Ice patterns in winter: enchantment for free Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. –Susan Sontag Susan Sontag’s words are inspriring for anyone, not just […]
- Aesthetics
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Pieced Cloth
Fragment of cloth in the Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably, be undone. –Jacques Derrida, Positions Sometimes it isn’t just about the whole cloth. This past weekend I thought a lot about fragments, about the shards of incompleteness that are “continually, […]
- Art Making
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The Deeper Thing
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. […]
- Art Making
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Dreams of Eden
In Robert Hass‘s essay, “On Teaching Poetry,” contained in What Light Can Do, he references W. H. Auden‘s book of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, named after a phrase from Shakespeare‘s Sonnet 111: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the […]
We Are Pale Ramon
Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight. My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited […]
Consciousness of the Mountain
The poet Robert Hass has won the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. I have admired his work for some time. So when a good friend enthusiastically suggested that I explore some of his prose as well, I took her up on it. What Light Can Do: Essays […]
Orbilinia Redux
It is a bit like raising a child, having an exhibit: it takes a village to bring it into form. Orbilinia, a show of my recent paintings at the Woodbury Museum in Utah, was an (art) barn raising that needed the essential help of friends, family (I have the world’s best sisters) and an extraordinary […]
New Paintings at the Woodbury Museum
Bharry (54 x 72″), Indradah (48 x 84″) and Kadartha (60 x 84″), from a show of new paintings called Orbilinia I’m out of town again, this time to Utah for my show at the Woodbury Museum. I’ll be back home March 21. In the meantime, I’m including a bit about this show, the largest […]
The World Before Our Eyes
Milford Sound in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park The sum of our own positions on things we value determines the shape and texture of our social lives. This is why contemporary Americans acknowledge the things they find beautiful and talk about them all the time. Our commonality as citizens resides almost exclusively in the world […]
Attention
The view this weekend from my kitchen window Robert Hass begins his extraordinary collection, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, talking about the photography of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams: What the two artists have in common, besides a name, is a certain technical authority. The source of that […]