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: contemporary art
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…
Try, try again …
TASK: Make a quick drawing every morning for a month – using the same, simple setup (a kettle, a cup & a vase with a dry flower) as motif. Learning something? I’m not sure yet – but maybe … if I just keep going???
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…
Joan Jonas – Drawings
study day Joan Jonas “Dog Drawing” from a performance with Robert Ashley at La MaMa, New York, 2009 Oil stick on paper 60 × 40.6 cm Joan Jonas was born in New York in 1936. She received a BA from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1958, and an MFA in sculpture from Columbia…
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…
There’s nothing at all to figure out … I’m just here to create
I’m reading Rick Rubin’s new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It’s the best book on making art & living a creative life I’ve read since reading Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Here’s an excerpt from Rubins new book: Freedom There…
All the corners of my world
This is what my tutor told me – the instructions are simple: I almost never work with charcoal (I have to remember to use it more, so simple & strong) – I discovered that the different kinds of charcoal I used here were very different regarding erasability. (Next time choose the more erasable ones). (……
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…
sub rosa 