I’m still on a Jenny Saville bender (see post below)…Here are a few passages from an interview with Saville conducted by Suzie Mackenzie of the Guardian. I found these passages provocative and insightful. She attributes the early “fascination with fat” to sitting on the floor watching her piano teacher. “From below she had these big, […]
Art Making
Jenny Saville in Boston
Saville uses her own body for most of her paintings This week we heard painter Jenny Saville speak at Boston University. Thirty minutes before the lecture was scheduled to begin at Morse Auditorium, 500 people were already in a line snaking down Commonwealth Avenue. My initial reaction was, how cool. How often do you find […]
- Art Making
- ...
The Thinking Gaze
The Frieze Fair, the UK’s biggest art fair, is currently open in London. A lot of the coverage of this high profile event has focused on how the global financial crisis will impact high roller art sales. That’s not the channel I’m watching, but a recent article in the Guardian by Sarah Thorton had something […]
The Long Arc
The ever clever and often contrarian Malcolm Gladwell has a piece in this week’s New Yorker that brings a refreshing perspective to the old saw about artistic genius residing primarily in the young. As I’ve gotten older I’ve paid increasingly more attention to the creative breakthroughs that happen after 50. And it may surprise you […]
The Curator’s Touch
Curator extraordinaire Kate Fleming with my daughter Kellin at a previous show at the Gallery at 38 Cameron A curator who knows her stuff is a great gift to an artist. Thank you to powerhouse Kate Fleming for pulling my work together in such an exemplary way for my show at 38 Cameron. She created […]
- Art Making
- ...
Bellying Up
Do not quit. You see, the most constant state of an artist is uncertainty. You must face confusion, self-questioning, dilemma. Only amateurs are confident . . . be prepared to live with the fear of failure all your life. –William Ormond Mitchell The toughest patch of uncertainty in this artist’s life is usually those few […]
Pamela Farrell on Revealing
Lacuna 73, by Pamela Farrell (image courtesy of Pamela Farrell) I recently made contact with Pamela Farrell, an artist, blogger and psychotherapist. Her rich and lush paintings, mostly done in encaustic, caught my eye immediately. And it was through Pam that I was first introduced to another worthwhile art blog, Color Chunks. Here is a […]
- Art Making
- ...
Barbara Weir: Grass Seed Dreaming
Barbara Weir is one of my favorite painters. As an aboriginal artist, she approaches her work with a different set of expectations and intentions than is typical in the Western artistic canon. Like other women from her community (including now-deceased Minnie Pwerle, Barbara’s mother, and international art star Emily Kame Kngwarreye), her work is closely […]
Third Acts
This morning I received an email from George Wingate, an artist and my first roommate in Manhattan oh so many years ago. He sent me an excerpt from a page torn from an old New Yorker that he found while cleaning his studio barn. Kenneth Tynan comments on the death of Janet Flanner in 1978 […]
- Art Making
- ...
Enough With the Words!
This short piece by Jonathan Jones (in The Guardian) captures rather succinctly many of the frustrations I have written about here in earlier posts. We are currently living through a period of inappropriate dependence on language to extol and explain what is often beyond language in the visual arts. Enough words! My voice joins others […]