Golagai 2, from a recent painting series exploring orbs and fluidity I arrived in Maine 10 days ago thinking a lot about two particular ideas culled from the book This Will Make You Smarter, a compilation of short but provocative answers to the Edge Question 2011: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” The […]
Aesthetics
On My Own Terms
Mark Rothko, at the Philips Gallery Jonathan Jones, that no nonsense, speak your truth art critic for the Guardian, reported on his visit to the new Tanks interactive art space at the Tate Modern: Six psychics sit at plain wooden booths as part of Fawcett’s contribution to the new Undercurrent series of live events at […]
- Aesthetics
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Useless Beauty
Who needs a peacock’s tail when you can build this for your lady love? The bower created by a male bowerbird. David Rothenberg is a jazz musician and a professor of philosophy. He has written a number of books, several of them focused on the interface between natural sounds (like the songs of birds and […]
- Aesthetics
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Entrance
Wasp’s nest: Entrances abound, but are hidden Not Writing A wasp rises to its papery nest under the eaves where it daubs at the gray shape, but seems unable to enter its own house. –Jane Kenyon This poem is so succinct and so artfully constructed. Haven’t we all had that daubing frustration of madly circling […]
- Aesthetics
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Truth, Beauty and Complexity
Contemplating the Spencer Finch installation at the RISD museum There is a long history in the modernist tradition of assuming the beautiful must be a lie and that ugliness must be evidence of truth. One can understand the origin of this idea in a reaction against ossified academic standards, and simultaneously a revulsion against the […]
Diebenkorn’s Fields of Silence
Ocean Park #54, by Richard Diebenkorn Most artists can remember those crucial moments that were turning points in their creative journey. These are events that are a more authentic tracking of a life than the customary biographical timeline; that marked up map of a well traveled terrain that is more personal, meaningful and accurate than […]
Art as Spiritual Remedy
Sandi Slone, Rasputin, 1984, oil and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 inches (Photo: Left Bank Art Blog) Carl Belz, Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has been posting his views on a variety of art topics for some time on Left Bank Art Blog. His most recent article, The Color […]
Honing in on Johns, Smee Style
The Dutch Wives, by Jasper Johns (on view at Harvard’s Sackler Museum) Sebastian Smee. How did Boston get so lucky? Having him at the Globe has made all the difference for me. No wonder my friends down under are still bemoaning his loss (Smee wrote for The Australian in Sydney before relocating here.) His recent […]
Developed Intuition
The Twins, Castor and Pollux, by Dorothea Rockburne I think the reason I paint, or that I do whatever I do, is to deal with (I don’t think of it as unconscious) subliminal knowledge. And I do think that one has knowledge about things that haven’t occured yet, and I try to work for those […]
Wheat and Chaff
The unstoppable nature of art making…from a recent installation in Chelsea Adam Davidson‘s piece in the Sunday Times magazine, How the Art Market Thrives on Inequality, explores that rarefied world of art auctions, blue chip galleries, U.H.N.W.I’s (Ultra High Net Worth Individuals) and sky high prices. In a sentence: “The art market, in other words, […]