Visual Art
Stuff Christian College Kids Don’t Like
Just a few months after graduating from a Christian college, I found an article that encapsulated the curiousness of the community I was leaving. Called “One Island Under God,”...
Other Post
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The Art of War
October 19, 2012 -
Montmartre to The Moulin Rouge: Can an Art Scene be Fabricated?
September 26, 2012 -
My Mother Versus Modern Art
May 18, 2012 -
Waiting for Blooms
March 30, 2012 -
Ito Jakuchu: the Preserved Colors of Independence
March 30, 2012 -
The Isness of Art
March 09, 2012
On the Validity of the Vogel Collection
A recent visit to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) led me to ask several questions-- some specific, some general-- about little local art museums. I kind of grew up at my little local art-history-science-et cetera museum: the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts—at least, my memories of childhood visits there are extraordinarily vivid and beautiful. Yet the Berkshire Museum was a gallimaufry at best: a...
Catching Glimpses of the Commonplace
Have you ever thought that you need photographs to prove your experiences because your stories are not enough? Horrible storytellers, like me, rely on images to tell our tales, both ordinary and extraordinary. Typically, the best spoken stories involve uncommon events: strange encounters with the homeless or rescuing an outrageously drunken friend from his demise. But what about the ordinary, the everyday moments ...
David’s Dropped Stone
Near where the peasant girl is being raped, and in the same room as another attempt, there stands in the Villa Borghese, a stone David facing a Goliath we can’t see. In a city where the classical and Christian collide, bristle, fizz, and even combine, these galleries, and this sculpture stand out as strange for that monstrous marriage. I knew Gianlorenzo Bernini was a great sculptor — one doesn’t escape Rome...
Caught and Taught
One of the creative venues in which I dwell is photography. Dare I call myself a photographer? I did until I read a post on Rodney Smith’s blog in which he wonders, “If I am a photographer in the first place (which is extremely questionable with great aspirations, and I know one when I see it, but whether I have achieved the Holy Grail of being a photographer is a whole other matter) . . . ” If Rodney Smith, wh...
It's an Introvert's World
As early as your first steps and words, people begin to tell you things about yourself. What you’re good at. How you should behave. How you can improve. People uplift you. People put you down. It’s hard to figure out who you are when you barely have time to decide for yourself. But once you discover a part of who you are on your own, even if it is the absurd fact that you prefer Mondays to Fridays, o...
Why I Shoot Film
For too long in the early days of our marriage, my husband and I were without a camera. We have no photographs of our long drive from New York State to the Deep South a few days after our wedding; none from our honeymoon to Portland, Oregon. I sold my 35mm SLR, a Pentax ZX-M, to my father before our wedding for two hundred bucks. As far as I know he never used it. I had never used it much either. [caption id="attach...
Eclipsing the Object
In 2001, a work by Damien Hirst, an installation piece valued at six figures and consisting of, “a collection of half-full coffee cups, ashtrays with cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, a paint-smeared palette” and “newspaper pages strewn around the floor,” was efficiently disposed of by a cleaning man. Said that man, Emmanuel Asare: “As soon as I clapped eyes on it, I sighed because there was so much mess...
