. . . and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important. –Wislawa Szymborska The idea of fragments and incompleteness was the topic of a blog post I wrote two weeks ago (Pieced Cloth) but it became the predominant leitmotif for life this past week. […]
Author: Deborah Barlow
Darkness, Then Some Light
Projections on BAM this week (Photo: Laughing Squid) My previous post, Paying Attention, was written just one day before the Boston Marathon Bombings. Paying attention? Indeed. Since the events on Monday I have been left feeling the deep sorrow that hung palpably over this city. That’s all any of us have been talking about. But […]
- Aesthetics
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Paying Attention
Ice patterns in winter: enchantment for free Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. –Susan Sontag Susan Sontag’s words are inspriring for anyone, not just […]
- Aesthetics
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Pieced Cloth
Fragment of cloth in the Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably, be undone. –Jacques Derrida, Positions Sometimes it isn’t just about the whole cloth. This past weekend I thought a lot about fragments, about the shards of incompleteness that are “continually, […]
- Art Making
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The Deeper Thing
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. […]
- Art Making
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Dreams of Eden
In Robert Hass‘s essay, “On Teaching Poetry,” contained in What Light Can Do, he references W. H. Auden‘s book of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, named after a phrase from Shakespeare‘s Sonnet 111: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the […]
We Are Pale Ramon
Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight. My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited […]
Consciousness of the Mountain
The poet Robert Hass has won the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. I have admired his work for some time. So when a good friend enthusiastically suggested that I explore some of his prose as well, I took her up on it. What Light Can Do: Essays […]
Orbilinia Redux
It is a bit like raising a child, having an exhibit: it takes a village to bring it into form. Orbilinia, a show of my recent paintings at the Woodbury Museum in Utah, was an (art) barn raising that needed the essential help of friends, family (I have the world’s best sisters) and an extraordinary […]
New Paintings at the Woodbury Museum
Bharry (54 x 72″), Indradah (48 x 84″) and Kadartha (60 x 84″), from a show of new paintings called Orbilinia I’m out of town again, this time to Utah for my show at the Woodbury Museum. I’ll be back home March 21. In the meantime, I’m including a bit about this show, the largest […]