Life magazine’s portrait of the Abstract Expressionist artists known as ‘The Irascibles,’ 1951. Front row: Theodore Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, and Mark Rothko; middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne. (Photo: […]
Art
A Life of Loving Cézanne
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. –Paul Cézanne January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906 A birthday commemoration to an artist whose work just keeps speaking to me. This love affair started when I was a teenager, and it […]
Painting Well
“Rag and bone shop” table surface in my studio The New York Times Book Review last week had a simple headline: “Why Criticism Matters”. The editors set the stage by describing our current age as one where opinions are “offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones”—by anyone, anytime. So in that context it is […]
- Art Making
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A Deep, Quiet Place
A recent shot of my studio table Some periods are creatively fecund, and some are not. After many years of being an artist, I have come to expect both the ups and the downs of a life in the studio. As I have observed many times on this blog, the nature of the work that […]
Up Against Oblivion
Sargy Mann, blind painter Here’s a story I have never encountered before. Sargy Mann spends 25 years as a painter and ends up losing his sight. But he decides to keep painting. From an article about Mann by Tim Adams in the Guardian: “After a bit I thought: ‘Well here goes,’ and loaded a brush […]
Bad Art Poisoning
The (in)famous Robert Benchley Maybe there is something more than wry humor behind Robert Benchley’s oft-quoted quip, “The world is divided into groups: those that divide the world into two groups, and those that don’t.” It is after all so comfortingly seductive, the beautiful symmetry of just two elegant and simple options. Like the essential […]
- Art Making
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Ways of Working
At some level, everything is of interest to the eye…a view of one corner of my studio space How do artists work? In a recent posting on Real Clear Arts, Judith H. Dobrzynski makes the case that as mysterious as the creative process is, it is that which people most want to know. And that […]
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 […]
- 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 […]
Sensory Intimacy, in Art and in Architecture
Sensuality afoot at the Metropolitan Museum The gift that just keeps giving…I don’t think there is a single page of my copy of Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin that isn’t marked up and annotated. Although Pallasmaa is an architect and writing primarily about that metier, his book is full of passages that are […]