Tiruchchirappalli, India This year we celebrated Easter with friends from Athens. While a whole lamb turned slowly on a spit, the table was loaded up with fresh bread, olives from the family vineyards back home, and copious bowls of salads and vegetables. It was sumptuous and unforgettable, rendered with the mastery that comes with having […]
Marquezania
García Márquez in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2003. Photograph: Andres Reyes/AP
Nobel prize winning author and father of magic realism, Gabriel García Márquez, passed away on Thursday at the age of 87.
His breakthrough novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published in 1967. The book has sold 50 million copies in 25 languages. That novel was a revelation to me then, and my respect for him never wavered.
The imaginative power of his writing was stunning, and that otherworldliness of his storytelling has impacted me and my approach to my visual work all these many years. I had to take a moment here to honor and remember this extraordinary man and his work.
Quotes by him are in abundance since his death, but here are a few of my favorites:
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
The secret of good old-age is none other than an honest pact with solitude.
But if they had learned anything together it was that wisdom arrives when it’s no longer useful.
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
There is always something left to love.
- Aesthetics
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Robert Morris: I Won’t
Shadows on my studio wall When artist Robert Knafo wrote to request a studio interview with Robert Morris, this was the response he received back. Knafo describes this as the best No he ever received. “I love how he calmly shoots the art documentary cliches, holsters his gun, and walks away,” Knafo wrote. “Thank you […]
Shaping the Story
From “The Shape She Makes” at American Repertory Theater (Photo: American Rep Theater) Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your […]
Walking the Road
An angled view of a new piece, “Mangalat” Kathleen Kirk’s post, “Persistence and Patience”, is a thoughtful description of how she ended up, after several career explorations, being a poet. In her graceful telling, she describes her many forays into other creative fields—music, art, theater, teaching—but none of them evoked the necessary persistence and patience […]
- Art Making
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Brian Eno: Active Surrender
Brian Eno (Photo by Matthew Anker) A category of music referred to as “ambient”—made popular by musicians including Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, The Orb, Aphex Twin, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh—is often coupled with the music of the “holy minimalists”—Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, Henryk Górecki, Alan Hovhaness and Sofia Gubaidulina. Whether electronic or contemporary […]
- Art Making
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Direct Encounters
“Ekka,” a newly completed painting (33 x 47″). An art collector had this to say when she stopped by my studio recently: “Lately I have wanted to just quietly commune with a work of art. I am not interested in deciphering references or spending time getting the inside jokes. I just want to find a […]
- Aesthetics
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Everything Depends
Mar Jee 3, from a recent series I have been spending some time contemplating where working and mystery coalesce. Here are a few thoughts about that by way of some wise practitioners… Shaking the Tree Vine and branch we’re connected in this world of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves contingent, roots pushing […]
Small is Beautiful
A display at the Museum of Innocence, titled “Istanbul‘s Streets, Bridges, Hills and Squares,” (Photo: Jackie Nickerson) Turkish author Orhan Pamuk (whose books include My Name is Red and Snow, among others) is an advocate of small museums (a topic I wrote about here.) We live in an era of mega-museums that work hard to […]
- Aesthetics
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Useful Space for Thought
Detail from one of my recent painting series, “Angaris” I recently found two statements about painting by Australian artist Helen Johnson that were very resonant for me. While Johnson’s work has identifiable content, her approach and attitudes are aligned with my work as a non representationalist. First, her description of painting from a roundtable about […]