Diana Al-Hadid, at Burlington City Arts, Burlington Vermont Artists have to find a way to pull the audience in, for only when people come to understand that within a painting or a sculpture they can find a time that is outside of time will they want to keep looking. . Jed Perl . My experience […]
Art/Spiritual
Roasted Chestnuts and Persimmons
From the Guardian series, by Budd Hopkins It Was Like This: You Were Happy It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not. It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not. At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. […]
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Being Present
Patsy Rodenburg Patsy Rodenburg, acting coach extraordinare and author of a number of books including one of my favorites, The Second Circle, has a six minute video posted on YouTube. This short piece could be viewed daily, a quick reminder of how to constellate your day. Her message is simple: Show up. Be present. Be […]
The Art Healer
Melamid in front of his “Art Healing Ministry” An article from the New York Times provocatively titled Can a Picasso Cure You?, went viral as soon as it was published. References to it were appearing repeatedly on Facebook and Twitter all day. First of all, the title is just too delicious to not stop and […]
Backs to the World
Agnes Martin. Her wisdom and point of view has stepped in and shifted my thinking many times over the years. This week I happened upon an interview with her, and it was like a Heimlich maneuver dislodging a blockage. She is so unabashedly mystical. Some say that she didn’t read a newspaper for the last […]
- Art/Spiritual
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Enchantment Becoming Thing
Seeking enchantment—here, there, everywhere…The Great Haul, a site-specific installation by Anna Hepler at the Portland Museum of Art. The light becomes crystalline and kaleidoscopic through the layered netting of meshed plastic. _____ We have an innate capacity for remembering and imagining places. Perception, memory and imagination are in constant interaction; the domain of presence fuses […]
Burchfield on My Mind
Charles Burchfield, Gateway to September Tanglewood in Winter Autumnal Fantasy (This painting was not included in the original Hammer exhibit but was available for inclusion in the Whitney show) How easy it is to think you know an artist’s work. I’ve seen Charles Burchfield paintings all of my life, but now I know that really […]
All Art Worthy of the Name
Thanks to friend and artist George Wingate for sending me to Jed Perl’s latest essay in The New Republic, “The Spiritual in Art”. Focusing primarily on the works of George Rouault and Marc Chagall (not two of my favorites BTW) Perl brings some salient issues to the fore, raising questions that concern a variety of […]
Meaning and Presence
I found an article in The Independent yesterday that I posted on my filter blog Slow Painting. It has dominated my thinking all day. In a singularly succinct manner, it captures a core set of issues that are at the center of my disaffection with a number of trends in contemporary art. These are some […]
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Take Me There
The work of Hiroshi Sugimoto cannot be comprehended without having been experienced in the flesh. Every artist believes this about their work, but in some circumstances it goes beyond optimal and moves into the imperative. So it is with Sugimoto’s photographs. (I have included this reproduction as an indicator but not the thing itself.) The […]