Though the culinary tastes in this book are original and often complex, the recipes themselves are breathtakingly clear and often very simple.
Visual Arts Review: Known and Mysterious—Wendy Artin’s Watercolors in “From the Roman Studio”
Wendy Artin finds beauty everywhere – in a clutch of beets, old paintbrushes, ruined statues, the human body.
Visual Arts: Ambergris and Alchemy — A Pilgrimage to John Singer Sargent’s “Fumée d’Ambre Gris”
At times I leave off my avid samplings of one entrancement after another in a great museum. Instead, I make a pilgrimage dedicated to a single work, such as John Singer Sargent’s intoxicating woman in white in “Fumée d’Ambre Gris” at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Visual Arts Essay: What is a Moment? — Two paintings of the wounded Eurydice by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Of course, I have no idea what was in Corot’s mind. But the juxtaposition of these images appears to me to present two different moments in time, perhaps adjacent ones, perhaps as close as possible, like adjacent frames of a film.
Fuse Feature: “The Riddle behind the Riddle” — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Fifth Norton Lecture
Mistranslation weaves through this lecture, for every translation is a mistranslation. But that is what makes them fruitful. As soon as we mis-hear or fail to understand, the brain constructs an instant bit of narrative to bridge the gap in understanding.
Visual Arts Essay: Gods in the Gallery — A Visit to the Museum of Russian Icons
If the icon is both a window into the mystical experience of the painter and a door allowing the saint to come into the believer’s world, am I, unbeliever that I am, hoping to stand in the line of sight, to see what I can intercept of this uncanny conversation?
Visual Arts Review: Wendy Artin — Translating Marble Onto Paper
Wendy Artin is not just about representation. Her paintings bring up all sorts of questions about the complexities of beauty. How do we build up beauty from matter? What happens to beauty over time? Does an object lose its beauty when time wears away at it?
Visual Arts Review: Flowers as the Work Table for the Imagination
Inescapably erotic, flowers are all about desire. What are they but a glorious exhibition and frame of their own genitals?
Visual Arts Review: Emotion, Time, and Eros in the work of Damon Lehrer and Rick Berry
Comparing Rick Berry’s expressionist paintings with Damon Lehrer’s exquisitely rendered, classical and contemplative work made me wonder about the expressionist style in general. By this I mean that artistic terrain where the passions, vehemence, or ferocity of the artist so colors the work as to form a powerful but distorting lens through which we see the work.
Visual Arts Review: The Strange Beauty of “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge”
The astonishing exhibition “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge” has the strange beauty and density of a scientific diagram or star chart. You can’t examine it deeply all at once. It is best to take a certain reading, see what questions arise, and go off to your lair to think.