After Thirty | Death, Change, and Time: Natalie Settles
By Interview Issue 100
It’s possible I will look back on my thirties as my most transformative passage.
Read MoreLife After Thirty | Collaboration and Community: Leslie Iwai
By Interview Issue 100
I’ve experienced more beauty than I could have hoped for or imagined, both aesthetically and relationally.
Read MoreLife After Thirty | The Path of Vocation: Olga Lah
By Interview Issue 100
As my artistic life grows, my spiritual life also matures; as I practice listening to the Spirit, I become a better artist. In who I am and in my work, I am striving towards creating a space where divinity meet the ordinary world.
Read MoreThe Empty Bed: Tracey Emin and the Persistent Self
By Essay Issue 90
THIS ALL HAPPENED IN 1998. A youngish woman, an artist, was at home in her council flat in the Waterloo neighborhood of central London. Council flats, you should know, are basically a British version of public housing. The woman’s name was Tracey Emin. She was having a lousy week. A relationship had gone sour. More…
Read MoreSystem and Chaos: The Art of Linnéa Spransy
By Essay Issue 89
I am interested in limits, specifically, in their ability to generate surprise, even freedom. —Linnéa Spransy The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. —Wendell Berry THE CANVASAS IN LINNÉA SPRANSY’S studio explode with images rich and strange: ribbons and lobes reproducing like bacteria in…
Read MoreStill Points: The Quiet Spaces of Wolfgang Laib
By Essay Issue 53
Let us start from one admitted fact: if prayer, meditation, and contemplation were once taken for granted as central realities in human life everywhere, they are so no longer. They are regarded, even by believers, as somehow marginal and secondary: what counts is getting things done. ————-—Thomas Merton, from Contemplation in a World of Action…
Read MoreOliver Barratt: Poetry of the Void
By Essay Issue 57
THE PHERICHE CLINIC clings to a windswept, rocky plateau two day’s hike below Everest Base Camp. Dwarfed by the majestic Himalayan peaks that surround it, this collection of low stone buildings is the highest medical clinic in the world, offering climbers and those who live there the care and expert treatment that are essential in…
Read MoreGravity and Grace: The Art of Richard Serra
By Essay Issue 57
RICHARD SERRA’S Torqued Ellipse I and Torqued Ellipse II (1996-97), now permanently installed at Dia:Beacon, remind me of Simone Weil’s axiom that “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by the laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception” [see Plate 1]. These lines, from the opening of her book…
Read MoreThe House that Agnes Martin Built
By Essay Issue 63
A Grant of the Divine— That Certain as it Comes— Withdraws—and leaves the dazzled Soul In her unfurnished Rooms. ——————————Emily Dickinson PAINTER AGNES MARTIN, who died in Taos, New Mexico, in 2004, had the ability to make seemingly restrictive, minimalist forms pulse with life. Her paintings are nearly all made up of straight lines and…
Read MorePixelated Glories: The Graphic Excursions of Kathy T. Hettinga
By Essay Issue 66
DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…
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