The Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or […]
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Yearnings
A hillside in Tuscany I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t have yearnings. I was raised in a culture that placed high value on the practical and the useful, but that didn’t quiet the longings that took up lodging just below the surface of my life. I was three years old, […]
Nozkowski, Adieu
Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (9-32), 2014. Oil on linen on panel, 22 x 28 inches. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York Many people hold Tom Nozkowski up as a rare exemplar of the artist who was uncompromisingly devoted to his work but was also able to achieve success in his career. He was an artist’s artist, […]
Hay Tiempo
Graciela Iturbide was a young mother when she lost her six year old daughter. It was shortly after that tragic loss that she turned to photography, eventually studying with Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Mexico’s most famous photographer. Bravo took her under his wing. His work was determinedly not picturesque, political or stereotypical, common fare in mid-20th […]
Another Way Please
Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan in 1957. (Photo: Burt Glinn/Magnum) Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel is more than a well deserved highlighting of the lives and careers of these five iconic […]
Dragons, Dalmatians and Dancing Gorillas
Hilma af Klint, from A Work on Flowers, Mosses and Lichen (© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk/Photo: Moderna Museet, Albin Dahlström) And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and […]
The Smudgy Fingerprints of our Humanness
“Uprooting the Tree of Life” by Ford Doolittle (From the February 2000 issue of Scientific American.) Science itself, however precise and objective, is a human activity. It’s a way of wondering as well as a way of knowing. It’s a process, not a body of facts or laws. Like music, like poetry, like baseball, like […]
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Diving into the Mystery
I’ve lived long enough to remember when Advice for Artists was a quiet, contemplative stream at the edge of town. Now it is a surging river with big crowds, water sports and riverboat casinos. Much has changed since Julia Cameron published the The Artist’s Way in 1992. Originally titled Healing the Artist Within, the book […]
A Timely Romeo and Juliet
Cast of “Romeo and Juliet,” at the Huntington Theater (Photo: Huntington Theater) “Theater is the essential art form of democracy,” claims Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater in New York. A new idea that power should stem from the consent of the governed—flowing from below to above—was born in Athens in the 6th […]
Endlings
Celine Song (Photo: Courtesy of the artist) A few years ago I was rhapsodizing with a friend about how much I love powerful storytelling, the kind that takes you so fully into another reality. Was the topic W. G. Sebald, George R. R. Martin, Rachel Cusk? I can’t remember what launched me, but the response […]