More on: visual art

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…

MY ATTENTION WANDERED from the closely printed pages of my first Bible, inscribed for darling Thomas from Gran April 1943, to its all too few illustrations. This was wartime England, with rationing. The picture pages showed brightly lit scenes of temple worship furnished, as it were, from Harrods. Jesus was turned out in clothes better…

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I found, embedded in one of my parents’ liqueur bottles, a tiny brass wine goblet, a decorative marketing ploy. The toy-like quality of the goblet and the forbidden place I found it made it irresistible to me. I’ve kept it through the years: too small to display but too precious…

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…

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…