George Wingate is a life long friend and an artist whose explorations have always been engagingly 360. His work has a staggering range. Most recently he has been mastering the weekend only installation: transforming empty storefronts, exhibit spaces or even the homes of friends. This past weekend George expanded that pop up skill set to […]
Nature
- Land/earth
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Attention Flow
Sunrise over New York City as seen from the West Side In Alexandra Horowitz‘s new book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, she explores the blocks around her home in New York City in the company of people with a particular expertise—an artist, a geologist, a self-professed “type nerd”, a field naturalist/insect advocate (among […]
The World Before Our Eyes
Milford Sound in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park The sum of our own positions on things we value determines the shape and texture of our social lives. This is why contemporary Americans acknowledge the things they find beautiful and talk about them all the time. Our commonality as citizens resides almost exclusively in the world […]
- Aesthetics
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Richter by the Sea
I just returned from a week in the Outer Banks with my three sisters. Beautiful and remote, that slim slice of land felt even more so with whole sections of the road washed out from Hurricane Sandy and only traversable via 4 wheel drive. Later in the week the road was closed down altogether due […]
- Aesthetics
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Repair and Revere
Hurricane Sandy (Photo: NASA via Getty Images) Storms, especially the ones as enormous as Sandy, move me to sober. Serious circumspection seems appropriate as my friends in New York and Virginia get dropped from the grid and swamped with water. But it is also a humbling reminder that we can never step out of the […]
- Aesthetics
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Output/Yield Ratios
Crooked timber and all that jazz Kingsley Amis, from his review of Don DeLillo‘s latest book in the New Yorker: When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less…I […]
In Search of the Minor Exceptions
Only one tree in my Brookline neighborhood is hosting a playful colony of shell-like parasols My last post elicited several provocative comments and instigated a number of compelling conversations over the last few days. As a result I have continued to sit with several of ideas presented in The Tree, by John Fowles. It is […]
- Aesthetics
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At Home in the Wild
A favorite small book, The Tree by the novelist John Fowles, is just the right place to turn for wisdom on this last day of the year. A memoir and a meditation on human and natural notions of control, The Tree can be read again and again. W. S. Merwin claims that he has carried […]
White, Plus Other Colors
Dar al Islam mosque, Abiquiu (New Mexico) The White Place, Abiquiu Rancho de Taos Santa Fe in February: White light. Radiant. Ubiquitous. Outside. Inside. Writ large. Writ small. Bowls in sunlight, Santa Fe (Jill Fineberg’s home) Stonecutters’ glass, Abiquiu Beard of a mask (at Jill’s) Last Friday night was the opening of my solo show […]
Eyjafjallajökull the Magnificent
Black rivers of meltwater mixed with volcanic ash, spreading from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, Icelandic Coast Guard) A seven-mile-high (11-kilometer-high) cloud of steam, smoke, and ash billows from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Thursday (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, Icelandic Coast Guard) Steam explodes from a glacier-topped Iceland volcano (Photograph courtesy Árni Sæberg, […]