Alain de Botton is a witty, well honed writer (his books include How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Art of Travel) so settling into an uninterrupted read of his most recent book, The Architecture of Happiness, was something to look forward to. De Botton is not an architect or an art critic per […]
Beauty
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 […]
What Spring Does with the Cherry Trees
After seeing yesterday’s posting of the Eastern Redbud in full rapture, my friend Sally Reed reminded me of this exquisite and sensual poem by Neruda: Every Day You Play Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more than this white […]
Beyond
Michael Benson is a filmmaker whose spent hours parsing through the thousands of black & white and color images taken by NASA space probes and landers. In his book Beyond: Visions of Interplanetary Probes, he has painstakingly pieced images together to create a view of space that takes my breath away. Looking at the images […]
In the Tangents
I have often used the phrase, “somewhere between what is hidden and what is seen” as a way to describe what pulls me in and inspires. So I was enchanted when a young Irish student visiting a show of my work in West County Cork turned to me and said, “I think I know what […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell’s work straddles the line between abstract expressionism and landscape more than almost anyone else. Her paintings, many of them quite large, create a sense of place of their own while referencing our collective sense of land and the space surrounding us. On a personal level, Mitchell–in spite of all the horrific stories of […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park
Diebenkorn has been a flagship artist for me. I saw the first showing of his Ocean Park series while I was still in college, and seeing those luminous paintings was a turning point in my aesthetic education. I have never lost interest in this work, and every time I find one hanging in a museum–they […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Agnes Martin
My work is non-objective like that of the Abstract Expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my painting, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape, so I never protest when they say my work is like landscape. But it’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that […]
Weighing in on Beauty, part 2
A few more insights on beauty… To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. Santayana When I think of Art, I think of Beauty. Beauty is the mystery of Life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness […]
Weighing in on Beauty
The whole idea of beauty was not embarrassing to me, as it was for a lot of people. Its one of the things that was encouraging about Rothko, that he didn’t seem to be embarrassed about it, either. Brice Marden The best book on the subject of beauty is still Uncontrollable Beauty, edited by Bill […]