Agamya 2 “May your imagination know The grace of perfect danger.” Those are lines are from the poem, For the Artist at the Start of Day, by John O’Donohue, the warmhearted Irish poet and former priest who died in his sleep at just 52 seven years ago. Writing this poem for anyone who spends their […]
Art
The Strange and the Familiar
“Lajiva”, from a new series In his essay, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, Jonathan Lethem writes, “It’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange.” That line is a reference to the 18th century poet Novalis whose early romanticism was captured in his […]
Pitch Perfect
Agnes Martin (Photo: Mildred Tolbert) From the newly released Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, by Nancy Princenthal: Martin’s mature paintings (she destroyed most of her early work) are incontrovertibly right, in the sense that they convince us that not a single preliminary decision or incident of execution could have been changed without damage. Composed […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
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
- ...
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 […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
The Disability of Visibility
Ken Price at work (Photo: LACMA) I am especially fond of an essay written some time ago by William Deresiewicz (author of the recently released Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life) that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Learning titled The End of Solitude. Deresiewicz traces […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Jake Berthot, Fellow Traveler
Jake Berthot in 1995. Photo: John Berthot I know several people who knew Jake Berthot personally. I was not so lucky. But a fan of his work I have been for a long time, and I was deeply saddened to read of his death on December 30. He was 75. Over the years, reading or […]
- Art Making
- ...
To Ponder and To Leap
Engraving depicting Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, circa 1650. Photograph: Kean Collection/Getty Images. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was an English aristocrat, poet, essayist, playwright and scientist. At a time when most women writers were publishing anonymously, Cavendish published under her own name. She wrote about gender, power, manners, scientific method, and philosophy. Her book, “The […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Attentionality
Looking closely at a recent painting Robert Hass begins his extraordinary collection, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, talking about the photography of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams: What the two artists have in common, besides a name, is a certain technical authority. The source of that authority is […]
- Art Making
- ...
Young and Yet Wise: Weil and Hesse
Simone Weil Eva Hesse The writer Simone Weil died in 1943 at the age of 34. In spite of her short life, her legacy is a rich one, spanning a variety of métiers including philosophy, Christianity, theology, social justice, mysticism. And even though her life’s work was from her point of view of a god-centered […]