The light in San Francisco in January can be incomprehensibly warm and golden. My winter-lashed New England self was basking in its late afternoon glow as I sat with a friend in a lush Marina garden. Bliss. Then, in an instant, my eyesight went skiwampus. That was 2018. After a lot of medical head scratching, […]
Wisdom
A Portal and a Hole
Photo: Garry Knight I don’t start my day thinking, “I need some words to lift my spirits and help me see the circumstances of life differently.” After all, with just about everyone sequestered inside and living through their own experience of quarantine, opinions about how to live are plentiful. It is no surprise we are […]
Begin Again
Thank you to so many friends who have been steadily at my side through this protracted and difficult passage, one that I am still struggling through. (A bit more about my condition can be found here.) I had a second neurosurgical procedure in June and was told that my eyes will need another six months […]
Finding the Forgotten Note
Pottery by Lucie Rie; painting by Okada Kenzo, “A Story” A seasoned and accomplished artist friend recently shared a painful encounter with a curator. During a studio visit, the curator—much younger than my friend—declared that her work lacked irony and anxiety. In his view, her approach was not relevant to the contemporary 21st century experience. […]
The Certain and the Uncertain
My granddaughter Siena, exploring all the available painting surfaces The assault on reason and human values that is ongoing in the political landscape isn’t confined to the ideological arena. When life’s bandwidth gets hijacked daily, resource allocation happens by default (especially for those of us over 50 who have to husband our energy.) As a […]
The Small and the Quiet
James Siena At James Siena‘s show at Pace Gallery, the back room is bursting with drawings that have “leaky margins,” where the mark making steps out beyond the paper’s edge and onto the matt and the frame. I was so delighted to see these. They have a quiet and relentless defiance that feels almost subversive. […]
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Makers Unite
My granddaughter Siena drawing in the Rothko room at the newly opened East Building of the National Gallery, Washington DC (Photo: Mona Wilcox) We have to help each other. That may sound trite, but it has come to mean a lot more to me over the last dark weeks. When my spirits flagged, I have […]
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Solitude and Surprise. Gotta Have Both.
A solitary figure walking through an empty landscape. That feels like a good description of what this month has felt like to me. (My daughter Kellin, walking the beach at Duxbury a few years ago) Years of solitude had taught him that, in one’s memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there […]
Creativity and Meditation
The cosmos suggested in the etchings on an abalone shell In writing about inspiration and meditation, musician and performer Amanda Palmer described the conundrum posed by those two concepts: The songwriter in me struggles like mad when meditating. The rules of my conditioned art-mind say that nothing must stand in the way of a developing […]
Times of Too Much
Sometimes just the idea of empty is deeply soothing. (Mojave Desert) Helpful thoughts when you’ve tipped into overload: Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses…culling and surrender. Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your […]