Up close and personal on a painting, seen from an angled view Bulldog behavior, getting a hold of something and holding on especially if you’re not sure exactly what it is—worrying it, wiggling it, maybe throwing it up in the air and chasing it, not letting it get away but not pinning it down either. […]
Brooklyn Show
Marae 2, 16 x 16″, mixed media on wood panel I am having a show of recent paintings at Brooklyn Workshop Gallery in Carroll Gardens during September and October. Curator Martine Bisagni has titled the show, “The Light Within,” choosing works where light appears to be emerging from within the painting rather than sourced externally. […]
- Art Making
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Playing From the Other Side of the Score
Skeepa, from a new series The New Yorker‘s Joan Acocella recently reviewed Playing Scared: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright by Sara Solovitch. Stagefright. Being a visual artist comes with plenty of baggage, but this isn’t one that is on my list of potential afflictions. Meanwhile this is a disabling condition that affects a […]
- Art Making
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Chase Away All Routine and Find the Singularity
Detail from a work in process: Learning how to know my own terrain Terry Theise‘s book, Reading Between the Wines (first introduced here), offers so many redolent parallels between winemaking and painting. And during a season when the land is in full expression, the analogies are particularly timely and apt. Consider this response from one […]
The Terroir-Driven Life
Mosel, the German valley most associated with Riesling wines (Photo: Friedrich Petersdorff) I’ve been laboring to write about (mostly) art making and creativity on this blog for almost 10 years. One of the overarching themes has been the search for language that comes in close, authentically, to the experiences I have when I am in […]
Sieve the World
Kana’an 3, from a new series Jane Hirshfield, poet and Buddhist, is my favorite guide to the overlapping territory shared by spirituality and creativity. In her books Nine Gates and most recently, Ten Windows, she moves back and forth between the artistic process and the interior life of the soul. In Ten Windows she writes, […]
- Art Making
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The Grace of Perfect Danger
Agamya 2 “May your imagination know The grace of perfect danger.” Those are lines are from the poem, For the Artist at the Start of Day, by John O’Donohue, the warmhearted Irish poet and former priest who died in his sleep at just 52 seven years ago. Writing this poem for anyone who spends their […]
The Strange and the Familiar
“Lajiva”, from a new series In his essay, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, Jonathan Lethem writes, “It’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange.” That line is a reference to the 18th century poet Novalis whose early romanticism was captured in his […]
- Aesthetics
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The Self-amusing, Musing Mind
Recently completed: Himnae, 42 x 84″ We all have a favorite go to distraction we turn to when things aren’t flowing (or don’t seem to be, which is a common deception.) Books, especially really great ones, are my Balm of Gilead. And right now, for whatever reason, I have a huge stack of new and […]
Pitch Perfect
Agnes Martin (Photo: Mildred Tolbert) From the newly released Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, by Nancy Princenthal: Martin’s mature paintings (she destroyed most of her early work) are incontrovertibly right, in the sense that they convince us that not a single preliminary decision or incident of execution could have been changed without damage. Composed […]