mjamieson
Backing into the Future
Previous blogs have talked about writers who use painters has protagonists in order to illustrate their own struggles with writing. In his novel Orfeo, Richard Powers uses a musician and composer as protagonist to explore […]
A Beguiling Irrelevance?
A. S. Byatt’s latest book of short stories, Medusa’s Ankles. is a joy to read after having waded through a slew of glib novels by young writers seeking to push the boundaries of the form […]
Writers & Painters.
Authors often like to use painters as protagonists because they illustrate some of the issues and concerns that are relevant to all artists. Sometimes these works reflect the reality of life for most painters but […]
The Mother Goddess Debate
The other thing I love about studying Neolithic Art is the raging debate among archeologists on the Mother Goddess issue. Supporters of the idea that the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother preceded the Father God […]
Eco-Feminism and the Neolithic Era
On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the UN, The International Association of Art (AIAPI), a UNESCO Official Partner, has released an artists call for an International Contemporary Art Exhibition: HUMAN RIGHTS?The Future’s […]
The Neolithic vs the Avant Garde
My recent work is inspired by European Neolithic images from thousands of years ago. While many artists have been inspired by so called “primitive” artwork of either contemporary or ancient cultures, these paintings are inspired […]
On Philosophy
On Philosophy Previous blogs have wrestled with the conflict between contemporary art and aesthetics and attempted to identify and understand the problems and philosophical efforts to resolve the quandary of aesthetics. Wikipedia defines aesthetics as: […]
On the New Academy
Academia, Art and the New Art Academy As further ongoing research into the place of painting in the 21st Century, this blog looks at some modernist art criticism from the 1960’s & ’70’s. It briefly […]
On Criticism
To further my ongoing research into the place of painting in the 21st Century, I have been reading modernist art criticism from the 1960’s & ’70’s. In this blog I will briefly review & expand […]
On Identity
This post continues the exploration of the philosophical currents that shape current art practices, in particular, painting. A previous post, More on Painting, touched on the issue of identity, discussed in terms of “self-differing” or […]
Art, Activism & the Avant-Guard
Art as Counterbalance In a rather startling development, what could in previous years have been described as a general lack of interest in the arts appears to be blossoming into antipathy towards the arts in […]
Even more on Painting
These posts are an effort to understand how painting has become a suspect art form, freighted with assumptions of its strong & irredeemable connection to everything that was wrong with art before the post-modern revolution. […]
A Culture of Change
Richard Powers book, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance includes an interesting section about progress and technology. Powers suggests that, as culture and its tools changed more in 30 years than in the […]
Theories of Art
Been reading the third in a series out of the Routledge & University College Cork, called Doubt, by Richard Shiff. Though it’s a critique of critics, it has interesting ideas for me as an artist. […]
Where’s the Fun?
At first I was put off by Harold Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticsm Art on the Edge (1) by his use of terms like “the artist is a man who…” and almost quit […]
Possibilities
My recent paintings are inspired by the conceptual world of Quantum Physics and explore how these theories can be explored through paintings. Quantum physics suggests that objects exist not so much as objects but as […]
Transcendence
Modernisms & Postmodernisms The art historian/critic James Elkins made an interesting statement in his 2005 book on Modernisms & Postmodernisms, Master Narratives and their Discontents (1). The focus of the book is the role of […]