Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge Massachusetts Yesterday a group of us gathered at the Blue Spruce Knoll at Mt. Auburn cemetery, the burial site of Bonnie Horne. Bonnie died in January, and she carefully chose that spot as the place where she wanted her name engraved in stone. As was her deeply methodical and thorough nature, […]
- Contemplative
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Not Giving Over
Hindu altar, Kanchipuram India, 2008 Blue Arabesque, by Patricia Hampl, is a book-long meditation and memoir that starts with her deep and sudden connection to a painting by Matisse hanging in the Chicago Art Institute. Writing not as an artist but as a thoughtful wisdom seeker, Hampl describes a conversation she has with a 60 […]
There’s No Marseille, and Never Will Be
Large Reclining Nude, by Henri Matisse. Baltimore Museum of Art, Cone Collection When I first came to the east coast from California all those many years ago, there were two museums outside of New York City I was determined to see right away. The Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania was at the top of the […]
Follow the Bouncing Ball
A heads up for anyone interested in getting an overview of the state of arts journalism: Regina Hackett has put together a good list on her blog, Another Bouncing Ball, In the fast-morphing world of art criticism, I found this posting helpful. Here’s an excerpt: The Brookyn Rail does not pay its contributors. Living on […]
Leaky Margins
For the last few years I have been following the fascinating discussion around what is socially transmitted and what is not. (Here’s an earlier post on this topic.) While the claim that happiness is contagious (and the subject of the lead article about the work of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the Sunday New […]
Brucing Into Something Better
The BHQF, in Bushwick A small article by Roberta Smith from the New York Times shed some light on the ongoing and ever morphing state of fine arts education. She begins her piece with the now famous quote from Barnett Newman—“Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds.” And given where things have gone […]
Silence’s Non-Narrative
Isle of Skye, 1999 A respectfully reverent review of Sarah Maitland’s latest book, A Book of Silence, appeared in the Sunday Times Book Review. Written by Dominique Browning, the review and book both speak to many of the aspects of silence that I have written about here in earlier posts. It is something I think […]
More on Abstraction and Nature
Rock and fungi, Tasmania, 2007 Two of the comments to my earlier post, Threading through Abstraction, Micro and Macro, came in from Down Under. Both of these writers offered a thoughtful expansion of the discussion I began in my post. My experience is that this issue of nature and abstraction has particular significance in the […]
- Aesthetics
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Threading Through Abstraction, Micro and Macro
In 1968 two of mid-century’s most influential designers, Charles and Ray Eames, made a short film called Powers of Ten. In just ten minutes they explored the universe from one end of the scale to the other. A book based on that film was published some years later and had a lasting impression on me. […]
Letting the Window Open
Christ’s troubled sleep from Milton’s ‘Paradise Regained’, Book IV lines 401-25, c.1816-18, by William Blake Once again I am moved to share an excerpt from my friend Andrew’s Sunday epistle. Armed with a piercing intellect and a PhD in literature, he often crafts entrances into Blake or Milton or Donne that I would not be […]