More on: visual art

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…

In the current issue of Image, #59, in an excerpt from a new book titled God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, Dan Siedell wrote about the importance of an “educated appetite” to understanding contemporary art. We sat down to ask him about how we go about developing such an appetite.   Image: I…

ON MAY 16 of this year, Night Sky #2 by Vija Celmins, on view at the 2008 Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, was vandalized by one of the museum’s own security guards, who used a key to cut a gouge down the painting’s middle, damaging it beyond repair. While this act was…

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, A luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been…

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…

IN THE MID-1980s, just shy of my fortieth birthday, I found myself out of work and divorced. It was a crash landing of all my aspirations, and crawling from the wreckage of two traumas, I was grieved, confused, desperate—cut off from the world I thought I understood. In the fragile years that followed, I tried…

Neighbors, Strangers,  Family, Friends Four Artists Reflect on Charis The traveling art exhibition Charis—Boundary Crossings: Neighbors Strangers Family Friends features work by seven Asian and seven North American artists. The show grew out of a two-week seminar in Indonesia sponsored by Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity and the Council for…

We played the flute for you and you did not dance…. ——————————————–—Matthew 11:17 IN HIS INTRODUCTION to a collection of medieval Welsh tales, the late John Updike describes his reaction: we feel in reading these stories, he says, “as if we are dancing with a partner who hears a distinctly different music.” The Charis exhibit—an…

THE YEAR 1992 marked the release of a film that challenged all conventional notions of filmmaking—and that nevertheless received nearly universal critical acclaim, much to the surprise of its makers. That film was Baraka. Filmed at 152 locations in twenty-four countries on six continents with no narrative or dialogue, Baraka was described as “a guided…