Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. –Rita Mae Brown These days I’m filling life with a lot more silence than is usual for me. Just a single thought or insight seems food enough for a day in the studio. And each morning begins by breaking everything apart […]
Contemplative
Nature, Seeing, Thinking
A few koan-like insights on art, nature, seeing and thinking: Art is not what we see; it is in the spaces between. –Marcel Duchamp . . Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, […]
Not Entering One’s Own House
I’ve always thought of myself as a Clydesdale artist–the kind that applies sheer will and fortitude to obstacles. It must be my pioneer heritage (a epigenomic proclivity?) that programs me to just keep walking no matter what. I have ancestors who did that as they made their way across the North American plains in the […]
Painting the Facelessness
Another passage of interest from W. S. Piero’s Out of Eden: Why are the jets and emulsive tracks of paints in Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 so compelling? It’s not only because he was creating a greater plasticity of space and laying out dozens of contested fields of formal activity where disintegrating patterns pitch […]
Married to Amazement, with the World in Her Arms
When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the […]
Something of the Hermit
There is something of the hermit about my kind of art making. I spend long hours alone in my studio. Sometimes I spend the entire day there without lifting a brush, just looking. There’s lots and lots of just looking. There is also something of the hermet when we engage with grief or sorrow. I’m […]
Grateful for Whoever Comes
The Guesthouse This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may […]
Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad
Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly […]
In the Throe of Wonder
I was introduced to the philosophical work of Jerome Miller a few years ago by my good friend Nicole Long. She studied with him in college and has been an emissary for his work ever since. I was signed up as a fan as soon as I stepped into his brilliant The Way of Suffering: […]
The Untidy Activities
One Art The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing […]