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 […]
Author: Deborah Barlow
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 […]
Sensing the Flow of Water Against the Skin
My favorite thought provocateur these days (actually “these days” is actually now several months) is Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and author of The Eyes of the Skin. Here are a few more of his insights about seeing, the dominance of the eye, modes of vision. (Other great quotes from Pallasmaa that I have posted here: Focused […]
- Aesthetics
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The Thinking/Feeling Continuum
Random window in downtown Charleston West Virginia Thinking and feeling. Some cultures prioritize those two concepts in that order. Others reverse it. And of course it is never a case of this or that, black or white. Every tradition has its own blending of head and heart, the external and the internal, the rational and […]