When is it too much text? (Photo: bodyartforms.com) As long as I have been making art—and eight years of writing steadily about art-related issues here on Slow Muse—I still struggle with how words and the visual come together. One part of me is convinced that the great visual experiences cannot be harnessed into words. That’s […]
Author: Deborah Barlow
Material and Matter: Show in Connecticut
Doing a show with artists whose work you admire and who you consider to be your good friends—that’s a sweet spot that doesn’t happen often. Luckily it was the case with this recent show. The four of us conceived of this work hanging together, and we were able to do the installation ourselves. I am […]
The Golden Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl Sarah Ruhl, award winning playwright and member of the genius grant class (it’s a badge you can wear for life), has been the theme of my week. Her recently released book, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater, is […]
Leaving the Path at Any Moment
Jack Whitten (Photo: Rose Art Museum) Yesterday I attended a symposium on the “status and stakes” of painting today. Most of the speakers were academics—art historians and curators whose business it is to categorize, systemize and prognosticate on where the world of art has been and where it is trending before it actually does. These […]
The Form in the Grass
A Message from the Wanderer Today outside your prison I stand and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen; you have relatives outside. And there are thousands of ways to escape. Years ago I bent my skill to keep my cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies, and shouted my plans to jailers; but […]
Finding Squares
Marilynne Robinson (Photo: Big Think) Recently I wrote about Richard Diebenkorn and described how deeply his work and approach to life informed my way of art making and being in the world. In that post I referenced Adam Gopnik‘s description of squareness: Cézanne, unique among the masters, was utterly square. Diebenkorn, the perfect representative of […]
- Aesthetics
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Visitors, Full of Yearning
One room from “The Visitors”, by Ragnar Kjartansson Installation view (Photo: Agostino Osio, courtesy Fondazione Hangarbicocca) The Clock, a video montage/art installation by Christian Marclay, artfully stitched together 24 hours’ worth of vignettes with references to time. Stipulated by Marclay to only be viewed in perfect synch with real time, The Clock‘s sequences are extracted […]
RD: Personal Hero
RD My friend Joshua Baer writes about wine with more creativity than anyone I know. (His reviews appear monthly in Santa Fe’s THE Magazine, and all his columns can be found on One Bottle.) Last month he blended a review of 2012 Comte Abbatucci Rosé “Cuvée Faustine” with his admiration for the artist Richard Diebenkorn […]
Finding Wild
A woman, alone, in the landscape (This particular one being my friend Ali Ringenburg at Deer Isle) Two excellent books, both written by women, have the same title: Wild. Sheryl Strayed is American, and her book became an instant best seller (and soon a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.) Jay Griffiths is British, and she is […]
- Books
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Another World, But Here
Paul Éluard, surrealist and poet, famously said, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” While culling through the Slow Muse archive, I also found the two quotes below from nature writer Ellen Meloy that weave into Éluard’s thread. Some of these are perennial themes: What it means to feel a sense of […]