Motoi Yamamoto (Photo: My Modern Met) Roberta Smith‘s response to the recent art auctions, Art Is Hard to See Through the Clutter of Dollar Signs, included a quote that has taken on a life of its own and is showing up everywhere online. After describing the spectacle of all time high prices and hedge fund […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
The Innovation/Creativity Continuum
Innovation is constantly in the news. Corporations spend millions of dollars fostering, cultivating and encouraging it in work environments that often seem inhospitable to deflected and unexpected thinking. Interestingly, artists rarely use the word innovation to describe the methodology of their work. Creativity is the more common term. How are the two different? Drew Marshall […]
A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment
Great Salt Lake, my birthland Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old […]
Mars on My Mind
This is Mars (All images: Aperture) It’s big, and it isn’t cheap. But for any of you out there who, like me, have a fascination with space, planetary bodies, other worlds and/or sheer unadulterated materiality, this is the book for you. This is Mars will knock you out. From the Aperture site: This Is Mars […]
- Art Making
- ...
Legacying a Life
Conflagration, by Gordon Waters (Photo: Art collection of the University of Western Sydney) After years of experience and a commitment to abstraction I am able to “forget myself” with greater ease. The pictures have begun to determine me instead of the other way around. In the process, a more cohesive body of work has evolved. […]
- Art Making
- ...
Grit-Rich
In my studio: Hand molds in a peat bowl by friend and artist Rachel Parry. Parry made both of these objects from substances she found on her land in Allihies, Beara, Ireland. Like most of my readers, I track creativity research like a part time job I’ll have for the rest of my life. With […]
Nicheless de Waal
Edmund de Waal (Photo: Andrew Testa for The New York Times) Mr. de Waal’s inspiration comes as much from poets and musicians as it does other artists: the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto “because of the abstract way he deals with an image”; composers like Steve Reich and John Adams, for their serial, repetitive music which […]
A Measure of Splendor
Detail of a sumi brushstroke, ink on rice paper Twigs (excerpt) Neither music, fame, nor wealth, not even poetry itself, could provide consolation for life’s brevity, or the fact that King Lear is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end… And so it has taken me all of sixty years to understand […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
The Shape-Making Impulse
Yellow Porch, Richard Diebenkorn Today’s post is from the me with my head under the hood. Here are a few thoughts about what happens in the making and the molding. Sometimes that part of the process takes precedence, when it is helpful to step back a bit to see if you can see a larger […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
The V Word
Ernesto Pujol (Photo: FIAF) Vulnerability, a meme that previously had little traction outside the world of self-help literature and 12 step programs, has gone mainstream. Brene Brown came at it straight on in a Tedx talk back in 2010. That speech went viral immediately and she became the “vulnerability expert” almost overnight. Brown’s contention is […]