More on: art

We’re talking here about two projects: rereading art history to recover a wider context for religious meaning, and rereading it to recover a wider sense of the art historical project. You are aiming at the first, which is the larger and more important one, but our examples have been mainly the second, which would be a tonic to the discipline.

Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.

Meaning does not only happen when we make it. We make meaning out of a world that is already meaningful.

I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly.

Katherine Mooney Brooks on art, illness, and the failures of the body

Leni Dothan examines and critiques how motherhood has been presented in western art history.

You are alone naked in a forest, surrounded. Alone, surrounded by a live ossuary of trees, shed twig, spell of oval stone.

I’m tired of beauty. Or rather, I’m tired of hearing the word “beauty” overused and misapplied.

What has changed me since turning thirty is a result of my Christian conversion. What I wanted as a painter was always there, but when I met God, he told me, “You can paint anything you want.”

i. Mid-morning Inside the rented van, a stone-gray moth head-butts the windshield, drops stunned in a looping catch, and rises to the same task, intent, not on light—there are other windows, some of them open—but this one light. Now it pauses in a midair hover, its hinged wings wide and minutely scripted in a flowing…