Richard III, now on the Boston Common (All photos: Commonwealth Shakespeare Company) Storytelling fascinates me. It is considered primal to the human condition. My guess is that you, like me, are soothed—and intrigued—when you hear the words, “Let me tell you a story.” Because I am not a particularly good storyteller—my preferred form of personal […]
Author: deborahbarlow
Progress!
Studio floor, South Boston The packing up of my studio of 22 years is nearly done, and I am almost ready for the move to Waltham in September. As disorienting as it has been to lose a space I loved and could ride to on my bike (a few pictures of it before it was […]
Begin Again
Thank you to so many friends who have been steadily at my side through this protracted and difficult passage, one that I am still struggling through. (A bit more about my condition can be found here.) I had a second neurosurgical procedure in June and was told that my eyes will need another six months […]
Update
Spring comes to Brookline It has been three months since I last posted on Slow Muse. I had envisioned that I would return to writing once I could talk about my current condition in the past tense. But given frequent inquiries of “Where are you?” and a timeline for recovery that is unknown, I am […]
However You Get There
Philip Guston, Painter III, 1963. Photo: Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth Robert Benchley‘s infamous statement, There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who divide the world into two groups, and those who don’t, also speaks to the human proclivity to figure things out and be right. We all strive to make sense […]
From What You Know to What You Don’t
Notched disk, at the Freer Museum, Washington DC. China, probably Shandong province, late Neolithic period, 2500 BCE. The purpose of this intriguing object has never been established. Not knowing, uncertainty, the pathless path, that which lives outside of language—these are themes that appear with determined insistence throughout the thousands of short essays I have posted […]
Intuition: The Photo Version
As insistent as I have been that this amazing exhibit, Intuition (which ends today after a six month run at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice) cannot be reasonably captured in either words or images, I can’t stop trying to share some traces of its magic. There are a lot of images included here. This is a […]
Intuition and the Irrational Elsewhere
The first gallery of Intuition, at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Statue-Menhirs from Italy and France (3rd century BC) coupled with “Versus Medici” by Jean-Michel Basquiat Ali Smith, author of the remarkable novel How to Be Both, tells a story about how that book came to be. Leafing through a copy of Frieze magazine, she […]
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Hands that See and Eyes that Touch
Belkis Ayón, collograph (detail,) from the show, NKAME: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón, at El Museo Barrio, New York We live in an ocularcentric culture, one that gives sight precedence over all over sensory stimuli. In one of my all time favorite books, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Juhani […]
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The Just Out of View
Seen on a table in a gallery in Charleston, South Carolina The “just out of view” has intrigued me for a long time. My artistic journey began many years ago with a particular fascination for exploring that domain between what is hidden and what is seen: nature’s nooks and crannies, the microscopic and macroscopic, the […]