Waltham Open Studios, held on the first weekend in November, is happening this weekend. This is the 48th (I know, hard to believe) year it has been held. My studio is in Building 18, on the third floor. I hope you can stop by.
Art
Do What You Do, and Do it Well
Heather Cox Richardson’s rise to prominence is an “if you build it, they will come” story. The Boston College history professor (with a specialty in 19th century America) started posting informed political coverage on social media five years ago. Carefully written and loaded with relevant historical context, these dispatches were so well received that she […]
The Infinity of Aesthetics
“Public opinion doesn’t usually move in staccato bursts,” writes Bill McKibben. “Culture usually shifts gradually—painfully gradually for those of us who want change. But, occasionally, attitudes swing quite suddenly, as if pressure had been silently building up behind a dam until it burst.” Consider for a moment how many build ups are bursting on this […]
Nozkowski, Adieu
Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (9-32), 2014. Oil on linen on panel, 22 x 28 inches. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York Many people hold Tom Nozkowski up as a rare exemplar of the artist who was uncompromisingly devoted to his work but was also able to achieve success in his career. He was an artist’s artist, […]
- 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
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The Facts and the Truth: Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery
Benefits Supervisor (“Big Sue”) Resting “There are facts,” the painter Lucian Freud once said, “and there is the truth.” The current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London follows less than a year after Freud’s death at 88. The show is a stark reminder that while Freud dealt with the facts of our all-too-human […]
- Antiquities
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History in a Box
A shamsa (literal meaning, “sun”) from the Met’s new Islamic Art wing One of my favorite books right now is Between Artists: Twelve Contemporary American Artists Interview Twelve Contemporary American Artists. I have so much more to say about this book, and hopefully I will write about it in more detail later on. But right […]
- Aesthetics
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Unchained
Many of you have undoubtedly heard about the Chain Letter Show. The idea was a robust one—using the existing network of artists, create an international, artist-curated, pop up event at several locations around the world all at the same time. Ten artists were asked, and then they asked ten more, who then asked ten more. […]
- Art
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E) All of the Above
“Everything I like about the art experience” is best expressed by this image of Dave basking in the Diebenkorns at Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center *** The Daily Beast writing about the Armory Show currently running in New York: A Sam’s Club for Art? Think of everything you like about the art experience: That it […]
A Life of Loving Cézanne
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. –Paul Cézanne January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906 A birthday commemoration to an artist whose work just keeps speaking to me. This love affair started when I was a teenager, and it […]