I’m back from Mexico, but I can still feel the intense white light that burnishes the back of your eyes after just a few hours in that unabashed sunlight. Baja California Sur is a glorious combination of two large arc themes, operatic in a visual sort of way. On one hand you are never far […]
Transcendence
Take Me With You, Sigmar
Carol Vogel’s written and video reports (New York Times) on Sigmar Polke’s preparations for the upcoming Biennale have me longing, deeply longing, to see this new body of work, “The Axis of Time.” (One painting from that series is posted on Slow Painting.) Vogel visited him in his Cologne atelier and feasted on a studio […]
Joseph Cornell
Cornell could take you into the universe in the space of a thimble. Robert Lehrman, Cornell collector An extensive Joseph Cornell retrospective is currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts. Seeing the range, depth and subtlety of his work left me speechless. I spent hours in the show but will have […]
Lynn Davis
Many of you know that in addition to writing this blog, I maintain another blog called Slow Painting that filters through websites, publications and blogs for compelling excerpts. Slow Painting is a customized assemblage of art-related news, ideas and concepts as defined by my sensibilities. Every so often a Slow Painting find is so provocative […]
Indra’s Net at 88th and Fifth
Alyson Shotz, The Shape of Space, 2004. Cut plastic Fresnel lens sheets and staples. Highlight from a recent visit to the Guggenheim Museum: In the lobby, the first thing you see is a beguiling wall of light which turns out to be Fresnel lenses stapled together. I sat with and walked around this curtain of […]
Stoppard Marathons, Theatrical Extremes and Other Joys
So much good commentary is available online about Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, Coast of Utopia, so I won’t spend time here rehashing the larger context of the play and its subject matter. Instead I’ll be blatantly bloggish and personal and just say that I was in an altered state through the entire 12 hour marathon. (Still […]
From the Dreaming, It Became Real
One of the leading anthropological experts on Aboriginal art and culture is Fred R. Myers. His 2002 book, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, explores the Western Desert Aboriginal painting movement through a lens that is more culture based than visual or aesthetic. Myers, a Professor of Anthropology at NYU, spent time […]
Beyond
Michael Benson is a filmmaker whose spent hours parsing through the thousands of black & white and color images taken by NASA space probes and landers. In his book Beyond: Visions of Interplanetary Probes, he has painstakingly pieced images together to create a view of space that takes my breath away. Looking at the images […]
Ahmad Shamlu: This Crow
I Am Still Thinking About This Crow I am still thinking about this crow that with its pair of black scissors— by two brisk swishing sounds— cut an aslant arc on the matte paper of the sky over the toasted wheat farms of the Yush valley; I am still thinking about this crow that facing […]
Mark Strand: A Suite of Appearances
A Suite of Appearances In another time, we will want to know how the earth looked Then, and were people the way we are now. In another time, The records they left will convince us that we are unchanged And could be at ease in the past, and not alone in the present. And we […]