Pablo Picasso: Boisgeloup In The Rain
Paul Verlaine described rain as "long sobs of Autumn's violins."Admittedly, this painting by Picasso shows us spring rain but I think the epigraph fits. Boisgeloup is an old stronghold dating from the...
View ArticleJaune-Quick-To-See-Smith
"Where we lived, the settlers built their houses. Wherewe drew fresh water, the oil companies sucked oil.Where deer ran in countless numbers, we have a newmall. Where the healing plants thrived; the...
View ArticleRaymond Han: The Many Shades of White
"Look how white everything is," Sylvia Plath marveled in her poem "Tulips." That's what I think when I look at paintings by Raymond Han. Of course these shades of white contain colors as you will know...
View ArticleHilary Mantel: Stories Of Her Youth
Learning to Talk, originally published in Great Britain in 2003, is likely to be the last book we will ever have from Hilary Mantel. Mantel died suddenly in September of 2022. Her publisher described...
View ArticleRuby Sky Stiler
"Let's not shame our eyes for seeing. Instead, thank them for their bravery." - Joy Harjo, from Conflict Resolution For Holy Beings, W.W. Norton, New York: 2015The place of the occupational self...
View ArticleJane Freilicher: Dark Afternoon
"Light is like oxygen in a painting; without it a painting is dead. It doesn't breathe. " - Jane FreilicherAs we change our clocks, the effect of seasonal light is on our minds. Dark Afternoon was...
View ArticleStephen Mueller: Orpheus the Enchanter
Everyone is smitten with the half-man half-god that was Orpheus. Even the skeptical Carol Ann Duffy sounds sneakily admiring: "the kind of a manwho follows her roundwriting poems,hovering aboutwhile...
View ArticleJean Charlot's Mexican Christmas
May the beauty and peace of the holiday season be with you.Image: Jean Charlot - untitled, color lithographic print, Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica.
View ArticleA Predilection For Onions: Mary Ann Currier
"How easily happiness begins bydicing onions. A lump of sweet butterslithers and swirls across the floorof the saute pan, especially if itserrant path crosses a tiny slickof olive oil. Then a tumble of...
View ArticleScarab-Like: Mark Innerst
"Seers can see, for instance, the light of the scarabs, emanations expanding to great size." - Carlos Castenada, from The Fire From WithinMark Innerst is known for paintings of luminous landscapes so...
View ArticleOrangerie: A Moveable Garden
"I peeled my orangeThat was bright againstThe gray of DecemberThat, from some distance,Someone might have thoughtI was making a fire in my hands." -"Oranges" by Gary SotoThe...
View ArticleCharles Seliger : Citron
Christina Rossetti in her poem Goblin Market described the citron as being "sweet to tongue and sound to eye.""I am not a traveler, except that I do make endless journeys within my paintings. " -...
View ArticleJane Piper: A Feeling For Color
"I didn't know such paintings existed. I had seen some things that were involved with color abstraction, some Picassos and Braques, but then when I saw the Matisses I didn't know what hit me. The...
View ArticleJudy Pfaff: "Sensations in Things"
"Good rain knows its time right:It will fall when comes spring.With wind it steals in night:Mute. it moistens each thing." - Du Fu (712-770) Tang Dynasty, excerpt from "Happy Rain on a Spring...
View ArticleWinter Trees: Gandy Brody
"Suddenly, in every tree,an unseen nestwhere a mountainwould be." - excerpt from "Choices" by Tess Gallagher"Even Gandy's clothes seemed to have opinions." - Elaine de Kooning"What sort of an age is...
View ArticleSylvia Sleigh: The Group
"A.I.R. does not sell art; it changes attitudes about art by women. A.I.R. offers women a space to show art as innovative, transitory and free of market trends as the artists' conceptions demand."The...
View ArticlePaula Rego: The Dance
I can' prove it but I think Paul Rego saw Winslow Homer's Summer Evening although she said that the idea for the painting came from her husband. Rego's paintings are full of her fascination with such...
View ArticleHilma af Klint: A Cartography of the Spirit
"Land lies in water; it is shaded green.Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edgesshowing the line of long sea-weeded ledgeswhere weeds hang from the simple blue to green.Or does the land lean down to...
View ArticleGeorgianna Houghton: Things of the Spirit
She called them "spirit drawings" but they were also abstract or else couched in a vocabulary to which she along held the secret decoder. It is tantalizing to wonder whether Houghton and Klint ever...
View ArticleDorothea Tanning's Late Flowers
"smoke veil tissuing in my thinsugar, spread-veined and still so green-legged for jumping throughEcho's silver glass to this temple of...
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