The generosity of the medium, as Lee Friedlander would later put it, describes the chaos of the backstage scene and its attending excitement: note the missing bulb over the mirror, the awkwardness of Andy shaking hands while holding both a tape recorder and camera, the shadows of guitars on the wall, the lone hair brush […]

Over the years, beginning in the 1990’s during those extended painting campaigns on the northwest Irish coast where the corrosive impact of weather drastically revised my own expectations of form, I’ve become much more interested in what places feel like rather than with making transcriptions of conventional appearance. Stuart Shils, “The Last Days of Summer.” […]

Sir Anthony Caro, “Early One Morning.” 1962 © Anthony Caro Estate/Barford Sculptures Ltd. Image courtesy Tate Galleries, under fair use guidelines. If you’re old enough to remember the TV show that inspired the name of this post (both the British original and its American incarnation that aired on NBC a year after the BBC canned […]

…you can approach the paintings more casually, with a feeling of ease—with the sense that these are sketches for larger works. There is less to recognize. There is less formality. There is less area to navigate. The less here feels more. Alex Katz: Small Paintings 1987-2013 19 September – 2 November ’13 Peter Blum 20 […]

The spectacle we all saw on TV of ruined homes and homeowners, a somber-faced reporter asking someone who lost her home or, in too many cases, a loved one, “how do you feel?”—it was just was too much for me. What kind of answer did they want, those reporters? Peddling tragedy for ratings was repulsive […]

Spring Wish As from the Earth the light Balloon Asks nothing but release— Emily Dickinson Some mornings there was bread on the air and transoms opened to let the oaks wake you, light chains of pollen caught on the dog’s sleeping face.
 And afternoons of parades, people dressed like ghosts and cyclones, like government officials […]

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The title came to mind while I was painting. I envisioned North Truro on lower Cape Cod, wandered to Mykonos, followed by thoughts of Matisse’s Morocco paintings which led me to recall Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, soon I was hearing Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue… Emilia Dubicki ‘White Curtains @ the Blue Motel’ 2013. […]

The storms are getting worse–more frequent and more intense. And the science that says so blames climate change and points a finger at us. And rightly so. We know that the long term fix is the urgent fix, that we need to build smarter and in smarter places, and that we need to consume less. […]

The print—naked without the frame and the context of a formal space surrounding it—quickly succeeds or fails. Instead of looking at a great Robert Adams photograph, I’m simply looking at a print on a table, in the exact same way that I look at my own work, scrutinizing for flaws and moments of salvation. Photo […]