Woman Holding a Balance
By Poetry Issue 69
If the painting-within-the-painting, hanging on the wall behind the standing woman— with its sinners wailing at Christ’s feet on Judgment Day— if that might be one way of looking at it, then the woman herself, who half obscures the painting, is another. All we know of her is what we see: how—weightless, effortless as flame—she…
Read MoreFrom the Lines of Life: Guy Chase and the Art of the (Extra)Ordinary
By Essay Issue 72
Although preparation for this article began in 2008, by the time it was completed Guy Chase had begun to lose his fight with cancer. He approved a near-final draft a few months before slipping away in his sleep on August 18, 2011, at the age of fifty-six. I am for an art that grows…
Read MoreArt from the Inside
By Essay Issue 71
Chuck Colson I ARRIVE IN TORONTO during gay pride week. The lampposts lining the city streets fly rainbow flags. Inside the Sheraton are still more rainbows, small ones on sticks stuck into the mulched flowerbeds surrounding the ten-foot waterfall cascading into a pool edged with flagstones. Every time I see one, I can’t help wondering…
Read MoreWhere Do You Stand? Anselm Kiefer’s Visual and Verbal Artifacts
By Essay Issue 77
I think it is beautiful to be justified (historically). ———Anselm Kiefer Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history. ———Hannah Arendt ANSELM KIEFER is one of the few artists working today who have transcended the vicissitudes and fashions of the contemporary art world. His stature among artists working after World…
Read MoreInsider/Outsider/In: The Art of Jennifer Anne Moses
By Essay Issue 79
THE SUNDAY TRAVEL SECTION of the New York Times would seem, on the face of it, an unexpected venue for an artistic confession, but for the multifaceted Jennifer Anne Moses—fiction writer, spiritual memoirist, and painter, as well as a self-confessed “liberal East Coast Jew”—it was an acutely appropriate venue, effectively the still point of…
Read MoreCarnal Beauties: The Art of Allison Luce
By Essay Issue 80
CERAMICIST ALLISON LUCE makes biomorphic portraits that seem almost excessively beautiful. Each piece revels in its physicality, its undeniable materiality, in its earthy substance—clay—and organic forms. Her four-part Serpent Tree series serves as an apt introduction to her work. In Primoris Ortus, for example, assemblages of swelling, vegetative curves stand alongside works suggestive of eroded rock…
Read MoreNoah Buchanan and the Renewal of Mystery
By Essay Issue 81
IT WAS THE FIRST FULL DAY of the fall semester at the New York Academy of Art, and California artist Noah Buchanan was riding the Number 2 subway to lower Manhattan’s Tribeca district where he would disembark five blocks south of the school. The Brazilian beat of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints thrummed on…
Read MorePlates from a Forgotten Book: The Paintings of Kim Alexander
By Essay Issue 81
IT IS A RARE mild September afternoon in Dallas when Kim Alexander sits me down. We are at her kitchen table, mere yards from her studio, which has spilled out of one spare bedroom into that familiar mid-mod home space, the den. In the regional vernacular for which we Texans are known but which we…
Read MoreKaren Laub-Novak: A Catholic Expressionist in the Era of Vatican II
By Essay Issue 83
IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…
Read MoreThe Open Window
By Poetry Issue 83
In Pierre Bonnard’s The Open Window the artist looks outward from his modest living room. It is summer, the heat baking the orange on the grill-like wall. To the right, a woman is resting in a chair, escaping as she can the sizzling midday air in which even her quizzical black cat blurs in the…
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