Brian D'Ambrosio
Bio
Brian D'Ambrosio is a seasoned journalist and poet, writing for numerous publications, including for a trove of music publications. He is intently at work on a number of future books. He may be reached at [email protected]
Stories (47)
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Carlos Carulo: Curiosity and the Architecture of the Cosmos
By Brian D’Ambrosio The Chilean-born painter known as Carlos Carulo has spent much of his life trying to understand the invisible forces that bind existence together. In his Santa Fe studio, canvases shimmer with nebulae, fractured geometries, drifting structures, and luminous particles that seem to float between worlds. At first glance, the imagery suggests deep space. But Carulo insists his work is not science fiction.
By Brian D'Ambrosio a day ago in Art
John Gorka
For more than four decades, John Gorka has occupied a distinctive place in American folk music: a songwriter whose work unfolds quietly but lingers deeply. His songs favor careful observation over spectacle, humor alongside gravity, and melodies that invite listeners closer rather than overwhelm them. It is a career built less on flash than on endurance—one song, one audience, one intimate room at a time.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 9 days ago in Beat
Corinne Griffith (1894-1979)
By Brian D’Ambrosio Corinne Griffith, born November 21, 1894, in Waco, Texas, became one of the most admired figures of the silent film era, celebrated for her elegance, poise, and expressive subtlety on screen. Known as “The Orchid Lady of the Screen,” Griffith cultivated an image of refinement and emotional restraint that set her apart from her contemporaries. Beneath the Hollywood persona lay a Texas childhood shaped by her Italian ancestry and the civic prominence of her maternal family, whose accomplishments left a lasting impression on her sense of artistry, ambition, and cultural awareness.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 13 days ago in History
Ken Wolverton
By Brian D’Ambrosio Along a dusty roadside of Cerrillos, connected weathered shacks lean into the landscape like a creature molded from the earth itself. Its walls are alive with color: horses rearing across mesas, dreamlike murals, and abstract forms that seem to vibrate with movement. Inside, brushes slant in jars, canvases are stacked against walls, and unfinished murals climb wooden planks. This is the world of Ken Wolverton, an 80-year-old artist whose life has been as itinerant and unconventional as the art he creates.
By Brian D'Ambrosio about a month ago in Art
Tinkertown's Carnival World:
By Brian D'Ambrosio Tucked into the ponderosa pines of the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tinkertown Museum is a hand-built labyrinth of imagination, humor, and eccentricity. More than a roadside attraction, it is a folk-art environment—part carnival, part curiosity cabinet, and part autobiography—created by one man with an inexhaustible drive to turn ordinary junk into wonder. That man was Ross J. Ward, a carnival painter, sculptor, and tinkerer whose restless creativity produced one of the most enchantingly eccentric places in America.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 2 months ago in Wander
The Paintings of Bouchra Belghali
By Brian D’Ambrosio To stand before a painting by Bouchra Belghali is to experience something closer to listening than looking. It unfolds the way music does—not by telling a story or depicting a recognizable scene, but by setting color into motion, allowing it to vibrate, collide and resolve into feeling. Like a melody unburdened by lyrics, it bypasses explanation and goes straight to sensation.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 2 months ago in Art
Jim Sloan
By Brian D’Ambrosio At 90, Jim Sloan has lived several lifetimes’ worth of work—carpenter, sign painter, excavator, sawmiller, road-builder and the go-to rattlesnake remover of Galisteo, New Mexico. Art may be the through-line, but it has never been the source of his income, nor the center of his universe. Sloan has always kept one foot in the studio and the other in the soil, without bothering to decide which world he truly belongs to. The truth is that he fits cleanly into neither, and he has long since stopped trying.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 3 months ago in Art
William Rotsaert
By Brian D'Ambrosio From Bruges to Santa Fe, a painter translates memory, motion, and myth through color and curiosity. William Rotsaert paints in the language of color — heatwaves and highways, red-orange skies that shimmer with motion, and the flicker of gasoline flames under a 1957 Chevy Bel Air. His canvases pulse between abstraction and realism, fusing the discipline of the old Flemish masters with the freedom of the American West.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 4 months ago in Art
Estella Loretto:
By Brian D’Ambrosio, Estella Loretto has lived her 72 years with a sculptor’s patience, chiseling each moment slowly, shaping a life balanced between Pueblo ancestry and monumental artistic vision. Each breath, she says, is a grain of stone, a measure of time, and a spark of spirit.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 5 months ago in Art
Kelly Hunt:
By Brian D'Ambrosio There’s a certain alchemy that happens when Kelly Hunt holds a century-old instrument. “I feel very protective of that instrument,” she said of her original Depression-era tenor banjo, its leather head delicate with age, “because that leather is a thin band of leather that is over a hundred years old.” The banjo is more than a tool for music—it is a collaborator, a vessel of untold stories, and, as Hunt put it, fuel for her imagination.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 6 months ago in Beat
Samantha Crain
Language quenches Samantha Crain’s flaming fire. An exceptionally potent songwriter, Crain finds that her spirit, affections, desires, and disposition live and reign in language. Her nuanced writing is something that she sees as both a gift and a demand.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 6 months ago in Beat
