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 (42)
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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 about 3 hours 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 19 days 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 2 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 2 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 4 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 4 months ago in Beat
Bill Hearne
Bill Hearne isn’t one to muse languidly. At 73, there is something rivetingly touching about the Santa Fe singer’s mulish willpower and the obvious love of music that has forever sustained him. Born with congenital cataracts at birth, Bill lost much of his sight by age 9. But his heartfelt vocals and personalized finger-picking guitar style of more than five decades stand as a permanent repudiation of the limits of his blindness.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 4 months ago in Beat
A Hard Fall and Good Bounce
Poetry, for me, has always been a way of gathering fragments—the daily objects, passing moods, and uneasy questions that won’t stay quiet. A poem begins with a small detail, then grows into something larger, a landscape where memory and imagination blur.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 4 months ago in BookClub
Sierra Hull interview
By Brian D’Ambrosio On Friday nights in Pickett County, Tennessee—the smallest county in the state, tucked up against the Kentucky border—you could find a young Sierra Hull squeezed into a crowded community center, mandolin in hand. The room smelled of hamburgers and hot dogs from the concession stand, and local bands played while neighbors filled the folding chairs. Hull, barely tall enough to see over the microphone stand, was already a fixture on stage.
By Brian D'Ambrosio 5 months ago in Beat
