Wingate Barn, site of the Winter Studio gallery in Wenham View of the gardens from the gallery Last weekend we did the real life installation of the Unchained show that appeared here at the end of the summer. The late fall light was clear and crisp, and visitors to the Winter Studio gallery were a […]
Art
Going for Depth, Not Distortion
Nooma 2, mixed media on wood panel Some people are gifted with an ability to sit with a political or ideological opponent and have a meaningful conversation. I’m not one of those, which is probably true of most of us. We choose to spend most of our time with my like-minded tribespeople. It’s an easier […]
The Rose Reopens: Art Trumps Money
The Rose Museum at Brandeis University reopened Last night the previously disenfranchised and much beleaguered Rose Art Museum on the Brandeis campus reopened with much fanfare, a celebration being called The Rose Art Museum at fifty. In spite of a torrential rainstorm, the museum was chockablock with donors, students, artists, patrons and, specially introduced to […]
Infinite Riches in a Little Room
De Kooning’s “Weekend at Mr. and Mrs. Krisher,” lithograph, 1970 _______________ More on De Kooning, Part 2 Another issue that emerged from spending the day at the De Kooning exhibit is a theme that I have written about here before: epic vs lyric; working large vs working small; the proclivity to grandiosity in contrast to […]
De Kooningingly Up and Down
Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louise Point, 1963 Pirate, 1981 With so many thoughtful and well written reviews already available of the MOMA’s blockbuster retrospective of De Kooning, it is easy to give myself permission to take a more personal jaunt through the seven decades’ worth of work on display. John Elderfield‘s curatorial mastery is in […]
Up Close and Personal
Looking down from the top balcony onto the Sum of Days installation by Carlito Carvalhosa in the MOMA. It is just too big and sensual to not pay attention and be delighted at some level. I just returned from five days in New York and Philadelphia. This was a working and a viewing trip. Since […]
E) All of the Above
Dewey Square in Boston on October 15 On the topic of art and political activism (discussed in my earlier post here): Susana Viola Jacobson, consummate artist and critic, left the following response to that piece. Her thoughts were too good to not share. Very thoughtful piece. I wrestled with this divide for years and finally […]
- Aesthetics
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Necessary Wildness
Wasatch Mountains in Utah (October 2011) Writing about writing poetry: It soothes my soul the way reading scriptures comforts believers. In an earlier post I referenced Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield (here), an inspiring and thoughtful meditation on how poetry comes into being. And now I have another to recommend: […]
- literature
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They Might Be Giants
T. S. Eliot Harold Bloom first wrote about his now famous theory of the anxiety of influence in the early 1970’s while I was in college. Bloom focused on poetry and traced the complex challenge facing a poet in search of his or her own unique voice while being inspired—and intimidated—by a powerful precursor. The […]
- Art Making
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Scaling Solitude
The lone wise one, from the caves at Ajanta, India I increasingly apply a sliding scale to assess most situations. It is one way of skirting the tendency in contemporary dialogue to Manichaean, black and white with nothing in between, either/or thinking. This is similar to how Asperger’s Syndrome is now being evaluated—you can have […]