Paris, 1970 Photo by Elliott Erwitt Maybe it happens to you like this: unexpected events and encounters often come in multiples. It’s as if random events are actually traveling through our lives in a wad. How many times has someone come to mind who I haven’t seen in years and then they suddenly appear at […]
In and Out and Back
The Wasatch Mountains in Utah This comment from Bill Keller in the New York Times caught my eye: In “The Uncoupling,” there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join. Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but […]
The Whole Ball of Who We Are
An excerpt from Bulabula 1, a painting currently hanging in my show at Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown A Ball Rolls on a Point The whole ball of who we are presses into the green baize at a single tiny spot. An aural track of crackle betrays our passage through the fibrous jungle. It’s hot and […]
Assessing the State of Visual Culture
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson, published in 2008, is one of the most evenhanded descriptions of the flamboyant, unpredictable, arcane—and at times, utterly exasperating—world of contemporary art. Thompson teaches marketing and economics and, refreshingly, doesn’t write from the point of view of someone who has been […]
Choosing Earth
The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation. I left […]
Blank is Blank
Jerry Saltz in front of a piece by Takashi Murakami The last few months have been a period of burrowing down deep for me, of incubation and isolation. But now my show is up in Provincetown and a new body of work has emerged, I am back up on the surface again and getting re-acclimatized. […]
Eye R&R
My show opened last Friday, and the next morning I left for several days of giving my eyes a little R&R. Which really means letting them look without a job or a deadline. It was luscious, and they loved this little road trip. So what follows is (mostly) a visual diary of the last four […]
Show at Lyman-Eyer Gallery
My show at Lyman-Eyer Gallery opened on Friday. The work was hung beautifully, and the opening was an evening of old and new friends. Now I’m headed out of town for a few days, back on Wednesday. A few installation shots:
Wrapped in Fecundity
Jim Lyman, gallerist at Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown, getting help hanging “Golawon” from Stephanie Hobart I have a friend who can paint a complete show over a summer and still have lots of time to go to the beach and hang out with her pals. I’ve always been a bit envious of her art making […]
Warburg and the Bruins
Aby Warburg, unconventional and still controversial art historian all these years later, made a trip to the Black Mesa in Arizona in 1896 and encountered the Hopi Indians. An expert on Florentine Renaissance art, he had his aha moment in realizing how similar the highly ritualized Hopi dances were to the elaborate court festivals held […]