Earlier Hockney: Man Ray, 1973 Winter Timber (2009), from David Hockney’s A Bigger Picture exhibition at the Royal Academy. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson Seeing (and writing about) the David Hockney show, A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy was (and is) hard. In some ways I have a sentimental place for Hockney that dates back to […]
Art
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The Facts and the Truth: Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery
Benefits Supervisor (“Big Sue”) Resting “There are facts,” the painter Lucian Freud once said, “and there is the truth.” The current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London follows less than a year after Freud’s death at 88. The show is a stark reminder that while Freud dealt with the facts of our all-too-human […]
London, The Lakes and Kusama
View from Keswick, in the Lake District My time in the UK was split between the timelessly serene Lake District (and former haunt of Wordsworth and Coleridge) and the frenetic expanse that is London. It is the perpetual longing for the both/and that I have come to know as elemental, similar to the paradox captured […]
- Aesthetics
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A Show and a Sojourn
Gola, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 54″, included in the show, “Acquire/Inquire” at Rhode Island College, March 2012 I will be showing my latest body of work at an upcoming exhibition at Rhode Island College next month. I am looking forward to seeing these pieces outside of my studio and all the visual clutter […]
- Aesthetics
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The Proud and Futile Wake
Continuing the theme of music and its multifarious explorations… I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck. –Samuel Beckett, Molloy What an evocative quote to start Alex Ross‘ most recent book, Listen to This. His columns in The […]
- Aesthetics
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Talking About What We Cannot
The “rag and bone shop” barn studio of my (nearly) lifelong friend, artist George Wingate. Our conversations here and in other venues over the last 40 years have been some of my favorites. My friend Robert Hanlon recently wrote me and said, “You are an expensive friend: you make me buy books!” Sorry Robert, but […]
Cling Film Conceptualism and Other Biennial Woes
From the deCordova Biennial, a work by Cambridge-based Joe Zane (Photo: Carroll and Sons Gallery)* OK. I haven’t seen the show yet. But Sebastian Smee‘s Boston Globe review of the newly-opened deCordova Biennial rang true of so many shows that I have seen lately: I thought we had outgrown smarty-pants biennials, filled with arcane and […]
We are Rashomon
Renate Ponsold, “Philip Guston, 1966, N.Y. Jewish Museum Retrospective” The past weekend was spent with my partner Dave’s family, gathering in Utah to remember his mother who passed away at 88. At her memorial service I was reminded once again that all of us have many identities and many versions of ourselves. The community where […]
Repetition, the Ritual of Obsession
The inimitable Thomas Derrah plays Mark Rothko in the Speakeasy’s New England premiere of Red, by John Logan. The play runs through February 4th. In John Logan’s Tony award-winning play Red, Mark Rothko delivers a steady stream of tough love lessons on the meaning of art to his young studio assistant. Advice is rarely this […]
Apparent Glimmerings
Curator Stephanie Hobart hanging my show, Apparent Glimmerings Apparent Glimmerings, a show of my paintings in Cape Elizabeth Maine, has been installed and is ready for the opening reception on January 13. Curator Stephanie Hobart did the vetting in my studio two weeks ago and ended up picking out 31 pieces that span about six […]