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...
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...
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.” ...
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...
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...
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...
