De Kooning’s “Weekend at Mr. and Mrs. Krisher,” lithograph, 1970 _______________ More on De Kooning, Part 2 Another issue that emerged from spending the day at the De Kooning exhibit is a theme that I have written about here before: epic vs lyric; working large vs working small; the proclivity to grandiosity in contrast to […]
De Kooningingly Up and Down
Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louise Point, 1963 Pirate, 1981 With so many thoughtful and well written reviews already available of the MOMA’s blockbuster retrospective of De Kooning, it is easy to give myself permission to take a more personal jaunt through the seven decades’ worth of work on display. John Elderfield‘s curatorial mastery is in […]
Up Close and Personal
Looking down from the top balcony onto the Sum of Days installation by Carlito Carvalhosa in the MOMA. It is just too big and sensual to not pay attention and be delighted at some level. I just returned from five days in New York and Philadelphia. This was a working and a viewing trip. Since […]
E) All of the Above
Dewey Square in Boston on October 15 On the topic of art and political activism (discussed in my earlier post here): Susana Viola Jacobson, consummate artist and critic, left the following response to that piece. Her thoughts were too good to not share. Very thoughtful piece. I wrestled with this divide for years and finally […]
- Art/Politics
- ...
Both/And
October 15 march and protest in Boston Aligning the work you do with the passions of your heart is not a given. My partner Dave worked for decades before he finally found a way to integrate his professional life with his personal desire to make the world a better place. (His organization, ReachScale, creates public/private […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Necessary Wildness
Wasatch Mountains in Utah (October 2011) Writing about writing poetry: It soothes my soul the way reading scriptures comforts believers. In an earlier post I referenced Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield (here), an inspiring and thoughtful meditation on how poetry comes into being. And now I have another to recommend: […]
Taking a Break
The street where my mother grew up in Layton Utah, not far from the Great Salt Lake I’m out of town for a few days, off to Utah for a family wedding. I’ll be back to Slow Muse on October 12.
The Best Possible World, Again and Again
Dr. Pangloss and Candide, from the production playing at the Huntington Theater Writing and thinking about T. S. Eliot (see my previous post) has engaged me in thoughts about what is timeless and why certain works of art just keep speaking to generation after generation. It is an esoteric chemistry, what must come together for […]
- literature
- ...
They Might Be Giants
T. S. Eliot Harold Bloom first wrote about his now famous theory of the anxiety of influence in the early 1970’s while I was in college. Bloom focused on poetry and traced the complex challenge facing a poet in search of his or her own unique voice while being inspired—and intimidated—by a powerful precursor. The […]
- Art Making
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Scaling Solitude
The lone wise one, from the caves at Ajanta, India I increasingly apply a sliding scale to assess most situations. It is one way of skirting the tendency in contemporary dialogue to Manichaean, black and white with nothing in between, either/or thinking. This is similar to how Asperger’s Syndrome is now being evaluated—you can have […]