Ad for L. L. Bean, back in the day (1941) Photo: George Strock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and […]
Wisdom
What’s Too Small
Evenesse 2, 25 x 55″ Sweet Darkness You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive […]
Wired For Sound
Kathleen Kirk’s post, Persistence and Patience, is a thoughtful description of how she ended up, after several career explorations, being a poet. In her graceful telling, she describes her many forays into other creative fields—music, art, theater, teaching—but none of them evoked the necessary persistence and patience in her that is needed to keep the […]
- Aesthetics
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Other Conversations
From the Leonardo Drew exhibit at the deCordova Museum. Drew said he has noticed that the more he touches things, the better they get. (More about this amazing show coming here soon.) This morning I tried to describe to my friend Linda how the energy in my studio can shift suddenly in ways I find […]
A Worldwide Eschatological Whoopjamboreehoo…or Not
I have a restlessness that constantly moves between two extreme nodes—from the “language is useful” end of the spectrum to the “language is not useful” at the other. When you find yourself hovering closer to the latter, the chatty wisdom of someone like Tom Robbins can feel comforting. Here’s one from my ever-reliable wisdom source, […]
- Aesthetics
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Lifelong Construction
] Random dust patterned on a surface in my studio _______ I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, […]
Incomplete is Not a Dirty Word
Assembling reality is mostly patchwork (from Anna Hepler’s exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art) More on the theme of being right and the cost of that fixation (referenced earlier in this post): An article appeared in the Sunday New York Times Book review last week that speaks to our proclivity to put blinders on […]
The Either/Or and the Both/And
Every one of us loves our own story. We are all attached, consciously or unconsciously, to our very personal version of truth, our take on who is right, our convictions about what makes sense, our determinations about how one should live in the world. Certainly the fallacies in our thinking that blindside us about ourselves […]
- Aesthetics
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Witnessing
“Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one,” is saying that one witness is everybody else giving you their feedback and opinions (which is worth listening to, there’s some truth in what people say) but the principal witness is yourself. You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep […]
- Art/Spiritual
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Enchantment Becoming Thing
Seeking enchantment—here, there, everywhere…The Great Haul, a site-specific installation by Anna Hepler at the Portland Museum of Art. The light becomes crystalline and kaleidoscopic through the layered netting of meshed plastic. _____ We have an innate capacity for remembering and imagining places. Perception, memory and imagination are in constant interaction; the domain of presence fuses […]