January 10, 2012
At just the moment, midway down the ramp of the Guggenheim, when the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective installation, All, began to lose its amusing edge and spectacular novelty, and become tiresome, I was led off-ramp, off-track by my friend Susan Bee who had escaped through a small portal to see Kandinsky’s Painting with White Border, a [...]
Posted in art, painting, sculpture | Tagged artists' writings, Grahame Wienbren, Maurizio Cattelan, Vassily Kandinsky
January 1, 2012
I woke up one morning this week, walked into my studio while still half asleep, looked around and thought, my work is just not enough. This may not seem like a good start to a New Year of positive thinking, but I immediately understood that this thought, surging from the liminal space between sleep and [...]
Posted in art, painting, sculpture | Tagged African art, Andrea Mantegna, Michael Baxandall, painting, portraiture, Renaissance art, Sandro Botticelli
December 8, 2011
Two painting exhibitions currently across the street from each other on West 25th street challenge any notions one might still harbor about the greater value of being “younger than Jesus.” By some fortuitous coincidence just a few steps separate “Joan Mitchell: The Last Paintings” at Cheim & Read from “Matta: A Centennial Celebration” at Pace [...]
Posted in art, painting | Tagged H. C. Westermann, Jack Tworkov, Joan Mitchell, old age style, Richard Artschwager, Roberto Matta, Willem de Kooning
August 18, 2011
This is the continuation of an earlier piece from July 28th *St. Francis in the Desert June 9th of this year was an exceptionally hot day in New York. I don’t have air conditioning yet in my new home so I passed the day cooling off in three of New York’s miraculous caves filled with [...]
Posted in art, film, painting | Tagged Chauvet Cave, Duccio, Frick Museum, Giovanni Bellini, Judith Thurman, Philip Guston, St. Francis in the Desert, Werner Herzog
July 28, 2011
I’ve spent the summer with my thoughts trapped inside three caves–the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave featured in Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the cave inside a malachite mine deep in the Ural Mountains featured in a 1946 Russian children’s movie The Stone Flower, and the cave whose entrance lurks in the shadow of Giovanni Bellini’s St. [...]
Posted in art, film, painting | Tagged 3D, Aleksandr Putshko, Cave of Forgotten Dream, cave paintings, Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave, Frick Museum, Giovanni Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, Star Trek, Stephen Colbert, The Red Shoes, The Stone Flower, Werner Herzog
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