Fallow fields near the Great Salt Lake in Layton Utah Friend and artist Kitty Bancroft stopped in Boston on her way to Philadelphia yesterday, and we had a few moments to share where things are in our private tinkering spaces called art making. I think of conversations like these as reminiscent of ones I had […]
Science
Mind and Eye
If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind. Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature What a provocative quote from the philosophical giant himself, and one that I have been pondering all day after spending some time on Mind Lab, a beautifully constructed site […]
Vacation as Metaphor
View of the beach in San Francisco, America’s favorite vacation city For anyone who loves a journey and has an appetite for adventure, travel is as essential for pleasure as a working shower, delicious food and a good pair of walking shoes. An article in the Boston Globe by Drake Bennett applies a little more […]
Going with Gist Rather than Speed
It’s inevitable. You just can’t ignore the fact that you used to run more effortlessly. That you used to acquire new information rapidly. That new data went into a file that was always open (as opposed to the vague middle-age hope that you can get “same day service” on a search for something you know […]
Catch All
A few notes and comments: From the web *** Norkae 1, mixed media on wood panel My work is being featured on Design Squared, a visually stunning blog written by Barbara Ashfield and David Hansen. Located in San Francisco, Ashfield and Hansen are both designers who possess fine sensibilities, and I am honored to be […]
Beautiful, Smart and Dangerous
Are you a hayfever sufferer? We’re a large tribe to be sure, some of us extremely burdened with this hypersensitivity to those tiny wind-born genetic delivery devices called pollen. But after watching Science Friday’s cheery video about the clever strategies employed by pollen grains to survive their difficult journey to wherever, I just can’t be […]
Listening Between the Silences
Crop circle, 2009 Cocktail party show stoppers, of which there are many, include any mention of a proof for the existence of god, the possibility of aliens in our realm and the supernatural creation of crop circles. Bring up any of these topics and the air in the conversation deflates instantly. It is the spoken […]
Choice and Meaning
Remember the jam experiment? Actually it was the work of Sheena Iyengar, a psychologist who convinced a luxury food store in Menlo Park to test customer responses to jam samples. Sometimes there were 6 choices, other times 24. What Iyengar discovered was that lots of options drew more shoppers over to the display, but after […]
Volcano Art
Munch’s The Scream More on the Iceland volcano, from an op ed piece in the New York Times by Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester compares our current struggles with a volcanic ash plume over Europe with the 1883 eruption on the island of Krakatoa between Java and Sumatra. More […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Wood, Water and Meaning
Studio view, South Boston Art making is, for me, a zone of inchoate nonlinearity, one that does not have the Wallace Stevensish delineations* to mark direction or any measure of “progress” (a word that, these days in particular, seems to always need to wear a pair of quotes.) Mostly I am thankful for having worked […]