The other thing that’s difficult about this way of encountering art, is that it takes trust. You are asked to trust the painting before you understand it, before you can see what it holds for you. You are asked to turn over your attention and your imagination to someone else, not knowing how they may chose to use them. To look at art in this way is vulnerable.
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Original Derivation
For each of these, Dylan, Bach, jazz, Shakespeare, and chant—the bread and butter is something not made, but received. More than that, using this given material seems to have enhanced their originality. It gives them more room to think.
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April: “Warrior with Shield”
Though the surface of the statue was pockmarked, scratched and pitted–the limbs didn't seem severed or mangled, so much as ground down, worn away as wood or stone is worn away by water or weather or time. For that reason the statue seemed to occupy two time frames, one brief, one prolonged. Both the violent instant, the impact of a blinding light, an obliterating moment of force–but also the slow duration over which the supposedly permanent is steadily, patiently effaced.
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Stepping Through the Blue: “The Truman Show” and Ancient Cosmology
Each day, there are countless demands on our time and our energy. We work to provide for ourselves and our families in the short time we have on this globe. But despite all that, we do well to remember the poet Hopkins’ call: “Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!” The entire cosmos, from the electrons that orbit their nuclei to the planets that orbit other stars in other galaxies, cries out for our attention and promises to reward the one who stops to see.
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Happy Public Domain Day 2023!
This year’s list items entering the public domain in the United States includes several works from 1927, including: Steppenwolf, Hardy Boys, Metropolis, and a smattering of works on evolution and faith.
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Featured Artist: Abigail Halpin
Abigail Halpin describes herself as a New England-based illustrator, creating art with a focus on story and narrative. Check out her work here!
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The Landscape of the Human Face : Two Films by Carl Th. Dreyer (Film Recommendation)
Though he only made about a dozen pictures over a long span of time (1919-1960s), Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s influence permeates the development of film as an art medium.
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Featured Artist: Christen Mattix
My work is about an intimate connection to place, community and the Divine. I create vibrant paintings and fiber artworks probing the boundaries between realism and abstraction, the self and the environment. Each work reveals inner and outer landscapes simultaneously as if presenting reality strained through poetry. Using a variety of layers and materials, I give form to the multidimensional worlds we inhabit. As a social practice artist, I seek to challenge culturally-ingrained patterns of inhabiting public space. My creative work begins on a street corner, along a river or on a park bench. I set up my easel or begin knitting a half-mile rope. People stop to talk and…
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Featured Artist: Matthew Paul Cleary
I first approached abstraction through sculpture—specifically the materials they were created from. What metaphorical weight do particular materials hold? How can these materials convey a message or a story to the viewer?
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New Public Domain Works for 2022
It’s January again, which means thousands of books, films and other copyrighted items entered the public domain and are now free to be appreciated, reprinted or artistically remixed.
