In search of the “flashes of identity between subject and object”……the world that exists outside language The following provocation closely aligns with my own views. This passage is by a forceful voice, Barbara Guest, from a book of her writings, Forces of Imagination: There is no substitute for imagination. Words deprived of their stability—that is […]
Month: September 2010
Eternally Artful
Some images never grow old, never fade in color on that screen of our life that lives at the back of the mind. Some of the images that live on for me were created 18,000 years ago, in southern France. I remember the first time I saw ever saw cave painting art. I was a […]
Franzen and Freedom
I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Even though yet another blog post about the literary sensation of the moment is not contributing much to the collective forward motion of our cultural understanding, I can’t NOT spend just a little time talking about the book. The reviews have been unabashedly glowing, so much so that […]
Edging Beyond the Edge
Mystical metaphysics meets science: The Economist has reviewed the new book, The Grand Design, written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. This passage is full of possibility: The main novelty in “The Grand Design” is the authors’ application of a way of interpreting quantum mechanics, derived from the ideas of the late Richard Feynman, to […]
Mining Dickinsonian Gold
Emily Dickinson: “The best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries” Book alert: The coming together of two greats—Emily Dickinson and Helen Vendler. Vendler has just released a new book, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. And although there are many collections of Dickinson’s work currently available, I can’t think of anyone I […]
The Word/Image Continuum
Being at home in a layered reality…The view through the rooms in Stephanie’s magical Rockport home I’ve confessed here before to the paradox at the core of my art making and blog writing persona: I don’t believe art can be parsed and analyzed in language the way other topics can be. But there are words […]
Courting the Presence
From Anna Hepler’s series, “Cyanotype 28,” on exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art. Hepler uses the idiosyncratic nature of a photographic process to explore how images can morph and disintegrate and, at the same time, expose the way light wraps a form and gives it a sense of presence. ____ In any kind of […]
Fallow and Fertile
Fallow fields near the Great Salt Lake in Layton Utah Friend and artist Kitty Bancroft stopped in Boston on her way to Philadelphia yesterday, and we had a few moments to share where things are in our private tinkering spaces called art making. I think of conversations like these as reminiscent of ones I had […]
- Art/Spiritual
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Enchantment Becoming Thing
Seeking enchantment—here, there, everywhere…The Great Haul, a site-specific installation by Anna Hepler at the Portland Museum of Art. The light becomes crystalline and kaleidoscopic through the layered netting of meshed plastic. _____ We have an innate capacity for remembering and imagining places. Perception, memory and imagination are in constant interaction; the domain of presence fuses […]
The Perspectival Eye
Waiting for Hurricane “My Name is Earl” to gather over the Northeast. We will be descending nonetheless on Cape Ann for a weekend of nuptial celebrating with Alexis and JP. So begins a month of wonderful wedding weekends. Life happens like that, big shifts that occur all at once, like the culmination of storm systems […]