Cold Mountain 3, by Brice Marden Here’s a thoughtful and provoking passage from one of my favorite blogs, Joe Felso: Ruminations. He references Han-shan, the same poet who inspired Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain series of paintings, who feels similar in spirit to my earlier posting on Master Linji, also from the Tang Dynasty: I wonder […]
El Anatsui, in New York
I saw my first installation by Ghanain-born sculptor El Anatsui at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. I came back from that trip and posted about that exquisite object–part textile, part tactile sculpture, made of bottle caps and wire. Since then he was featured at the Venice Biennale and is now getting well deserved […]
The Power of the Question
I received a book in the mail as a gift from a friend* I haven’t seen for some time: Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go: Waking Up to Who You Are, by Thich Nhat Hanh. As is often the way these things go, I opened it up to a few passages that had deep resonance […]
Leon Ferrari
Leon Ferrari (images courtesy of Cecelia de Torres Gallery) The Museum of Modern Art catalog for January 2008 arrived in the mail and I was stunned by the cover. It features a recent purchase, a drawing by Argentinian artist Leon Ferrari. I don’t know Ferrari’s work well but his name caught my eye when I […]
Juicing the Corpse and Making it Dance
I found a terrific article about painting and its complex relationship with the contemporary art scene. It is so provocative, and it reflects many of my own beliefs about the “state of the art” (so to speak) of painting that I posted most of it on my Slow Painting blog. I don’t want to come […]
Thoughts On a Moonbeam for a New Year
Moonbeam The mist rose with a little sound. Like a thud. Which was the heart beating. And the sun rose, briefly diluted. And after what seemed years, it sank again and twilight washed over the shore and deepened there. And from out of nowhere lovers came, people who still had bodies and hearts. Who still […]
Zero-Gravity Thinking
Innovation. It is the subject of IBM ads that air during football games as well as a constant issue for anyone who is a maker of poems, paintings, music, theatre. A recent article in the New York Times captured some of the occupational hazards encountered by those who have to deal daily with what does […]
Poetry is White
One of my Christmas gifts from my friend Cindy was Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, a book of poems by Pablo Neruda translated by Stephen Mitchell. Based on my preliminary reading of a few of my favorite Neruda poems in this volume, thumbs up. Here’s a sample comparison of Mitchell’s translation with a popular […]
Authenticity and its Discontents
In responding to my previous post about theory and art making, Elatia Harris left a comment that is so full of potent issues I felt it needed to be brought forward, into the headlights. She touches on issues that many visual artists (including myself) mull over, struggle with and voice frustration about. I don’t necessarily […]
Theory Free…Not
Sun through the gazebo in Skaneateles I drove to Syracuse last weekend to retrieve my daughter who just completed her first semester of graduate school. Her plan for recovering from a string of all nighters reading Leonardo’s notebooks and researching the driving force behind the Maniera style was to spend the night in Skaneateles, one […]