If you are a Diebenkorn fan (as I am,) you will be dazzled by the new catalog for a show currently on view at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico (though September 9, 2007.) The show features work from Diebenkorn’s two and a half year residence in Albuquerque in the early 1950s, […]
Land/earth
Painful Beauty
Chris Jordan’s photographic works are extremely memorable. He knows how to create retinal appeal to be sure, but he also packs a political wallop. Some of you may know of his photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, published earlier this year. Circuit boards Another […]
Lynn Davis
Many of you know that in addition to writing this blog, I maintain another blog called Slow Painting that filters through websites, publications and blogs for compelling excerpts. Slow Painting is a customized assemblage of art-related news, ideas and concepts as defined by my sensibilities. Every so often a Slow Painting find is so provocative […]
What Spring Does with the Cherry Trees
After seeing yesterday’s posting of the Eastern Redbud in full rapture, my friend Sally Reed reminded me of this exquisite and sensual poem by Neruda: Every Day You Play Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more than this white […]
The Revery Alone Will Do If Bees are Few*
Best display of spring treeness goes to this amazing creature that uses every available surface to celebrate. (For those of you in New York City, this one-of-a-kind tree is in Central Park just north of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.) *Emily Dickinson, and yes, bees are few.
Aboriginal Art, Sacred Land and Becoming Visible
More on the topic of Aboriginal art through the eyes of Fred Myers: In Painting Culture, Myer quotes Nancy Munn who describes the Aboriginal relationship to their country as an objectification of ancestral subjectivity. Places where significant events took place, where power was left behind, or where the ancestors went into the ground and still […]
From the Dreaming, It Became Real
One of the leading anthropological experts on Aboriginal art and culture is Fred R. Myers. His 2002 book, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, explores the Western Desert Aboriginal painting movement through a lens that is more culture based than visual or aesthetic. Myers, a Professor of Anthropology at NYU, spent time […]
Beyond
Michael Benson is a filmmaker whose spent hours parsing through the thousands of black & white and color images taken by NASA space probes and landers. In his book Beyond: Visions of Interplanetary Probes, he has painstakingly pieced images together to create a view of space that takes my breath away. Looking at the images […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell’s work straddles the line between abstract expressionism and landscape more than almost anyone else. Her paintings, many of them quite large, create a sense of place of their own while referencing our collective sense of land and the space surrounding us. On a personal level, Mitchell–in spite of all the horrific stories of […]
Painting, in the Larger Context
In her essay, ‘Moorditj Marbarn (Strong Magic)’, Aboriginal artist Julie Dowling quotes Jean-Paul Sartre who described the role of painting as ‘the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it’. Her belief that painting is her means of cultural and personal survival provides an important perspective […]