Showing posts with label Artists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Artists. Show all posts
Friday, December 2, 2011
Basil Beattie and Claude Viallat
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Ann Toebbe
Jered Sprecher (new paintings up)
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Studio View: Christopher Thomas
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Helen O'Leary
Friday, June 10, 2011
Mark Grotjahn
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Annie Lapin ("I'm trying to make objects that I don't undertand.")
Another great one from New American Paintings--
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Louise Erdrich Quote #2
And now the second quote...about being a writer and having children. As there are so few instances of women talking about being artists and mothers, and as I am nearly 8 months pregnant with my second child, I am very interested in any meditation on the link between making art and motherhood.
"By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."
"By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."
Louise Erdrich Quote #1
In high school I fell in love with the books of Louise Erdrich. I recall writing a paper on one of her first novels, Love Medicine. I actually haven't read much of her writing of late, so I can't vividly recall why I loved her so much. I do think it had to do with her being one of the first writers who helped me see that it is possible to phrase something in the most particular of ways--in a way that no one else does, or has ever thought of before. This inclination toward invention has grabbed hold of me ever since.
My mother sent me this week's Writer's Almanac; Louise Erdrich is quoted extensively. The first quote I have to record here involves book-love, which I very much relate to:
"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."
My mother sent me this week's Writer's Almanac; Louise Erdrich is quoted extensively. The first quote I have to record here involves book-love, which I very much relate to:
"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."
Monday, May 23, 2011
Everyone's oddness
Yesterday evening I happened upon the below entry from Anne Truitt's wonderful, wonderful journal Daybook. (I read the book for the first time the summer before my freshmen year of college and have perused it periodically ever since as it is a wealth of thoughtfulness about being an artist.) I record this passage here because she writes what I experience as I move through my days between the studio and the home--so much of life and living for me is remarking on how amazing is this color against that one, in the context of a room or a person or a collection of everyday objects. Just yesterday I took pictures of a bowl of shelled fava beans, (which will no doubt find there way here soon) not because the bowl of shelled fava beans was in and of itself so remarkable (though I might argue for the remarkble-ness of fava beans actually, tossed with garlic, olive oil and parmesan) but because my eye loved the settled repetition of their piled up shapes, as well as their pale green color. Somehow those fava beans relate to painting for me.
From Anne Truitt's journal Daybook:
24 October
I opened my eyes a moment ago into the maple leaves outside my window. Almost simultaneously with the act of identifying them as these particular leaves and thus placing myself, I saw them as paintings, an arrangement of values.
The other afternoon when I was entertaining my daughter Mary in her bath, she asked me whether I thought artists were "just born that way." I said I thought they might be. "How?" she asked. I said I didn't know, but that there was rarely a time when I wasn't half-consciously translating what was around me into terms of art, that as I stood at the door--for I was on my way out when this exchange took place--I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam's blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to. These elements arranged themselves into proportions of color, the weights of which gave me the meaning of what I was seeing. Mary and I laughed, partly out of the pleasure of talking to one another and partly out of the wry recognition of everyone's oddness.
From Anne Truitt's journal Daybook:
24 October
I opened my eyes a moment ago into the maple leaves outside my window. Almost simultaneously with the act of identifying them as these particular leaves and thus placing myself, I saw them as paintings, an arrangement of values.
The other afternoon when I was entertaining my daughter Mary in her bath, she asked me whether I thought artists were "just born that way." I said I thought they might be. "How?" she asked. I said I didn't know, but that there was rarely a time when I wasn't half-consciously translating what was around me into terms of art, that as I stood at the door--for I was on my way out when this exchange took place--I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam's blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to. These elements arranged themselves into proportions of color, the weights of which gave me the meaning of what I was seeing. Mary and I laughed, partly out of the pleasure of talking to one another and partly out of the wry recognition of everyone's oddness.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Inspiration of Late: Garima Saxena
One of the biggest delights recently has been seeing the collage-marathon of Garima Saxena posted on her blog. I love the frank willingness to try anything and to show us that really so much more is possible here than we thought. I've just picked out six here; there are many, many more to see, and I urge you to go look now!
Monday, March 7, 2011
W.S. Merwin in coversation with Michael Silverblatt
Michael Silverblatt: I have a final question. It would once have been impossible for a poet to easily accept the invitation to be a country's poet laureate, this country's poet laureate. It certainly once would not have been possible for you. What makes it possible now?
W.S. Merwin: When I was invited to do it the terms of it were--we talked about that--and I was asked whether there was a theme that I would want to have to string the whole thing on, and I said, yes, if I accept to do it that will be one of the main reasons why I would do that, and the theme would be something I want to talk about. My words won't change anyone's behavior but the connection between the human imagination, which I think is the one really distinctive thing that humanity has, not intelligence or language--both of which are dubious in different ways, but imagination--the thing that allows us to sit here in the Palomar Hotel in Los Angeles and be distressed about the homeless people and Darfur and the whales dying of starvation in the Pacific and elated by a little girl getting a prize for playing Mozart in China when she's seven years old. Other animals have this quality but it's not primal in their lives. It's not the center, and it's what makes us. Each one of us is here in our imaginations seeing the world a little bit differently. I think this is our great talent. It's the source of compassion and it's the source of our respect for the rest of life and for our, oh I would say more than that, our gratitude for it, our love of the rest of life. And if we don't have that, we are in every sense deprived. We're narrowed down to little selfish blobs destroying the world around us and in so doing destroying ourselves.
W.S. Merwin: When I was invited to do it the terms of it were--we talked about that--and I was asked whether there was a theme that I would want to have to string the whole thing on, and I said, yes, if I accept to do it that will be one of the main reasons why I would do that, and the theme would be something I want to talk about. My words won't change anyone's behavior but the connection between the human imagination, which I think is the one really distinctive thing that humanity has, not intelligence or language--both of which are dubious in different ways, but imagination--the thing that allows us to sit here in the Palomar Hotel in Los Angeles and be distressed about the homeless people and Darfur and the whales dying of starvation in the Pacific and elated by a little girl getting a prize for playing Mozart in China when she's seven years old. Other animals have this quality but it's not primal in their lives. It's not the center, and it's what makes us. Each one of us is here in our imaginations seeing the world a little bit differently. I think this is our great talent. It's the source of compassion and it's the source of our respect for the rest of life and for our, oh I would say more than that, our gratitude for it, our love of the rest of life. And if we don't have that, we are in every sense deprived. We're narrowed down to little selfish blobs destroying the world around us and in so doing destroying ourselves.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Meghan Brady
The top image is Untitled (yellow), oil on canvas, 40.5"x30", 2010 while the bottom image is called Jackrabbit, oil on canvas, 18"x14", 2010. You can see more at her website.
Monday, December 20, 2010
He wanted to meet in the real world
the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
When I read this passage I felt I'd read an exacting description of my relationship to the images I seek to make.
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
When I read this passage I felt I'd read an exacting description of my relationship to the images I seek to make.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Eva Hesse Spectres
I don't think I'd be who I am without Eva Hesse's work.
It is wonderful to be confronted with something truly amazing and indescribable--I feel the fullness of living when I see images like the above.
Eva Hesse, 20"x20", oil on canvas, 1960
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
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