Embracing the Ephemeral

Still in tact: The view of the Pacific from UCSC’s Porter College (AKA to some of us as College Five) “Material Ephemera” at UC Santa Cruz Another view Long time friend Alicia Falsetto at the artist reception on Saturday Things, people, ideas—they operate with a certain kind of circularity. That coming round again has becomes […]

Dingy-Friendly

“Cold Mountain Studies 10” (1988-90) by Bruce Marden Having just gone through a stack of recent art periodicals—Modern Painter, Art on Paper, Art Papers, Art Forum—I can categorically say that the number of times I felt connected to (compelled by? curious about? impressed with?) the art being written about or advertised is at a lifetime […]

Tang Dynasty Wisdom

Cold Mountain 3, by Brice Marden Here’s a thoughtful and provoking passage from one of my favorite blogs, Joe Felso: Ruminations. He references Han-shan, the same poet who inspired Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain series of paintings, who feels similar in spirit to my earlier posting on Master Linji, also from the Tang Dynasty: I wonder […]

Pondering Marden’s Nebraska

Marden cuts the cord that still bound an artist like Jasper Johns to the literary underpinnings of nineteenth-century symbolism, without simultaneously destroying art’s ability to evoke natural forms. He jettisons story, myth, and illusion, and with them representation, composition, and spatial depth. What we are left with is paint, canvas, scale, shape, and brush stroke—but […]