Magpie’s nest (Photo: Wire.com) Last week I returned from a two week sojourn in the desert. Everything shifts around inside when I am in that landscape, and I have been gently allowing the ballast that balances me to settle into its new positions. Luckily I found the perfect companion for that subtle transition: Living with […]
Month: May 2014
- Aesthetics
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Marks and Mark Making
Pottery shards from a bygone era are everywhere along the upper mesa at Tsankawi One of the best parts of visiting New Mexico is the rich mix of mark making. A sense of surfaces that have been touched is everywhere, some of it from human hands and some of it by other means. In a […]
Coordinates: Unlocatable
Somewhere in New Mexico A Muslim prayer expresses this extraordinary request: “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” In poet Fanny Howe‘s essay, “Bewilderment”, from her essay collection, The Wedding Dress, she describes bewilderment as more than an attitude. It is an actual approach she says, a way to “settle with the unresolvable.” And this: A signal does […]
Inside Sontag
Moe Angelos as young Susan Sontag (and as an older Sontag on a scrim above) in the Builders Association’s “Sontag: Reborn.” (Photo: James Gibbs) Susan Sontag, author of many books that are now classics—Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others—has been gone for 10 years. But […]
- Aesthetics
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Working Alone
Door into my zone of privacy, my studio I am not the only artist out there voicing advocacy for the way of solitude. There are many of us who spend most of our days working alone and know that is the only way we can do what we do. But Susan Cain, author of Quiet: […]
- Aesthetics
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Yes, But…
“Hydra,” by Kay Canavino*, a photograph in my personal collection that I look at every day and adore I keep coming to that tough place, the one where you just have to say, “Yes, but…” It is a pervasive thing, this need to straddle. It isn’t just in the area of art and art making, […]