Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight. My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited […]
Art
Consciousness of the Mountain
The poet Robert Hass has won the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. I have admired his work for some time. So when a good friend enthusiastically suggested that I explore some of his prose as well, I took her up on it. What Light Can Do: Essays […]
Orbilinia Redux
It is a bit like raising a child, having an exhibit: it takes a village to bring it into form. Orbilinia, a show of my recent paintings at the Woodbury Museum in Utah, was an (art) barn raising that needed the essential help of friends, family (I have the world’s best sisters) and an extraordinary […]
Walking the Line
In front of Mandaliya, at the opening of my show at Spaulding Gallery (Photo: Marcia Goodwin) It is a fine line that we ask ourselves to walk. My work requires hours alone in my studio, silently conversing with the work emerging in front of me. It is a form of primal nakedness, working that way, […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
A Resolute Materiality
Jay Heikes, Ear of Dionysius, Collection Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will be mounting a show of paintings in February, their first group painting show in 10 years. Titled Painter Painter, the exhibit has been co-curated by Bartholomew Ryan and Eric Crosby. I was intrigued—and heartened—by their selection process, their view […]
Feeling the Undercurrent
Charles Burchfield, “Moon and Thunderhead” There are many craftsmen who paint pleasantly the surface appearances and are very clever at it. There are always a few who get at and feel the undercurrent, and these simply use the surface appearances selecting them and using them as tools to express the undercurrent, the real life. If […]
Saville Wisdom
Jenny Saville, photographed in her Oxford studio, June 2012. (Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer) Some memorable quotes about Jenny Saville from an article in the Guardian last year, Jenny Saville: ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies’: *** Painting is my natural language. I feel in my own universe […]
Nowists United
Joi Ito, my favorite nowist The selection of Joi Ito as Director of the MIT Media Lab in 2011 was a departure from the norm. A former nightclub DJ and college dropout turned venture capitalist, Ito is a selfmade entrepreneur, visionary, “adventure capitalist”, tech guru. In recent interviews, Ito has shared his approach to innovation […]
What Can Be Seen
Officially known as ACT-CL J0102-4915, the galaxy cluster has been nicknamed El Gordo. “This cluster is the most massive, the hottest, and gives off the most X-rays of any known cluster at this distance or beyond,” said Felipe Menanteau of Rutgers University. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Hughes et al, Optical: ESO/VLT/Pontificia Universidad. Catolica de Chile/L.Infante & SOAR […]
Born Things
Shoji Hamada How easy it is to slip into busy. Busy, and disconnected from the core of things. This morning I found a needed course correction courtesy of Sarah Robinson‘s Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind: Cognitive scientists tell us that it takes time for the conscious mind to extract latent patterns within a diversity of superficially […]