Slow Muse has been a personal repository for my thoughts and feelings about art, art making and creativity for almost 20 years. As the landscape of creativity has constantly changed, I have frequently been surprised by what persists and what does not. At this particular moment in time artistic expression has become increasingly politicized, then […]
Paula Vogel wrote the play, How I Learned to Drive, by staying up all night for two weeks. She had secured a theater residency in Juneau, but unforeseen circumstances caused her to arrive empty handed. As a result, she was highly aware of an obligation to produce something quickly. The long days of sunlight, the […]
. “The ecstatic is our compass, pointing to our true north.” “Art is far more powerful than our plans for it.” —Advice for artists from The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin . There’s nothing quite like a consuming passion. It often comes about unexpectedly when encountering a new idea, project or person. And then it […]
Zadie Smith in rehearsal for Wife of Willesden. Photo: Marc Brenner. . There are many reasons to make your way to Zadie’s Smith’s play, The Wife of Willesden. Based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, it draws on 600 years of admiration for Chaucer, the undisputed father of English poetry. And bringing this play to […]
Darkening Moment, by Phoebe Adams. Acrylic gouache on paper mounted on wood panel, 30 x 40″ WALKING NOMAD, a show of new work by Phoebe Adams, at David Richard Gallery in Chelsea, 508 West 26th Street, New York NY. The essay below was written about these new paintings, and is included in the show catalog. […]
Golawon. Acrylic, oil, Galkyd, powdered pigments, substrates minerals on canvas, 54″ x 72″. . “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.” –Lucien Freud . Writers and artists actually talk about this concept a lot although they typically employ different terminology: themes, tropes, proclivities, inclinations, gestures. The fact is that none of us create something […]
Some proclivities are sui generis, perennially present as a life unfolds. That is the sense I get when George Saunders expresses the discomfort he still feels about his childhood failure to befriend a lonely girl in his neighborhood. For Saunders, gifted author and teacher, kindness and humility are built in. I have a primordial proclivity […]
“We have reached a crossroads, we have emerged from what we assumed was normality, things have suddenly overturned. One of our main tasks now—especially those of us who are not sick, are not frontline workers, and are not dealing with other economic or housing difficulties—is to understand this moment, what it might require of us, […]
You can’t start writing until you know what you’re doing, and you don’t know what you’re doing until you start writing. I still have to resist the false intuition that I need to know as much as possible in advance. The essential thing is to know as little as possible. Ideally, when things fall out […]
Our language—or maybe our culture in general—have limited terms to describe those times when a life gets turned upside down. For creative types, much has been written about writer’s block. Whether you view creativity as a product of sheer self expression or the gift of an inspirational visiting daemon, every artist I know has had […]