I was so pleased to hear that Marilynne Robinson won the Orange Prize for her latest novel, Home. I have been a fan since a friend lent me Housekeeping many years ago. What a writer, and what a book. Published in 1980, Housekeeping was Robinson’s sole novel (she did publish two books of essays which […]
Mass MoCA, You Rock
Here’s a well deserved shout out for Mass MoCA. One of my all time favorite museums, this innovative, expansive and lively space is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. That’s no small feat. (A piece about its inception is posted on Slow Painting, excerpted from an article by Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe.) Here are […]
Leaky Margins
What Kafka had to be so clear and simple about was that nothing is clear and simple. On his death bed he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead. All demarcations are shimmeringly blurred. Some powerful sets of opposites absolutely do not, as Heraclitus said, cooperate. They […]
The Politics of Nipples (We’re all Equal)
Breasts If I were French, I’d write about breasts, structuralist treatments of breasts, deconstructionist breasts, Gertrude Stein’s breasts in Père Lachaise under stately marble. Film noire breasts no larger than olives, Edith Piaf’s breasts shadowed under a song, mad breasts raving in the bird market on Sunday. Tanguy breasts softening the landscape, the politics of […]
Real + Imagined
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the […]
The Spangles of Self to Burn
Big Song I have tried it. The brag, with permission of democracy. The royal we. The big words, like courage, excellence and power, brilliance. Have tried to supercede the bound- aries of skin, hair, scarred hands, the fatigue housed by the majority of my bones, to launch a spirit large as a whole group of […]
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Tracey, Say It Isn’t So
Tracy Emin at the White Cube Gallery (Oli Scarff/Getty Images) Tracey Emin has cordoned off sex and sexuality as a major trope of her oeuvre. She has been outrageous, flagrant, outspoken and nakedly raw in her expression of pure id-ness. So turning 50 changes all that? Come on Tracey, can’t you love ideas AND sex? […]
The Three-Body Problem
A wise friend, something of a mystic and a channeler, recently described to me an encounter she had with a non-sentient being who passed through her consciousness some time earlier. In the midst of this mystical encounter with an energy that can only be described as “other” and yet not, she heard a voice in […]
That Damned Underbelly
Portrait of Francis Bacon I have posted two separate reviews on Slow Painting of the Francis Bacon show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, one by Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine, and one by Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe. Both touch on Bacon’s deeply troubled personal life, in particular his experience of […]
Face Against the Glass
Arombell 1, 14 x 14″, mixed media on wood panel I’m heading into the final lap of this preparatory marathon. Postcards for my upcoming show go out this week, so my face is against the glass. (If you would like to be on my mailing list, send me an email with your snail mail address.) […]