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Looking At Pictures
"The good gray guardians of artPatrol the halls on spongy shoes,Impartially protective, thoughPerhaps suspicious of Toulouse.Here dozes once against the wall,Disposed upon a funeral chair.A Degas...
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Giorgio Morandi & The Lives of Objects
"Even at night, the objects kept vigil,even as he slept with African dreams,a porcelain jug, two watering cans,empty green wine bottles, a knife.Even as he slept, deeply, as only creatorscan sleep,...
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John Pfahl: Punto di fuga
"I want to make photographs whose very ambiguity provokes thought, rather than cuts it off prematurely. I want to make that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more...
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Beatrice Wood: Her Brimming Life
"I never meant to become a potter. It happened very accidentally...I could sell pottery because when I ran away from home I was without any money. And so I became a potter." - Beatrice WoodYou could...
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The Quarantine Library: Part One
My new favorite person is the postal carrier. Every day with unfailing good cheer he makes the rounds of my apartment complex, the sound of his wheeled cart announcing his imminent arrival. Although...
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Lau Tzu, Art Critic
"We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;But it is on the space where there is nothing that theusefulness of the wheel depends.We turn clay to make a vessel;But it is on the space where there...
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Paul Gauguin: On the Road to a New Synthesis
"Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?" - Paul GauguinWhat first catches the eye here is the bowl of fruit but what makes this picture so...
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The Quarantine Library: Part Two
"Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away/in any direction - " - Rainer Maria RilkeSomehow these lines, unrelated to what I have been reading recently,I. The author of more than...
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Jozef Czapski: A Not So Empty Train Station
"Each time it is almost nothing. But that 'almost nothing' signifies everything." - Jozef CzapskiSeven large empty baggage carts cluster on a platform. In back is a train that is also empty. We...
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Alice Halicka: Something Cool
She signed her painting prominently in an upper corner, a la Gauguin. The colors - black, brown, red, blue, green, and white - could be used to produce bright effects, but that was not Alice Halicka's...
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The Quarantine Library: Part Three
I. "The very poor, it could be said, often find it hard to be loved."Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) was a Swedish master of the short story, far less well known than the Russian Chekhov or the Canadian...
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Emile Nolde: Terra Incognita
"The terra incognita of the notproven that stretches betweenthe firm ground of the provedand the void of the disproved" - from Pierce-Arrow by Susan Howe, New York, New Directions: 1999"To a person who...
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Charles Prendergast: An Offering
"Under the bright glazesEsau watches Jacob,Cain watches Abel.With the same heavy eyesthe tilemaker's Arab assistantwatches me,all of us wonderingwhy for every pairthere is just oneblessing." - excerpt...
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Vilhelm Hammershoi: Aslant
Aslant is good point of view to the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1915). Sun slanting obliquely through a window is remarkable in this context because you look around and notice doors viewed...
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Afloat on a Cubist Boat: Marsden Hartley
"Spirit is awareness, intelligence, recollection. It requires no dogma ..." - George Santayana, excerpt from Platonism and the Spiritual Life.(1927)It may not look so to us now but this painting...
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An Artist of the SIlver Age: Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva
"How much has been said and written about the White Nights. How they were hated by those who could not get used to them, and how passionately they were loved by others....." - Alexandre BenoisHow the...
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Luigi Settanni: An Artist's Brittany
I. We see men and women standing on a shore, symbolically separated by a boat that seems to be taking on water. Drowning in the choppy, unpredictable waters of the Atlantic was a constant worry,...
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Vilhelm Hammershoi: A Silver Age
"This landscape looks like a secretbecause the river can't be seenfrom the spot where I am standing.And therefore it isthe landscape where I most easilywould be able to do without myself.Among these...
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How to Ruin a Friendship
Alma Schindler was a Viennese beauty and a budding composer when she fell in love with Gustav Mahler, nineteen years her senior, and a moody, authoritarian composer who made Alma give up her music in...
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Charles Prendergast: Earthly Paradise
There is much to see in this painting by the American artist Charles Prendergast. Starting at the bottom there are water lilies floating in deep purple water.. In the lower right corner stands...
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