The Keeper of Lost Things (New York, NY, William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2017) is a novel that I abandoned after the first couple of chapters. I usually try to plow through […]
In her forward to The Gift by Lewis Hyde, Margaret Atwood says: “If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift. It will help keep you sane.” This is […]
Yesterday I spent the day at the French Creek Estuary, near to where I now live, counting birds on my eBird app. In 2 1/2 hours we counted 18 different species of birds. In or […]
As an artist I depend on writers to put into words their thoughts on some of the issues that all artists perennially grapple with. What is the point of making art? What is useful or […]
Now that I am once again living on an island, Island Time is a real phenomenon. It feels like there is more time but the priorities for how to use it have shifted. It is […]
Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers, poses the question – “is art a depiction of reality, a concentration of it, a superior substitute for it, or just a beguiling irrelevance?” (excerpt from the novel, […]
How relevant is it to épater les bourgeoisie anymore? The bourgeoisie have happily lapped up bold artistic experiments designed to shock them out of their complacency and have cannily turned them into marketable commodities. And […]
A. S. Byatt’s last book of short stories, Medusa’s Ankles, was a joy to read after having waded through a slew of glib novels by young writers seeking to push the boundaries of the form […]
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 […]
Paintings I created between 2019 – 2021 explored Neolithic art that was focused on female fertility and the regenerative power of the earth. I was most interested in the European Neolithic era which would have […]
My perspective is that of an eco-feminist artist, so I have explored issues of gender inequality to seek ways to understand and communicate, not only the problems, but their source. The problems are formidable. The […]
As discussed in other blogs, from 2019-2021, my work was inspired by European Neolithic images from thousands of years ago. In those blogs, I compared the societies that created Neolithic art to contemporary Western culture […]
how has suspicion of any clear statement of goals, reference to any absolute principles and denial of any metaphysical basis for existence or thought become the dominant paradigm?
Academia, Art and the New Art Academy As further research into painting in the 21st Century, this blog looks at some modernist art criticism from the 1960’s & ’70’s. It briefly reviews & expands on […]
This post continues the exploration of the philosophical currents that shape current art practices. A previous post, More on Painting, touched on the issue of identity, discussed in terms of “self-differing”, or the self as […]
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 […]
This and other 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 […]
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 […]
Been reading the third in a series out of the Routledge & University College Cork, called Doubt, by Richard Shiff. This book is also discussed in another blog .Though it’s a critique of critics, it […]
