When I sent my characters to the Cirque Fernando in Where the Light Falls to see Mlle. La La perform, I had no idea that the real woman painted by Edgar Degas was a mixed-race performer. Read More
Picturing a World
Norman Garstin
November 28, 2016
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For the most part, I try to focus on lesser known women artists in this blog; but today my attention was caught by a man new to me, Norman Garstin. He studied with Carolus-Duran in Paris, painted in Brittany at about the same time Read More
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Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner
November 23, 2016
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How marvelous to see Asians, African-Americans, a native of the First Nation, and women among those invited to Uncle Sam’s 1869 Thanksgiving Dinner—with universal suffrage as centerpiece! Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Read More
Into another wood
November 13, 2016
In reply to a question from Haruki Murakami about conducting Mahler, Seiji Ozawa says in a November 5th interview in the Guardian that when he "first saw the work of Klimt and Egon Schiele, they came as a real shock to me. Since then, I’ve made it a point Read More
Wan November
November 11, 2016
Tuesday, after I had voted, I came down with Lyme Disease. The nation came down with worse. How we deal with the next four years, how we heal, remains to be seen; but I take comfort in art like this. While it proposes no grand solutions, it enables us to cherish even the waning of the year. We must each find ways within our spheres to live our ideals, to practice art, to love nature, to nurture one another even if it means continuing to go into the woods where there are deer ticks. Read More
Hallowe’en 2016
October 31, 2016
Today’s image comes via It’s About Time, but could equally have come from Liberty Puzzles. As the 2016 election spirals down, I regret not having ordered one for distraction!
For a wealth of holiday postcards from the New York Public Library, click here.
And I’ve just discovered a book that bears looking into, American Holiday Postcards, 1905–1915. Addendum: For a helpful review, click here. Read More
For a wealth of holiday postcards from the New York Public Library, click here.
And I’ve just discovered a book that bears looking into, American Holiday Postcards, 1905–1915. Addendum: For a helpful review, click here. Read More
Not fallacy—art!
October 28, 2016
This week on a visit to the Sterling and Francine Art Institute, I saw again this painting by Inness, one of my favorites. An October 17th recent New Yorker article on Ursula Le Guin states, “From Thomas Hardy, she learned to handle strong feelings infiction by pouring them into landscapes, letting the settings carry part of the emotional charge. ‘There’s a patronizing word for that: the “pathetic fallacy,”’ she says. ‘It’s not a fallacy; it’s art.’” (p. 40) Read More
Villain in the narrative arc
October 11, 2016
Thanks to Greer Gilman for connecting me to this comment on Donald Trump from Zoe Williams in the Guardian: “There is no story arc for this man, no journey; he can get no better, and we already knew that he could get no worse. So his narrative is broken. He can no longer be the anti-hero of his own film; he can only be the villain in somebody else’s.” Read More
Joan Carlile at the Tate
September 25, 2016
Blog tip: A portrait of a woman by artist Joan Carlile, ca. 1650, has been purchased by Tate Britain in London. Read more at the History Blog post, Tate acquires its earliest portrait by woman artist.
Stenographer or reporter?
September 19, 2016
Mattie Palmer, the heroine of ANONYMITY, my work-in-progress, is a “stenographer” or secretary in a publishing firm. Before going to New York around 1900, she had been a reporter in Cincinnati.
So far, I haven’t been able to find the short story, “A Girl Who Became a Reporter,” for which this is an illustration; Read More
So far, I haven’t been able to find the short story, “A Girl Who Became a Reporter,” for which this is an illustration; Read More