Like an old friend who drops in and ends up staying a few days, Seamus Heaney has been on my mind ever since I read those few lines I posted yesterday. Here’s a short poem by him that delights, enchants, creates longing (the good kind.) Song A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road […]
Art
Wired for Sound
It is an easy seduction for an artist–any artist–to complain about being misunderstood and unappreciated. But according to Oliver Sachs (by way of Trevor Hunter’s excellent blog, New Music Box,) musicians may have a neurological right to that claim: At last week’s Chamber Music America conference, keynote speaker Oliver Sacks brought up an astonishing fact: […]
Jorie Graham: Prayer
This poem by Jorie Graham has had particular resonance for me today. I share it with the intention of passing its magic along to anyone else who might need its wisdom. Prayer Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the way to create current, […]
Coming Up for Air
I’ve been burrowed in my studio for several days, getting work ready for an upcoming show in San Francisco. For the first time in nine years there is no heat in my studio on weekends, so I have had balance and moderation forced on my otherwise excessive self. I’ve missed the introspection and insight that […]
Tang Dynasty Wisdom
Cold Mountain 3, by Brice Marden Here’s a thoughtful and provoking passage from one of my favorite blogs, Joe Felso: Ruminations. He references Han-shan, the same poet who inspired Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain series of paintings, who feels similar in spirit to my earlier posting on Master Linji, also from the Tang Dynasty: I wonder […]
The Power of the Question
I received a book in the mail as a gift from a friend* I haven’t seen for some time: Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go: Waking Up to Who You Are, by Thich Nhat Hanh. As is often the way these things go, I opened it up to a few passages that had deep resonance […]
Pondering Marden’s Nebraska
Marden cuts the cord that still bound an artist like Jasper Johns to the literary underpinnings of nineteenth-century symbolism, without simultaneously destroying art’s ability to evoke natural forms. He jettisons story, myth, and illusion, and with them representation, composition, and spatial depth. What we are left with is paint, canvas, scale, shape, and brush stroke—but […]