No matter what museum in the world one visits, there is always a crowd and with it comes murmuring. The museum experience then becomes like watching a movie with the director’s commentary on.

Some weeks ago something highly unusual happened. I found myself alone with three creations by two American masters of painting: Clyfford Still and Joan Mitchell.

The miracle took place during the Art After Dark hours at the Norton Museum of Art, which could explain why, for more than 20 minutes, I had one whole gallery room to myself.

The paintings in question will not be rushed. Silence is their big collaborator. They provoke a personal reaction in each individual, in time and in solitude, without the pressure of having to move along.

“They are very powerful when you actually see them,” said Cheryl Brutvan, curator of contemporary art, referring to the untitled Mitchell work on display and Still’s PH-1033 and 1949-A-No.1.

Seeing them is already a big deal when you consider that these paintings have rarely been exhibited. Now you can see them until Sept. 2.

Upon entering the room, we face a dark violent landscape or creature in velvety blacks and deep red tones. Creature or not, whatever it is, it looks alive. This is Still’s 1949-A-No.1, my favorite of the bunch. Just last year a lucky telephone bidder acquired it for a record $61.7 million, breaking the artist’s previous record of $21.3 million.

To the right, another Still piece is battling a fire. The flames threaten to consume the entire 93 ½-x-83-inch-canvas although which color represents the fire is up to us. In the center of every orange brush stroke lives a redder intensity just as within the lighter space some spots go whiter. There remain blank spaces untouched by the heat. A balance is achieved. This is PH-1033 (1976).

If you stand far enough, you could think of it as a bloody sheet, spread out as a sign of a certain sacrifice, loss, offering.

A stampede of color seems to be running away from the center of an untitled canvas and heading to the edges as if someone had yelled fire or bomb on a packed theater. This is a frenetic crowd, an explosion of tones, a massacre. Colors step on top of colors, get on the way, interrupt other colors’ flow. No tone escapes intact. The white sports multicolor scars: random violent strokes that seem accidental but you can rest assured were well planned. The same goes for the blue.

This is Mitchell’s Untitled (1960). At an auction last year, this one piece reached a record $9.3 million for the artist. Mitchell once said: “What excites me when I’m painting is what one color does to another and what they do to each other in terms of space and interaction.”

It shows here.

Occasionally we find a small oasis of calm in the work, where the colors are not fighting but fusing together under a thin, smooth layer of paint. To the right (on the top half of the piece) a magenta spot resembles a sunset sky.

The artist was in her mid-30s when she painted this. An abstract expressionist with an athlete’s discipline, she is known for the emotion and energy of her brushstrokes.

The miracle minutes of silence spent with these three works in that small white room make me think of one word: conspiracy. I am not wrong.

The Norton intentionally placed the paintings in one of its smallest gallery rooms to facilitate that intimate, personal connection between the viewer and the each work, Brutvan said.

After all, what is the Mona Lisa to you if you cannot see her smile or her eyes because of a packed room? I can tell you what it would mean: nothing. You might as well be facing a painting by Mr. Bean.

Artworks as rare as these three tend to be like comets. You need to be very patient and they eventually will come around and find you. Just be sure when they do, you take the right amount of time to really find them.

American Masters at the Norton: Clyfford Still and Joan Mitchell is on display through Sept. 2. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $12; county residents free every first Saturday of the month, and West Palm Beach residents free every Saturday. Call 561-832-5196 for more information or visit www.norton.org.

Forget garlic: When it comes to art, passion and honesty will get you far or, at least, get you to live forever.

In case you have any doubts, the Boca Raton Museum of Art is currently offering a large dose of pieces by an artist who has always been far from extravagant and is now about to turn 101 years old.

Will Barnet at 100: Eight Decades of Painting and Printmaking is proof that immortality is not reserved only for artists who shock, stick to their found style or follow the artistic waves of the moment. There also is room for the artist who does things of his own accord, leaves his found style to discover another, and produces work that is simple and quiet. And in this case, there is a lot of room.

The artworks on display range in variety from watercolors and drawings to oils and prints. They offer realism, cubism and abstraction and represent the years 1935 to the current year of 2012, although not in chronological order.

Youth and The Studio, to me, carry the same grace and simplicity. There is no despair. No sense of urgency. No use of shadows. These two paintings are 26 years apart. The first, Youth, is from 1970 and depicts Ona, the artist’s daughter, extending her left arm in a pose similar to that found on Egyptian wall paintings. Her dark hair falls on her shoulders. Her skin is very pale. At the sight of a golden bird, a black cat (which looks more like a panther) takes a bow, its tail curved in scorpion-like fashion. Her long black robe ends long before her ankles to make space for a touch of rich purple serving as underskirt.

The second work, from 1996, shows an artist with a brush on hand. Straight lines define the body covered in a black coat and turtleneck. A child extends both arms as if trying to reach the canvas set on the easel. A cat rests on a high window while a parrot poses for a portrait. In both cases, the human figures avoid looking at us.

Barnet’s themes are rather simple, minimalist, serene and happy to exist just as they are. There is no need to look for hidden motives for most of the works capture family, children and animals (particularly cats) in ordinary moments of daily life. In that sense, the works are very honest.

How exactly the artist manages to make these unimpressive moments extraordinary I am not sure. One thing I know: Will Barnet is not an old man.

His works are mostly flat, carry thin layers of paint and straight, clean lines. Nothing is ever accentuated or too loud. It is as if, from a young age, his emotions had surrendered to quietude and orderly structure. After seeing what he does and how he does it, one cannot conceive these same figures in any other way than how he presents them.

I am particularly touched by his use of color, which is lovely. In some paintings, he stays within the range of a color’s family, carefully stepping in and out of its territory. His use of subtle variations end up giving two impressions: there is either one color or dozens of colors in one work.

At the beginning of the show you are introduced to The Lesson (1983-84). The tone used on the woman’s gown is not the same as that used on the cat sitting on the piano nor is it equal to that given to the boy’s hair. And yet, the proximity of all the colors gives the entire work a sense of harmony and unity.

Something similar happens with Dusk (1976-77). This time a family of blues has inundated the canvas where a woman has momentarily abandoned her book to look at the cat resting by her side. They are all blue, but no single color repeats itself.

In other pieces, such as Ellie in Blue (2002) and Return from Paris (1990-99), Barnet opts for contrasting combinations. He dresses a girl in blue against a mustard-yellow space and gives a green coat to an elegant gentleman standing before a warm orange sky.

A sharp separation of tones happens in Seventh Season, a 1975 color serigraph, where white serves as primary background color. A white cat rests on the window frame looking at a chess match not long from ending. The sky is painted blue. One hand extends from the right to hold the white king while a girl wearing a bright orange dress rests her chin on her hand waiting for her turn. She may have already lost, although we cannot be too certain. After all, she has a black pawn approaching the other end of the board where she can claim her queen back and, who knows, maybe a victory.

Besides the Egyptian-like mannerism and flatness, you may notice there is a certain oriental quality to his female figures. These appear dressed in long loose robes featuring long black hair, pale skin and graceful features.

You can see it on Dialogue in Green (1970) as well as Dawn (1975). The latter one is a contemplative piece depicting a woman on a roof terrace looking out in the distance. Her skirt moves with the wind, unlike her hair, which is wrapped in a bun. Barnet lets a window of the house be seen but there are no lights on and nobody can be seen through it. I get the sense this is not the first time this woman has come to this spot to see the dawn.

At one point, you will come across abstract works full of symbols, strange patterns and colors. That is not a wrong turn. You are still looking at Barnet pieces; these are just completely different. Seemingly more organic and less controlled, these works derive from Barnet’s consistent interest in Native American history and the ancient past in general.

It is a rare surprise to find an artist brave enough to find new ways of expression, even if in doing so he will be less recognizable. Barnet has always been true to no one else but himself. That philosophy helped earn him the National Medal of Arts from President Obama about two months ago.

Although a lot of attention goes to the fact that he is 100 years old, still alive and still painting, his age should really take a back seat while looking at his work. We would not want to confuse sympathy for admiration and feel one when we mean to feel the other.

Age does not mean a thing. Not in art. One can be young and brilliant; old and mediocre. Few are good at all ages.

But if you are curious to know what being consistently good looks like, go see the show.

Will Barnet at 100: Eight Decades of Painting and Printmaking runs through May 20 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. Admission:$8 adults, $6 seniors, $4 students. Hours: 10 am-5 pm Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 10 am-9 pm Wednesday; 12 pm-5 pm Saturday and Sunday. Closed Mondays and holidays. Call 561-392-2500, or visit www.bocamuseum.org.

Memories in Mariko Kusumoto’s head do not need to fear a slow, eroding death.

Think of them like waves, retreating, seemingly forgotten, and later hitting the shore bigger and stronger, darker as well.

A unique and very personal show based on Kusumoto’s memories of Japan is currently on display at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens until May 6. Mariko Kusumoto: Unfolding Stories mainly consists of a series of metal sculptures that resemble music boxes or dollhouses with a surreal twist.

The exhibit is part of the museum’s artist-in-residence program.

A Greek/Roman sculpted torso rests on a pedestal while a wide-open eye serves as the round top surface of a tiny desk. If you move, the eye will open and close (as the image on a lenticular 3D postcard). The rook is a long-haired woman whose rescuer, a tiny knight, has started climbing up to the top using her braid. Look closer and you will see a man’s face has been given to a shell. These are all characters found in Kusumoto’s Chess Set (2010).

The pieces of this board game are meant to represent the East and West. It is not immediately clear, not to me at least, which side (East or West) each object was representative of. Here you will find them displayed across the board, but after a long battle, the pieces can go rest in a warm, semi-traditional Japanese home the artist has built for them.

Objects you would never think of putting together Kusumoto pairs in unimaginable ways, as in Shizuoka Ekiben (Boxed Lunch) [2006], where the elements needed for a tea ceremony are found in a sushi roll and a Japanese couple takes a stroll, umbrella in hand, inside a clam. Also, look for a tiny group of spectators anxiously watching a sumo wrestling match. The title of this teapot-shaped piece refers to the boxed meals available at Japan’s Shizuoka railway station.

While visiting, you will see small doors and drawers open up to reveal a butterfly or a lipstick, a fetus or a sushi roll; each of them is a clue associated with a particular memory. They may have an entirely different meaning for each one of us. Participation is, after all, what the artist wants from the audience and we should not shy away from letting our own associations run.

Kusumoto’s amazing works derive from a childhood spent in a 400-year-old Japanese temple where her father was a Buddhist priest. It is the ancient treasures and daily activities she was exposed to as a child that she now pays tribute to and gives the overdue respect. She took them for granted, the artist says in her own statement.

That could explain why each of her works seems to say I’m sorry and thanks simultaneously.

Kusumoto uses techniques such as etching, enameling, chemical patination and electroforming, which is a metal built-up over a non-metallic surface as in the bronzing of baby shoes.

Her objects usually have a moving mechanism or some other magical surprise to offer.

Take Kodomobeya (Daughter’s Room) for instance. Each vertical body layer displayed reveals organs and stages of a pregnancy. To be exact, this is a representation of the artist’s pregnant body. She made it when her daughter, Misa, was one year old and drawing from the thoughts and emotions that transpired during this time of her life. It is the artist’s most intimate piece.

Unlike Kodomobeya, other box constructions cannot hold its containers within four walls and explode, instead, distributing the fragments of the memory among small theatre-like stages and making us work harder to find them.

Tokyo Souvenir (2008) features many of the iconic Japanese images tourists love. They include the good-luck cat (maneki neko), a local shop and people in traditional attire boarding a local trolley. The passengers are attached forming a bracelet and the cat contains a brooch holding the body of a parakeet.

The show is highly entertaining and far from overwhelming. We can easily walk it in 30 minutes, but you should really take your time. While doing so, you will sense Kusumoto not only enjoys working with metal but knows the material well. After all, she was assigned the task of polishing the metal ornaments of the temple’s altars as a child.

Personally, I was glad to see an artist not just frantically exposing elements of her childhood and herself but, in a way, also hiding them. The message I got from it all is that the child sees today what the adult will later discover. We ought to be grateful for Kusumoto’s arrival to the point of discovery.

Mariko Kusumoto: Unfolding Stories runs through May 6 at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, 4000 Morikami Park Road, Delray Beach. Tickets: $12, $11 for seniors, $8 for children and college students. Open 10 am to 5 pm Tuesdays through Sundays. Call 495-0233 or visit www.morikami.org.

By Tom Tracy

If you were to stroll past Talia Cervetti’s studio on Lucerne Avenue in artsy downtown Lake Worth earlier this year, you might have found her seated low to the floor, listening to an old Sade CD while stitching a design into one of her acrylic paintings.

Or she might have been drawing one of her abstract figurative series in black-and-white using pencil, graphite or pen and ink.

If it was a Friday night, you might have been invited in for a wine-and-cheese open house. From there you might try on some handmade garments and shawls, another part of her art output.

Although she’s moved on from her Lucerne Avenue spot, Cervetti, a fine example of an emerging artist locally, would love for as many people as possible to experience her mostly abstract, colorful expressions.

“Many of my ideas come from the exchanges and conversations with others that may trigger thoughts and ideas,” she said.

A native of Iowa, Cervetti, 25, earned a degree from the prestigious California College of the Arts after graduating from the equally noteworthy Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach.

“I read about different ideas of spirituality and then configure and conclude some of my own thoughts and beliefs. Not only through reading do I feel a connection and ideas, but also through daily experiences with people.”

A member of the Jupiter Artists Association, a local artists’ co-op, Cervetti is tapping into the wider community for some help at this critical stage in a young artists’ development, when one needs to learn good business practices and how to understand the career side of the art world.

Some of Cervetti’s first influences come from a chance encounter she had while taking in Art Basel in Switzerland, where she saw the photography of Canadian-born Robert Polidori. His tragic landscapes and a series of images of rooms in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina inspired Cervetti in the direction of powerful emotions.

“Within those photos are immense textures, colors, and stories the people and families who have lived in or inhabited these spaces,” she said. “This series of photographs as well as many others tell a story about the past. They also are very attractive in the sense that they create a stillness and a silence so that you are almost physically be in the same room and capture its essence.”

Enter the mentor, JoAnne Berkow, owner and founder of Rosetta Stone Fine Art Gallery in Jupiter and author of three books, Shades of Love, What They Didn’t Teach You in Art School, and Painted Poetry.

In the 1970s, Berkow created a highly celebrated art cooperative, the Touchstone Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 1994, she opened Frenchman’s Art Gallery and Studios in Juno Beach. The 3,200-square-foot Rosetta Stone Gallery, which carries some of Cervetti’s pieces, opened in 2004 and has relocated to Jupiter Commerce Park. She said she has discovered and promoted some mid-career artists locally and internationally just before their work fetched inflated prices.

“I don’t find it fun to be a commodity trader for the blue-chip works. I am more interesting in emerging artists and to help expose developing artists,” Berkow said, adding she encourages artists to band together and inspire each other. “Some of the newer artists like Jeff Koons have a whole group of people working with them. They share space, and being around other artists is very valuable in my opinion.”

Berkow thinks Cervetti is a great at drawing and developing as a painter. She discovered her work at Unique Art Gallery, a small cooperative in Jupiter.

“I enjoy being a mentor and Talia is super-talented,” Berkow said, adding that Cervetti’s character studies and overall work has “weight” that will appeal to serious art buyers.

“The combination of drawing, handmade fabrics and cutouts in the paper adds such dimension to her work. Now I am encouraging her to add the material to all her pencil drawings because that is unique, and that is what people like today: unique.”

Cervetti speaks highly of the foundation in drawing and painting skills she took from her years at Dreyfoos, and the encouragement from the faculty there to explore her interests and artistic path, to push past her fears.

Northern California artist and instructor Franklin Williams urged her, for instance, to make a conscious effort to be present all the time in what she is doing in the here and now.

“He creates a space where the environment in which I existed for six hours a week stood still, where absolutely no worries could exist, where no boundaries existed, where in front of me lay a new landscape of exploration,” she said. “The energy I felt in his classroom is something I strive to feel every day. It is a place where I consciously allow for my mind to rest and focus on a specific task.”

Susan Lorenti, founder and director of the 25-member Jupiter Artists Association, is currently hosting three series of Cervetti’s works, including a large color landscape showing a central figure that she believes is Cervetti’s self-representation.

“She doesn’t fit into any particular mold, which is what I like about her. She is raw talent, an artist exploding,” Lorentti said, adding that she was worried at one time that being in the art field might compromise Cervetti’s individual creativity, “but her collaborations with other people and having people tell her what is marketable haven’t hurt her at all.”

“She is definitely a free spirit and that reflects in her work. I adore her personally. She is a very honest and pure person,” Lorenti said.

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Talia Cervetti’s website is www.taliacervetti.com. Her work can be seen at Rosetta Stone Fine Art Gallery and A Unique Art Gallery, both in Jupiter. She also is available by appointment can be followed on her Facebook page for upcoming shows and events.

The Web has enabled the advent of the pajama-clad, online shopping experience, but can e-commerce work in one of the world’s most lucrative retail markets?

The founders of the VIP Art Fair — James and Jane Cohan, owners of the James Cohan Gallery in New York and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren — believe so. They’ve created the world’s first virtual, limited-time art marketplace and branded it an “art fair.” It recently concluded its second-year incarnation, dubbed “VIP 2.0,” earlier this month (Feb. 3-8).

There was impressive participation from 135 leading galleries representing 35 countries, including Gagosian, Pace, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth and White Cube. The galleries were segmented into categories from large to emerging and there was also a segment for prints. There were more than 1,000 works by stellar contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, and emerging artists, many bordering on the cusp of the big time.

In essence, the VIP Art Fair functioned much like an e-commerce website, but available for a limited time. Purchases were made directly through the dealers, with the website providing a portal to showcase art in the same way an e-commerce site showcases any product. Rather than entering items into a shopping cart or wish list, visitors were invited to save works in an area designated, “My Collection.”

Prominent art world figures, such as tennis-star-turned-art-dealer John McEnroe and Miami collector Dennis Scholl, publicly shared their “My Collections,” thereby highlighting interesting works.

Fair visitors could browse anonymously via avatars, so people got to enter the virtual fair looking like such art world regulars as a Bergdof-clad collector, or scruffy art intellectual. Navigating the fair’s website was easy. Landing pages contained boxes that served like front doors, and when you clicked on them you entered a virtual gallery space and could view individual artworks through a scrolling display. It was easy to chat with, or email, the galleries.

Once inside the virtual gallery space, you could click for details about the artist, size and materials. Prices were visible on some works, but on others you had to email the gallery. There was a “scale” button, and when you clicked it, the display adjusted the artwork in relation to your human-scaled avatar.

If numbers are the only measure of success, the fair did well, boasting 73,000 registered attendants from 155 countries. In case you’re not familiar with online measurements, those are good stats for such a short period of time. By comparison, Art Basel Miami Beach, which ran for five days in December, concluded with “record attendance,” but that only brought 50,000 visitors through the convention center’s doors.

However, behemoth fairs such as Basel deliver the same prominent, yet predictable, usual-art-world-suspects. In the case of VIP 2.0, visitors included people not inclined, or perhaps even interested, in traveling to an art fair, but with the means to make major purchases. VIP 2.0 reported a growth in visitor numbers from key emerging markets, including a 278 percent increase in visitors from India, 288 percent from the UAE, 277 percent from Brazil, 409 percent from Turkey, 319 percent from Mexico, and 456 percent from Chile.

In many respects, VIP delivered the unparalleled ability to reach new clients for not that much more than the price of an ad in one of the major art trades, and without the hassles or costs associated with shipping, setup, or staffing at real-life fairs. This also makes VIP a platform for expanding the global reach of art gallery brands.

Final sales information is still being compiled, but Jane Cohan noted in an email that, “….galleries who reported that they made sales include Lisa Cooley (they reported selling out 80 percent of their booth), May 36, Brooke Alexander, Peter Blum, Arndt, Marian Goodman, Roslyn Oxley, Annet Gelink, LTMH--Leila Heller, Nara Roesler, White Cube, James Cohan, Jeffrey Frankael and Untitled, and many of our museum exhibitors sold works.”

Most galleries showed paintings, but many fully leveraged the forum’s predilection for video work, and it was nice to visit galleries and not have dealers or gallery assistants standing there scanning you from head-to-toe.

VIP received criticism for not delivering the full fair experience, but the problem could be semantics. Branding VIP a “fair” sets real-life fair expectations. Some won’t see the potential of the virtu-sphere and those that don’t appreciate the Web as a marketing platform won’t acknowledge peripheral benefits, such as providing an email marketing list.

“Last year, conversations revealed that one of the most meaningful attributes of the first edition of the fair is the lead generation that was initiated online,” Cohan noted. This, she said, led to, “….sales in the weeks and months following the event.” Another benefit to a virtu-fair: Web analytics. Everything is measurable — and in real time. So galleries get statistical information about visitor demographics and preferences.

It’s possible that VIP is ahead of its time. They may need to soldier on and wait for dealers to fully embrace the Web as a viable sales and marketing tool and for the public at large to realize that an online fair is its own entity, and isn’t intended to replace the real thing.

“We have never proposed, by organizing this online event, that people stop appreciating art in person,” Cohan said. “I think it is well-understood that the Internet is a wonderful connector. However, it does not replace real-life experiences.”

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VIP Art Fair goes live each year in February. Additional fairs include VIP Paper (April 19-21), VIP Photo (July 12-14), and VIP Vernissage (Sept. 20-22). For more information, visit http://www.vipartfair.com/

Jenifer Mangione Vogt is a marketing communications professional and writer on art and Italian culture. Visit her blog at www.fineartnotebook.com.