When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the […]
Transcendence
Something of the Hermit
There is something of the hermit about my kind of art making. I spend long hours alone in my studio. Sometimes I spend the entire day there without lifting a brush, just looking. There’s lots and lots of just looking. There is also something of the hermet when we engage with grief or sorrow. I’m […]
Grateful for Whoever Comes
The Guesthouse This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may […]
A Thousand Brilliant Lies
I’m now in the last lap of preparing for my show that opens in Provincetown on July 20th. The last few weeks have been a kind of silence retreat, intensity without a spoken language component. And something does shift for me when visual language becomes the dominant modality for an extended period of time. When […]
Leaving it in the Unknown
Deliberately low-keyed art often resembles ruins, like neolithic rather than classical monuments, amalgams of past and future, remains of something “more,” vestiges of some unknown venture. The ghost of content continues to hover over the most obdurately abstract art. The more open, or ambiguous, the experience offered, the more the viewer is forced to depend […]
Wisdom from Hafiz
Tripping over Joy What is the difference Between your experience of Existence And that of a saint? The saint knows That the spiritual path Is a sublime chess game with God And that the Beloved Has just made such a Fantastic Move That the saint is now continually Tripping over Joy And Bursting out in […]
An Unexpected Time Out
Daily life came to a standstill for me this week while two beloved nephews went through long and arduous surgeries. One was planned, the other was not. Bless you both, Spencer and Ben, for making it through this part of your health crisis ordeal. During this difficult couple of days I have been in a […]
In the Throe of Wonder
I was introduced to the philosophical work of Jerome Miller a few years ago by my good friend Nicole Long. She studied with him in college and has been an emissary for his work ever since. I was signed up as a fan as soon as I stepped into his brilliant The Way of Suffering: […]
Richard Tuttle at Sperone Westwater
I caught the last day of Tuttle’s show at Sperone Westwater in New York last weekend. SW on West 13th Street is an open, multi-roomed white space. It could be daunting for someone whose works are often delicate and small. But Tuttle fills the galleries to the brim with intimately-sized wall pieces whose only similarity […]
Morphic Photography
Ferrofluid with permanent magnets underneath (Image courtesy of Felice Frankel) Here are two provocative examples of morphing developments in photography, especially in the age of digital (and signficantly, nearly cost free and unlimited) options. The first features Felice Frankel, author of Envisioning Science. Frankel has come a long way in bringing meangingful visual imaging into […]