Katherine Keenum

Of course, from the get-go, it's more like fiction than a news story: Estate sale, item from attic, auction set at $10,000–12,000, and, blooey! bidders take risk that a painting is no copy but a real Rembrandt. Final price: $1.4 million. Waaaaaay too pat (even if true), and, yet—what would you do with it? What story would you tell?

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Yesterday, I listened to the beautiful Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College. The order of service included a deeply moving sonnet, Refugee by Malcolm Guite. To be truly meaningful, the Christmas season must acknowledge the dark as well as the light. In this year when Putin's war is an extension of the slaughter of the innocents and immigrants are freezing on our borders, let us be reminded by images of the Holy Family on the road that we are one family and need to look after each other. After reading about immigrants being taken in by Detroit shelters for this year's Christmas storm, I have made a special gift to Forgotten Harvest. Even a kindly smile can be like a candle lit in the dark. Have a joyous and loving Christmas.
 
Image via National Gallery of Ireland

The Spanish painter Sorolla captures the intensity of a 19th C scientific researcher and his colleagues in a laboratory. Outside science fiction, the topic of scientific research is not much explored in art or literature (some of my own chapter was edited out). In painting, I can think of only a few medical examples,  Read More 

The Renicks’ copy of Rembrandt’s Flight allowed me to show Edward and Jeanette reacting together to the same evocative object but with different emotional responses. In this scene, the painting embodies emotional light and shadow, the need for safety and the longing for transcendence. In general, it illustrates artists’ concern for sources of light and where the falls. The hidden moon also echoes Charlie Post’s sickle moon, and the fire adds that touch of red or warm color that plays into several compositions in the book. Read More