Francis Picabia in his studio If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts. Our heads are round so that our thinking can change directions. –Francis Picabia Picabia (1879-1953) had a life that included a number of shirt changes. He lived in Paris at a point in time […]
Artist wisdom
Diebenkorn in New Mexico
If you are a Diebenkorn fan (as I am,) you will be dazzled by the new catalog for a show currently on view at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico (though September 9, 2007.) The show features work from Diebenkorn’s two and a half year residence in Albuquerque in the early 1950s, […]
Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad
Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly […]
The Rag and Bone Shop
In the spirit of “everything is autobiographical,” I found a conversation (in the Telegraph) with architect Frank Gehry and filmmaker Sydney Pollack that is compelling in its honesty and reassuring in a “misery loves company” sort of way. When asked if things got easier as they got older, here are their responses: SP: It doesn’t […]
The Glass House Opens
Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Caanan, Connecticut I’m still thinking a lot about buildings and designs for living after reading Alain de Botton’s book (see yesterday’s posting below.) An article in the New York Times today highlights a legendary building, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, which will be open to the public later this month. […]
Take Me With You, Sigmar
Carol Vogel’s written and video reports (New York Times) on Sigmar Polke’s preparations for the upcoming Biennale have me longing, deeply longing, to see this new body of work, “The Axis of Time.” (One painting from that series is posted on Slow Painting.) Vogel visited him in his Cologne atelier and feasted on a studio […]
Lynn Davis
Many of you know that in addition to writing this blog, I maintain another blog called Slow Painting that filters through websites, publications and blogs for compelling excerpts. Slow Painting is a customized assemblage of art-related news, ideas and concepts as defined by my sensibilities. Every so often a Slow Painting find is so provocative […]
Guidelines for Creating
One of my favorite bloggers posted the rules he gives to his writing students. These excellent guidelines for writers (and readers) are applicable as well to those of us who work in the visual arts. I have extracted from his posting below, but you can read the entire piece on his blog, Joe Felso: Ruminations. […]
Certainty vs Complexity
I can’t move on, not just yet…Still thinking about Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, Coast of Utopia, and about Isaiah Berlin’s insightful Russian Thinkers, the book that launched Stoppard’s interest in writing about this historical period in the first place. Here is another quote from Aileen Kelly’s excellent introduction to Berlin’s book, a quote that is so […]
The Longing for Calm Repose
In this contemporary technological world, we have all become travelers. We struggle with teachings that have slipped into disarray, searching for guideposts that are no longer there, markers that have faded from disuse, signs that no longer fulfill their function. We desperately, secretly, or even unconsciously, long for the image of calm repose, wisdom, and […]