I feel the sadness of the city, a sadness all the more powerful because everything around suggests that there is nothing to be sad about. «BLACK PAPER – Writing in a Dark Time» by TEJU COLE A new, beautifully disturbing essay collection by Teju Cole. If I am to highlight some of them … 1)…
Tag: aesthetics
The beautiful ugliness of Phyllida Barlow
Why don’t you have a look at this: For almost 60 years, British artist Phyllida Barlow (1944-2023) took inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. She created large-scale yet anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim, plaster and cement. These…
The Pensive Image (cont.)
Hanneke Grootenboer’s text is dense and rich, very dense. I dance my way across, picking up notes here & there. Grootenboer quotes Hesse, saying: “Chaos can be structured as non-chaos.” — Eva Hesse It’s a beautiful line, almost like a kōan. Hesse also said: “Don’t ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work…
And all art is poetry
Creativity is an exploratory process to find the concealed material within. We won’t always discover it. If we do, it may not make sense. A seed could draw us because it contains something we don’t understand, and this vague attraction will be as close to knowing as we ever get. Some aspects of the self…
studio morning
All winter I’ve been working on a series of paintings with the working title “The Art Disagreeableness”. It’s (unpleasantly?) personal. It’s an ongoing project with the goal of transgressing my own proneness to making nice …, my inclination to believe my task in life is to please the world around me. Yesterday I sensed a…
Failed attempt
A few weeks ago I tried out a new palette; payne’s grey, raw umber, raw sienna, white & sanguine. It was all very well matched and elegant, almost sophisticated. But it wasn’t me. If “Art (as according to Jerry Saltz) is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.” This…
Christopher Le Brun
on painting “There aren’t any reasons for painting. That’s what’s special about it. It doesn’t need justification. It’s essential that it’s not used for other purposes. All of the things which will, as it were, take away from what’s mysterious about it.” Christopher Le Brun, more info: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/christopher-le-brun
From what I’ve read
(i) “To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner,…
Note to self
Brice Marden on the complexity of a very simple situation – Brice Marden is a contemporary American painter known for his subtle explorations of color and gestural lines. Marden belongs to a generation of American painters who arose in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism and during the onsets of Pop and minimalism.
Running in circles …
… or maybe not? The circle in shape of a vessel resembling a Moon Jar has shown up in several of my recent paintings Moon Jars were originally made during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). They are curvaceous, plain white porcelain jars resembling a full moon. They were made customarily to contain flowers or wine, but…
sub rosa 