into Natalie Frank's studio in light of her upcoming exhibitions at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and The Drawing Center, New York.