‘Ghost Dance Dress’: Southern Arapaho artist, Oklahoma, circa 1890 (Photo: Joshua Ferdinand) The best way I know of dealing with the scale and scope of the Metropolitan Museum is to walk through and let the objects find you. Art critic Michael Kimmelman did his own version of the “evocation stroll” in the company of numerous […]
Month: April 2015
No Logic Here
“Book for Architects,” by Wolfgang Tillmans (Photo: Francesco Galli) Over the past ten years, I have photographed buildings in ordinary and extraordinary contexts in thirty-seven countries on five continents. Displaying the complexity and the irrationality—sometimes madness—and at other times the beauty of architecture, these pictures in their totality seem to me a little daunting but […]
Invisible But Felt
From Astronomy Picture of the Day: Milky Way over Erupting Volcano (Photo: Sergio Montúfar) Explanation: The view was worth the trip. Battling high winds, cold temperatures, and low oxygen, the trek to near the top of the volcano Santa Maria in Guatemala — while carrying sensitive camera equipment — was lonely and difficult. Once set […]
The Sweet Unheard
Of all the poets who delve into writing, creativity and the nature of art making, Jane Hirshfield is the closest to my way of seeing things. I go back to her books over and over again. Now another to add to my library: Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry. These three essays were […]
- Aesthetics
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The Confirmation Bias
Imagined map of the word, Japanese I am reading a book recommended by my daughter Kellin Nelson: The Art of Thinking Clearly, by Rolf Dobelli. It’s designed with the 21st century reader in mind—succinct, straight talking advice on rampantly human cognitive errors in 99 chapters, each only a few pages long. Dobelli nails all of […]
Upcoming Show in California
My new exhibit, Behind, Beyond, Beneath: Scaling the Continuum will open April 25 at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka California. The show features paintings from a variety of series that I have worked on over the last five years but held together by an ongoing exploration into the “micro to macro” span […]