Siva drinking World Poison, Nandalal Bose (Photo: National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi) I have been participating in an ongoing conversation with my friend Supratik Bose about the nature of creativity. Over dinner a while ago he told me he didn’t believe something could be deemed creative unless it demonstrated market value. Bose, trained […]
Hitting High Notes
After the St. Francis Dam Concrete mostly, fractured spans of handrails in their new rust, insistent brown rabbits. Downstream from the floodwave, now someone’s house, green lawn, the sun thick with its own agenda. More rabbits. Ghosts from here to the ocean though I know days aren’t made from holding back and watching bunnies. To […]
Expecting Beauty
Japanese calligraphy, beautiful in its inexplicable mystery (From the LACMA collection) *** Beauty is not a concept. …Beauty harmonizes consciousness from top to bottom. It is as organically vital as digestion. Beauty is, or ought to be, no big deal, though the lack of it is. Without regular events of beauty, we live estranged from […]
Unaffordable Art Fair
New York Studio Gallery (Photo: NYSG) My Facebook friend Agni Zotis sent me a notice for this event, the Unaffordable Art Fair. Here’s the copy from the event’s FB page: Several years ago, my friend took a collector to Julian Schnabel’s home in Montauk with $10,000 ready to spend right there and then. Mr. Schnabel […]
Catch All
A few notes and comments: From the web *** Norkae 1, mixed media on wood panel My work is being featured on Design Squared, a visually stunning blog written by Barbara Ashfield and David Hansen. Located in San Francisco, Ashfield and Hansen are both designers who possess fine sensibilities, and I am honored to be […]
- Architecture
- ...
Greatness, with Grace
Architect Jeanne Gang (Photo: Chicago Tribune) Paul Goldberger wrote about architect Jeanne Gang and her new shimmery addition to the Chicago skyline (a tower named Aqua, which is quite evocative isn’t it?) in a recent issue of the New Yorker. Goldberger is particularly impressed with the distinctive 82-story apartment building, citing its remarkable blend of […]
Left Coast Report
Back from California, visiting with both the Northern and Southern tribes. As always, the eye gets fed, and sometimes the finds are a surprise and unexpected. San Francisco Richard Diebenkorn: A gallery show at Paul Thiebaud Gallery consists of works that belongs to the late artist’s son Christopher. (In strange symmetry: Paul Thiebaud is artist […]
- Imagination
- ...
Unseated
My friend Kathryn walks her road in the fields of Cumbria I do not believe in creation, but in discovery, and I don’t believe in the seated artist but in the one who is walking the road. The imagination is a spiritual apparatus, a luminous explorer of the world it discovers. The imagination fixes and […]
Beautiful, Smart and Dangerous
Are you a hayfever sufferer? We’re a large tribe to be sure, some of us extremely burdened with this hypersensitivity to those tiny wind-born genetic delivery devices called pollen. But after watching Science Friday’s cheery video about the clever strategies employed by pollen grains to survive their difficult journey to wherever, I just can’t be […]
I Feel Your Pain
Desert landscape near Alice Springs, Australia I’ve gone through creative dry spells. Everybody does, but when it is happening to you, it is hard to not take it personally and forget that the condition is common. It is easier to talk about it when the episode is over. It’s a little like childbirth: Give me […]