18th century lacquer work from Quianlong Garden Currently at the Peabody Essex Museum: The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City, on view through January 9 before it moves to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This collection of artifacts, never before seen by the public, is taken from a sanctuary built in the […]
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Irony and Meaning
Barnett Newman I’ve been having a lot of discussions lately about irony, particularly its role in art. Many of these are conversations I have been having with parts of myself, but some of them are with friends and cotravelers. This interest was piqued a few weeks ago when a good friend with an exceptionally developed […]
Some Days That’s All You’ve Got
Ad for L. L. Bean, back in the day (1941) Photo: George Strock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and […]
Backs to the World
Agnes Martin. Her wisdom and point of view has stepped in and shifted my thinking many times over the years. This week I happened upon an interview with her, and it was like a Heimlich maneuver dislodging a blockage. She is so unabashedly mystical. Some say that she didn’t read a newspaper for the last […]
In Praise of Travel
“solvitur ambulando”: Walking alongside the Hemis monastery in Ladakh I’ve written many times here about my extreme reliance on travel to enrich and deepen the inner experience of life. As a painter with an expected sensitivity to changes in landscape and terrain, experiencing those radical shifts in venue is part of my ongoing creative process. […]
Marking our Passage
An unexpected gift on the Times Op-Ed page last Sunday, cohabiting with bleak post election columns by Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd: Six poems marking the end of daylight saving time. The work is all by blue chip poets—James Tate, Vijay Seshadri, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin as well as the two whose poems I […]
Brice, What’s Not to Love?
Installation view: Brice Marden at Matthew Marks Gallery Currently on view in New York: Brice Marden at Matthew Marks Gallery. The show includes large works and drawings, with a smaller exhibit of older pieces next door. The range of these bodies of work—the gestural and transparent fluidity of the later work in contrast to the […]
Neri Oxman and Materialecology
Ab Ex at the MOMA The works of Abstract Expressionists are on view on multiple floors at the MOMA right now. Worth the visit, but it wasn’t a heart stopper for me. It felt more like the obligatory pilgrimage devout Catholics make to the Vatican out of respect rather than passion. My MOMA moments of […]
Hipsterdom and the Spiritual Middle Finger
The ever present spectre of urban expression…a wall surface in Brooklyn Most compelling article I’ve read in a while: What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, by the editors of n+1. The history of hipsterdom is rich and nuanced, and its current “apotheosis” is told with a superb eye for detail and those often subtle […]
What’s Too Small
Evenesse 2, 25 x 55″ Sweet Darkness You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive […]