Installation view Show announcement (Photos: Fleisher/Ollman Gallery) I spent the weekend in and near Philadelphia, a city I have always enjoyed visiting*. It has much to recommend it—a great museum, proximity to the Barnes Foundation (soon to be housed within its own city limits, a fraught topic I’d rather not get in to at this […]
- Art
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E) All of the Above
“Everything I like about the art experience” is best expressed by this image of Dave basking in the Diebenkorns at Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center *** The Daily Beast writing about the Armory Show currently running in New York: A Sam’s Club for Art? Think of everything you like about the art experience: That it […]
Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
Petroglyph at Boca Negra Canyon, Petroglyph National Monument, Albuquerque New Mexico Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on […]
White, Plus Other Colors
Dar al Islam mosque, Abiquiu (New Mexico) The White Place, Abiquiu Rancho de Taos Santa Fe in February: White light. Radiant. Ubiquitous. Outside. Inside. Writ large. Writ small. Bowls in sunlight, Santa Fe (Jill Fineberg’s home) Stonecutters’ glass, Abiquiu Beard of a mask (at Jill’s) Last Friday night was the opening of my solo show […]
Taking a Break
Top: Hong Kong; Bottom: Chimayo New Mexico I am on the road for a few weeks, first in Hong Kong and then to Santa Fe for the opening of my show at Zane Bennett Gallery on February 25. I will return to Slow Muse on March 2.
A Landscape of One’s Own
The landscape in Carson, New Mexico Landscape And Soul Though we should not speak about the soul, that is, about things we don’t know, I’m sure mine sleeps the day long, waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake, preferably by joy, but sadness also comes by surprise, and the soul sings its songs. And because […]
- Aesthetics
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Slow Looking, Boredom and Contemporary Art
Frank Auerbach, Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm, private collection Over the fall months James Elkins, the prodigiously prolific writer about art, art history, criticism and art appreciation, wrote a series of pieces for the Huffington Post. (I wrote about his series here.) One of those articles as a title—Are Artists Bored By Their Work?—that is […]
Maureen Doallas: Neruda’s Memoirs
Ode to Compassion When you are old, re-spin me your beginnings from their Greek and Irish coordinates, unplot straight lines of ancient made-up histories, upend the stakes of claims in bindings of your mother’s mother’s mother’s womb cut and spilling life into care. When you are grey, recall me to the look of the father […]
Forms Change
Robert Plant I call it “squinting”—you will have your own term. You’ve chosen a favorite musician, probably in your teen years, and the relationship grows through awkward phases…Along the way, you find yourself squinting to keep seeing what made you fall in love…In pop music, which is a worse deal for the aging than painting […]
Bucky for the Ages
R. Buckminster Fuller Content-rich theater is hard to do. Tom Stoppard is probably our most exemplary contemporary playwright of that genre. In so many of his plays, ideas and intellectual constructs take on theatrical forms, functioning almost as characters in the story. The Stoppard experience is deeply layered and yet neither didactic nor instructional. Which […]