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 […]
Paul Cezanne
A Life of Loving Cézanne
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. –Paul Cézanne January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906 A birthday commemoration to an artist whose work just keeps speaking to me. This love affair started when I was a teenager, and it […]
The Perspectival Eye
Waiting for Hurricane “My Name is Earl” to gather over the Northeast. We will be descending nonetheless on Cape Ann for a weekend of nuptial celebrating with Alexis and JP. So begins a month of wonderful wedding weekends. Life happens like that, big shifts that occur all at once, like the culmination of storm systems […]
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A Beyond of Color
Rainer Maria Rilke More on the theme of poets and artists: Good friend Sally Reed steered me to a slender volume, Letters on Cézanne by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. These letters were written mostly to his wife Clara while he was living in Paris in 1907, a time when he was spellbound by Cézanne’s […]
Cézanne: A Multiplicity of Successively Probed Sensations
Apples and Oranges, by Paul Cézanne (Photo: Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris) Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer sat for several years on my bookshelf (the one that is, unfortunately, gravitationally challenged and is sagging precariously) waiting for its chance to get cracked open. That finally happened during those luxurious, divinely isolated hours […]