More from David Batchelor’s Chromophobia: In the chapter titled “Whitescapes”, Batchelor describes going to a party at the home of an art collector in London. His description of that experience is hauntingly familiar to me, but one that I have never thought through in such explicit detail: The house looked ordinary enough from the outside: […]
Chromophobia
I have had a small book titled Chromophobia on my shelf since it was published in 2000. After dipping in and out of it over the last few years and being delighted and intrigued, I finally read it from stem to stern. It is a terrific, terrific book. The author, David Batchelor, is a sculptor […]
A Landscape I Know
Distance From up here, the insomniac river turning in its bed looks like a line somebody painted so many years ago it’s hard to believe it was ever liquid; a motorboat winks in the sun and leaves a wake that seals itself in an instant, like the crack in a hardly broken heart. And the […]
Chemical Dance
It is a strange and esoteric chemistry that moves the inner dial of our moods. Who hasn’t taken a micro-second whipsaw ride from ebullience to hopelessness? For me, some days in the studio are all flow. On others, nothing goes right. If only I could clear a pattern headed in the wrong direction as easily […]
Art for All
After several days in California, I’m readjusting to the stubbornness of a winter overlord who won’t give up New England. Succession planning? We’re working on that. Spring is off stage, bedecked in faille, fluttering her white and pink organzas, just waiting for an entrance cue. I had some memorable moments last week, both indoors as […]
Waiting for the Crack
Spring Thaw in South Hadley Old snows locked under glass by last night’s ice storm left curatorial Winter, in whose hands alone we’d hope to find the keys, jangling them in the trees—. not merely in these pine needles by the fistful gloved in crystal, but, from their boughs, the self- invented digits of icicles […]
The Nature of True North
I’ve written about Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press, on this blog previously. While I was visiting CPP in San Francisco, I was introduced to The North Pole, Brown’s book about her adventure on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker in 2002. With no coffee table aspirations, this paperback is simply and elegantly designed, interleafing Brown’s […]
Authenticity, Identity, Reality
I’m recovering from knee surgery, so maybe that is the reason I’m sporting a surlier view of things. Bear with me here, I’ll be ambulatory and more optimistically inclined soon enough. But until then… Much has been written over the last week about the latest scandal regarding yet another faux memoir exposed. It is easy […]
Monumental Grandiosity
Clyfford Still So maybe this is my week to air art world frustrations. My latest complaint: The newly unveiled Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. An excerpt about the proposed museum from the Denver Post can be read on Slow Painting. The building concept sounds soulful, more of an invitation to solitude than its brassy, sassy […]
Art Distribution and Other Woes
I have been a life long advocate for the importance of original art in daily life. Of course that is a position that is nothing short of self serving, but it is also based on a very distinct experience from my own childhood. My parents were suburban middle class people who grew up on farms […]