On Hills, Mountains & Ocean Waves
When I was a child, I always thought of hills & mountains as barriers that hindered my family’s annual drive from the valley to the coast: They were obstacles to be gotten over - or more accurately, around - before we could begin our seaside vacation. Every...
On Red
My favorite scene in Mr. Turner, the 2014 biopic about the English artist, occurs during the run-up to a Royal Academy exhibition: Turner appears to have deliberately ruined one of his dark & dramatic seascapes by pressing a brush loaded with shiny red...
On Being Demanding
The Belgian writer Georges Simenon is most famous for his series of detective novels featuring Commissaire Maigret of the Police Judiciaire in Paris, but he also wrote other books that he called his romans durs or “hard novels.” ...
More on Edges
A few days ago, one of my students asked me if I had posted anything new to my blog lately. My answer was no, I hadn’t, because my 50th entry, written back in July, seemed like a good place to end. But these words were scarcely out of my...
On Summing Up
Anticipating that this blog post would be my fiftieth, I recently printed out all of the previous ones & read them through. I placed them in categories as though they were in the chapters of a book & I wondered if, beyond the obvious one, there...
On Being a Flâneur
The other evening at dinner, I remarked to Tom, “Well, today I really felt like an artist.” He gave me his “I-don’t-know-where-this-is-going-but-I’m-willing-to-follow-you-there” look & waited for me to continue. Here’s what I...
On Pattern, Shape & Form
Last month some friends & I went to the Chicago Flower & Garden Show, an annual event strategically timed to free me from the iron grip of Seasonal Affective Disorder & to offer me a welcome respite from the sight of my winter-weary backyard where last...
On Courage
Scattered about on a bulletin board in my studio are several brief-but-pithy quotes attributed to artists, such as To see is to know (da Vinci) & Drawing is the fountainhead & substance of art (Michelangelo). I’ve relied...
On Freight Trains
Tom & I are currently staying in the area where I grew up & on our first night here, a freight train went through town. We had arrived late; it was almost midnight before I was ready to tumble into bed. For me, travel days are always...
On Dutch Art
One of the great joys of our recent trip to Europe was seeing the 16th & 17th C. Dutch art that has thrilled my soul since adolescence. Standing a few, trifling feet away from the very paintings that I had once pored over on the pages of books was,...