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
The Saturnine Age and the Modern Genius
When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams - for example, the I.Q. test - but most know a genius by his work. The Brothers Karamazov is proof that Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a genius. Be it Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo, the man of genius is epoch-making because his work acutely affects history and seems to redefine our basic catego...
Albert Hastings and Other Strangers
“If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see just not their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame that we see them in.” - Frederick Buechner I am an unabashed people-watcher. I don’t mean to be rude; I’m just fascinated by humanity. I fu...
Paper Gives Peace
Sengoku is not a place you would find in any usual Tokyo guidebook. The nondescript metro stop is crammed with commuters passing through to Sugamo. But take exit A2, turn right, and walk ten minutes in a straight line, and you will find the Paper Nao shop, opened by owner Naoaki Sakamoto in 1984. Much of the initial stock was given as a gift, and in his book about paper, Sakamoto recounts the generosity of three pape...
Art in the Time of Holocaust
As I enter the building, darkness hems me in. The concrete, triangular building entraps me and allows only a sliver of light through its peaked top. I weave through the downward-sloping tunnel, with each turn glimpsing light at the end. This is Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel. And though walking the hard floors through the winding tunnels makes my feet and heart ache,...
Woodcuts in a Time of Destitution
The way I understand it, it was hard to find artists in Germany after World War II. Some had been killed, some had fled the country, and many, many German artists had connected their work so closely with Nazism that after the war, after the country stood shocked and ashamed of what it had done, the once successful artists were completely rejected. This left Germany desperate for artists. In a time when the country wa...
Shoot the Terminal
I do just enough corporate travel each year to push me into that category of fliers who are a bit more familiar with airports than they would really like to be. But this familiarity has a nice silver lining to it, and as a photographer, that translates to a target-rich environment for capturing people in a sort of raw, unrehearsed setting of life. So, how should one go about catching this unique environment wi...
Out of the Classroom, Into the Museum
Yesterday I went to a museum all by myself. Like most Americans, I used to go to museums mostly for class field trips. This type of museum-going tends to be more a social experience in which the group tries to see the greatest number of pieces, limited only by time and physical exhaustion. By contrast, yesterday was about the art-about seeing it and looking at it, and learning to receive it. Ugolino and His SonsS...
