The headline in the Parrot’s Weekly read: Titantic Sunk. No Parrots Hurt. –Katharine Whitehorn, quoted in The Artful Universe by John D. Barrow Oh the power of a point of view…Parrots may not be your thing, but something is. Washington’s poet laureate Elizabeth Austen speaks to our proclivity to narrowbanding in her piece, How poetry […]
Author: Deborah Barlow
Behind, Beyond, Beneath: Scaling the Continuum
A few installation shots from my recent show at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka California, Behind, Beyond, Beneath: Scaling the Continuum. At the opening event on Saturday night, over 800 people came through the museum. I met some extraordinary people and had a terrific evening. Special thanks: A stellar team and museum staff—Jemima Harr, […]
Evocative Objects
‘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 […]
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 […]
- Aesthetics
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Painting with your Guts
Claerwen James (Photo: London Evening Standard) Every artist has a personal story of how she ended up spending a lifetime doing this thing that is all-consuming. It’s a strange decision really, that willingness to give yourself over to a passion that takes hold as soon as you awake and stays resident, in background or foreground, […]
- Art Making
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Tuttle Truths
Richard Tuttle (Photo: PBS) The most reliable speaker about art and art making from where I sit: Richard Tuttle. In this interview with Ross Simonini in Art in America, he touches on many of the themes that are all over my writings on Slow Muse. Here are a few that are particularly important to me […]