I’m still sitting in the fragrance of the excerpted passages from the Francis Clines article that I posted earlier this week. This visual image for example has a powerful persistence for me: For his opening classes at Harvard, Heaney usually prescribes selections from East European poets, stark verse that is hardly the language of bogus […]
Art
More From Seamus
Like an old friend who drops in and ends up staying a few days, Seamus Heaney has been on my mind ever since I read those few lines I posted yesterday. Here’s a short poem by him that delights, enchants, creates longing (the good kind.) Song A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road […]
Timorous or Bold
I found a passage from a poem by Seamus Heaney, quite by chance. It stopped me in my tracks: ”The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.” Just coming out of a long period of living life beneath the surface of things, those words cut through to the bone. So […]
The Object of My Affection
Here’s a midwinter diversion for you. From Slow Muse friend and frequent commenter, Elatia Harris: 3 Quarks Daily is known as one of the blogosphere’s more cerebral haunts, and it occurred to me that habitues of 3QDistan might know a great deal about being broken-hearted by a poem, a song, a building, or most of […]
Brown
I’m a huge fan of Stephin Merritt, inspiration behind the Magnetic Fields and a slew of other collaborations. He has that Elliott Smith-like proclivity to combine unexpected lyrics with a wide range of hummable music. (I like this description: “bitterly smart lyricism and a musical-survey style.”) The results don’t feel forced or manipulative, just delightfully […]
Navigating the Imagination
Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, was reviewed by Leah Hager Cohen in the New York Times on Sunday. (I have an excerpt from this excellent review on my filter blog, Slow Painting, if you didn’t catch it.) Hartigan’s book is the catalog for the show that just closed at the San […]
Coming Up for Air
I’ve been burrowed in my studio for several days, getting work ready for an upcoming show in San Francisco. For the first time in nine years there is no heat in my studio on weekends, so I have had balance and moderation forced on my otherwise excessive self. I’ve missed the introspection and insight that […]
El Anatsui, in New York
I saw my first installation by Ghanain-born sculptor El Anatsui at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. I came back from that trip and posted about that exquisite object–part textile, part tactile sculpture, made of bottle caps and wire. Since then he was featured at the Venice Biennale and is now getting well deserved […]
The Power of the Question
I received a book in the mail as a gift from a friend* I haven’t seen for some time: Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go: Waking Up to Who You Are, by Thich Nhat Hanh. As is often the way these things go, I opened it up to a few passages that had deep resonance […]
Leon Ferrari
Leon Ferrari (images courtesy of Cecelia de Torres Gallery) The Museum of Modern Art catalog for January 2008 arrived in the mail and I was stunned by the cover. It features a recent purchase, a drawing by Argentinian artist Leon Ferrari. I don’t know Ferrari’s work well but his name caught my eye when I […]