Magpie’s nest (Photo: Wire.com) Last week I returned from a two week sojourn in the desert. Everything shifts around inside when I am in that landscape, and I have been gently allowing the ballast that balances me to settle into its new positions. Luckily I found the perfect companion for that subtle transition: Living with […]
- Aesthetics
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Marks and Mark Making
Pottery shards from a bygone era are everywhere along the upper mesa at Tsankawi One of the best parts of visiting New Mexico is the rich mix of mark making. A sense of surfaces that have been touched is everywhere, some of it from human hands and some of it by other means. In a […]
Coordinates: Unlocatable
Somewhere in New Mexico A Muslim prayer expresses this extraordinary request: “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” In poet Fanny Howe‘s essay, “Bewilderment”, from her essay collection, The Wedding Dress, she describes bewilderment as more than an attitude. It is an actual approach she says, a way to “settle with the unresolvable.” And this: A signal does […]
Inside Sontag
Moe Angelos as young Susan Sontag (and as an older Sontag on a scrim above) in the Builders Association’s “Sontag: Reborn.” (Photo: James Gibbs) Susan Sontag, author of many books that are now classics—Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others—has been gone for 10 years. But […]
- Aesthetics
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Working Alone
Door into my zone of privacy, my studio I am not the only artist out there voicing advocacy for the way of solitude. There are many of us who spend most of our days working alone and know that is the only way we can do what we do. But Susan Cain, author of Quiet: […]
- Aesthetics
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Yes, But…
“Hydra,” by Kay Canavino*, a photograph in my personal collection that I look at every day and adore I keep coming to that tough place, the one where you just have to say, “Yes, but…” It is a pervasive thing, this need to straddle. It isn’t just in the area of art and art making, […]
- Aesthetics
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Pitchers and Catchers
“Veriddyi 2”, a recent painting (and one that speaks to my ongoing longing to envision that first day of creation) One of my favorite quotes comes by way of W. S. Piero from his book of essays, Out of Eden: “Certain artists give up the making of representational images so that they can see through […]
A Thousand Ways
Cast drawing Rumi‘s famous poem advises that “There are thousands of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” a line which follows directly upon another wise admonishment: “Let the beauty we love be what we do.” And how many ways there are for those of us who are called to plumb the visual! On a […]
- Art Making
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Always Enchanted
Tiruchchirappalli, India This year we celebrated Easter with friends from Athens. While a whole lamb turned slowly on a spit, the table was loaded up with fresh bread, olives from the family vineyards back home, and copious bowls of salads and vegetables. It was sumptuous and unforgettable, rendered with the mastery that comes with having […]
Marquezania
García Márquez in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2003. Photograph: Andres Reyes/AP
Nobel prize winning author and father of magic realism, Gabriel García Márquez, passed away on Thursday at the age of 87.
His breakthrough novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published in 1967. The book has sold 50 million copies in 25 languages. That novel was a revelation to me then, and my respect for him never wavered.
The imaginative power of his writing was stunning, and that otherworldliness of his storytelling has impacted me and my approach to my visual work all these many years. I had to take a moment here to honor and remember this extraordinary man and his work.
Quotes by him are in abundance since his death, but here are a few of my favorites:
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
The secret of good old-age is none other than an honest pact with solitude.
But if they had learned anything together it was that wisdom arrives when it’s no longer useful.
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
There is always something left to love.