Alfred Kazin (Arnold Newman/Getty Images) I’ve only read a few essays by the heralded critic Alfred Kazin, but what I have read I found brilliant. A new biography of Alfred Kazin (by Richard M. Cook) was reviewed by Brian Morton in the Sunday New York Times. Some memorable gems are worth highlighting: A representative essay […]
Language
More From Seamus
Like an old friend who drops in and ends up staying a few days, Seamus Heaney has been on my mind ever since I read those few lines I posted yesterday. Here’s a short poem by him that delights, enchants, creates longing (the good kind.) Song A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road […]
Timorous or Bold
I found a passage from a poem by Seamus Heaney, quite by chance. It stopped me in my tracks: ”The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.” Just coming out of a long period of living life beneath the surface of things, those words cut through to the bone. So […]
Coming Up for Air
I’ve been burrowed in my studio for several days, getting work ready for an upcoming show in San Francisco. For the first time in nine years there is no heat in my studio on weekends, so I have had balance and moderation forced on my otherwise excessive self. I’ve missed the introspection and insight that […]
Tang Dynasty Wisdom
Cold Mountain 3, by Brice Marden Here’s a thoughtful and provoking passage from one of my favorite blogs, Joe Felso: Ruminations. He references Han-shan, the same poet who inspired Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain series of paintings, who feels similar in spirit to my earlier posting on Master Linji, also from the Tang Dynasty: I wonder […]
Zero-Gravity Thinking
Innovation. It is the subject of IBM ads that air during football games as well as a constant issue for anyone who is a maker of poems, paintings, music, theatre. A recent article in the New York Times captured some of the occupational hazards encountered by those who have to deal daily with what does […]
Authenticity and its Discontents
In responding to my previous post about theory and art making, Elatia Harris left a comment that is so full of potent issues I felt it needed to be brought forward, into the headlights. She touches on issues that many visual artists (including myself) mull over, struggle with and voice frustration about. I don’t necessarily […]
Theory Free…Not
Sun through the gazebo in Skaneateles I drove to Syracuse last weekend to retrieve my daughter who just completed her first semester of graduate school. Her plan for recovering from a string of all nighters reading Leonardo’s notebooks and researching the driving force behind the Maniera style was to spend the night in Skaneateles, one […]