I received this message recently from Karen Fitzgerald, a remarkable artist and dear friend: I’m no longer making work for the art world. I’m making it for the world. The art world can go hunker down in its lumpy lodge, as can the fame makers, the fame industry. My back is turned. That may be […]
Art
The Voice That Comes in Through the Window
You can’t start writing until you know what you’re doing, and you don’t know what you’re doing until you start writing. I still have to resist the false intuition that I need to know as much as possible in advance. The essential thing is to know as little as possible. Ideally, when things fall out […]
Enough for Dreaming: Gay Patterson
This is a Preamble: The Then and The Now Prior to the 20th century, letters to friends and family frequently included words as well as sketches. On the road without a camera, travelers used the best technology at the time—pen and paper. A hand written letter was personal, intimate, singular and often quite beautiful. Our […]
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Yearnings
A hillside in Tuscany I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t have yearnings. I was raised in a culture that placed high value on the practical and the useful, but that didn’t quiet the longings that took up lodging just below the surface of my life. I was three years old, […]
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, […]
Hay Tiempo
Graciela Iturbide was a young mother when she lost her six year old daughter. It was shortly after that tragic loss that she turned to photography, eventually studying with Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Mexico’s most famous photographer. Bravo took her under his wing. His work was determinedly not picturesque, political or stereotypical, common fare in mid-20th […]
Dragons, Dalmatians and Dancing Gorillas
Hilma af Klint, from A Work on Flowers, Mosses and Lichen (© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk/Photo: Moderna Museet, Albin Dahlström) And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and […]
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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 […]
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Irrefutable Presence: Picasso and the Primordial
Some ideas come in tangles, the kind that don’t disengage by applying analysis and logic. One of those is ethnocentrism in art. Brewing under the surface for some time, that particular net of knotted issues came into high definition in 1984 when Thomas McEvilley mounted his vociferous attack at the MOMA for its show, “Primitivism […]