My friend D at Joe Felso: Ruminations calls it a “find”: Coming across a blog quite by surprise that speaks to you. My most recent online discovery is lies like truth by Chloe Veltman, a writer and musician. Here’s her excellent blog credo: These days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. […]
Nature
Chemical Dance
It is a strange and esoteric chemistry that moves the inner dial of our moods. Who hasn’t taken a micro-second whipsaw ride from ebullience to hopelessness? For me, some days in the studio are all flow. On others, nothing goes right. If only I could clear a pattern headed in the wrong direction as easily […]
Waiting for the Crack
Spring Thaw in South Hadley Old snows locked under glass by last night’s ice storm left curatorial Winter, in whose hands alone we’d hope to find the keys, jangling them in the trees—. not merely in these pine needles by the fistful gloved in crystal, but, from their boughs, the self- invented digits of icicles […]
The Nature of True North
I’ve written about Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press, on this blog previously. While I was visiting CPP in San Francisco, I was introduced to The North Pole, Brown’s book about her adventure on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker in 2002. With no coffee table aspirations, this paperback is simply and elegantly designed, interleafing Brown’s […]
The Many Worlds View
I’m off to New York for a few days. I want to see the Mannerist drawing show at the Morgan Library, most particularly out of respect for my daughter Kellin who is a Mannerista fanatic now that she is living in Florence. (To read an excerpt from the New York Times review of this show, […]
Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming
Here’s a ray of hope on the Spiral Jetty preservation front. This article by Patty Henetz appeared on February 21 in The Salt Lake Tribune (and presents a much more hopeful view than a similar piece that ran in the other Salt Lake paper, The Deseret News.) Artists outraged at the possibility of oil drilling […]
Humility, Nature’s Way
Brookline Massachusetts, December 14th View from my front door Yesterday was the first snowstorm of this winter season. I love the quality of the light, the way the sound of a city changes, the disruption of life, the patterns of tires and feet, the way a neighborhood becomes unfamiliar and redefined, how everything is conjoined […]
Map Lust
Ancient Mississippi courses For those of you who fell in love with BibliOdyssey, here’s another site to delight your mind and your eye. Strange maps is chock full of images that provoke, delight, entice, perplex. Maps must be on the mind since I found this site quite by accident just hours after reading about two […]
Nature, Seeing, Thinking
A few koan-like insights on art, nature, seeing and thinking: Art is not what we see; it is in the spaces between. –Marcel Duchamp . . Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, […]
Giving Voice
Is there some trace of the land’s past still resident? Although songlines are not part of our Western cultural history, the concept of stories preserved in a particular landscape has a powerful appeal. Here in New England we often joke about the tenacity of our Puritan ancestors whose energy still seems to linger in spite […]