Resting on Perception

Saul Bellow Art and meaning. Big topic, and one that just keeps morphing and moving through our relationship with art making in whatever form that takes. I’ve written on that complex topic a lot here, if only peripherally given its depth, but my interest in it is tireless. Leon Wieseltier’s New York Times review of […]

Openings

The universe in a blade of grass (…or in a lid left on your work table in the angled light of afternoon) Here’s more on the theme of looking for and relishing the unexpected, life’s little and big exceptions, those “black swans” that appear out of nowhere (as I wrote about here.) I am also […]

Tinker Away

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain […]

PEM Update

18th century lacquer work from Quianlong Garden Currently at the Peabody Essex Museum: The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, on view through January 9 before it moves to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This collection of artifacts, never before seen by the public, is taken from a sanctuary built in the […]

Irony and Meaning

Barnett Newman I’ve been having a lot of discussions lately about irony, particularly its role in art. Many of these are conversations I have been having with parts of myself, but some of them are with friends and cotravelers. This interest was piqued a few weeks ago when a good friend with an exceptionally developed […]