Art as Spiritual Remedy

Sandi Slone, Rasputin, 1984, oil and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 inches (Photo: Left Bank Art Blog) Carl Belz, Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has been posting his views on a variety of art topics for some time on Left Bank Art Blog. His most recent article, The Color […]

Portalized

At the RISD exhibit (Photo by Jan Baker) It’s an it. It is a simple insight but a huge one, that an entity exists outside of yourself that is your inspiration. Some call it the artist’s gift, some call it creativity. But the idea that it is separate from you—that it can be addressed and […]

Weil and Hesse

Simone Weil Eva Hesse The writer Simone Weil died in 1943 at the age of 34. In spite of her short life, her legacy is a rich one, spanning a variety of métiers including philosophy, Christianity, theology, social justice, mysticism. And even though her life’s work was from her point of view of a god-centered […]

Rhizome Redux

Revisiting the past: “Tuffesse,” 20 x 50″, from a body of work I painted about the same time as this original post This post first appeared here in April 2007. In looking back through that period of time I found these quotes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari still relevant and useful. A Thousand Plateaus […]

What the World Can Do Without

Another passage from Christian Wiman* that speaks to poetry writing but could apply to all the rest of us who are inveterate makers: Reality doesn’t need us. A poet knows this, and then, in the midst of a poem, when reality streams through the words that would hold it, doesn’t quite. W.S. Di Pietro, probably […]

Focus and Creativity

Heron on the beach at Small Point, Maine This is a postscript to yesterday’s post with more on the theme of the usefulness of downtime… Sam McNerney has posted a piece on Big Think called Why You Shouldn’t Focus Too Much in which he highlights the results of several recent studies on focus and creativity. […]