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There You Are

November 3, 2017 in Age Matters, Art Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Snapshot, Spirit Matters

My routine this fall: Watch the sunrise with the seagulls and the seals, then walk into the dunes. For the rest of the morning, write. Afterward walk into the woods and sometimes go thrifting, naming my finds consolation prizes or rewards depending on the day’s work. From then, bid the sun farewell from a west-facing beach, and make dinner from fisheries and farmstands in the area. Star-gazing from the hammock beneath the birch trees, and asleep by 9:30, tucked in with a grey-gold permakitten purring at my feet. This has been my perfect life, and it has turned me into the space crone mermaid of my dreams.

Last night I was telling a dear friend in Brooklyn about how sad I’ll be to leave the Cape next week. “I’m running out of supplies,” I told her. “I’m on my last bag of Oslo Coffee beans and down to my last bottle of vitamins. I’m even running out of wine. But it’s so hard to imagine not being able to run to the sea as soon as I wake. And how will I get unstuck in my writing when I can’t walk in the woods to clear my head?” “Spend this last week just soaking it all up,” she said. “It will be the best week of your life.” She is an artist and knows how to be inside the moment while also storing it for her paintings and drawings. I was grateful for her glorious plan, and grateful for the reminder of why I love New York City so much. It is there–scratch that, it is here–that I find my people one way or another. What’s most beautiful: once you find kindred spirits, they’re inside you wherever you go, whether they be tree spirits or seal spirits or loudmouth millennial spirits. Love is love.

Art credit: Detail from a Marlene Frontera drawing. Photo: me.

Beautiful Resistance: Why Protest Art Matters

August 24, 2017 in Art Matters, Book Matters, Film Matters, Music Matters, Queer Matters, TV Matters

Recently I was at a dinner party of my peers, which is to say: Not Young People. (Thus far, most Generation Xers refuse to refer to themselves as middle-aged, though we surely are.) The subject came around, as it inevitably does these days, to the Trump administration and the turmoil wracking our country and world (besides France). ““I feel like there’s no protest music being made anymore,” said one friend. “Dude,” said another. “I feel like there’s no protest art being made anymore, period.”

On the way home, I realized how much I disagreed with that statement. One of the fundamental roles of art always has been to shed light on the human condition–to increase our empathy for each other. Even art that ostensibly focuses only on beauty–Monet’s lilies, for example, or ee cummings’s lowercase homages–is also about love and mortality, which brings us back to the human condition. And the concept of “beauty” has always been subjective and intensely fraught; read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye if you need a refresher on that concept.

But let’s not be fatuous. Not all art is equally charged. Karen Finley’s performance art is a provocative tool of second-wave feminism while “Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2″ hardly challenges the status quo in any significant way. To even compare the two seems ridiculous, which begs the question: Isn’t there a place for fluff-o-tainment that allows us to turn our brains off sometimes? Isn’t there room in our cultural arena for, say, the “Real Housewives” television franchise and “The Wire,” David Simon’s potent examination of Baltimore power structures? For James Ellroy’s pulpy noir and Paul Beatty’s sharply observed fiction? For the works of kitsch masters Walter (and Margaret!) Keane and activist-artist Kerry James Marshall? Continue Reading →

Of Grace and Duty: Materialist Matisse

August 9, 2017 in Art Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Reviews

Much has been made of Henri Matisse’s use of color, and much should be. Arguably the most adventurous colorist in the history of art, the artist’s palettes improved upon peak foliage, peak blooms, and the many feathers in a peacock’s plume. The painterly equivalent of a pregnant lady’s incongruous cravings, his hues forever altered Western civilization’s understanding of how color could explode upon a canvas. Along with the introduction of LSD, he and other Fauvists may have been centrally responsible for the rainbow splendor of the 1960s.

But in “Matisse in the Studio” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (it’s since moved on to London’s Royal Academy of Arts), the artist’s patterns are as important as his palettes. Spanning fifty years, the show is organized into five sections – “The Object Is an Actor,” “The Nude,” “The Face,” “Studio as Theatre,” and “Essential Forms” – and features his paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and cutouts as well as key possessions that inspired him. Not all of these objects of affection are high-falutin’; among them are a chocolate pot, a green glass vase, a short chair, a pewter jug, haitis (embroidered hanging cloths) from North Africa, and masks and figurines from sub-Saharan Africa. But he appreciated each enough to use in his work again and again. “He acquired things not because of their material worth, but because of how they spoke to him,” MFA co-curator Helen Burnham has said.

In his paintings, aglow with ochres and mauves and tomato reds, female subjects do not dominate so much as contribute shapes and shades to whole series of shapes and shades. In what has been called a “quantity-quality equation,” areas of color, each marked by a different pattern, are arranged across his canvases so that they are all accorded their own value. In Matisse the Master, Hilary Spurling quotes him as saying: “Peace and harmony is always my aim.” With everything as foreground and therefore background too, this aim is abundantly evident. Each of his canvases constitutes a flourishing democracy, if ever there’s been one. (America should take note.) Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy