Two Faced

But only one brain and one stomach. More here.

Try This

After listening to the following two versions of Wm Blake's Tyger try playing them at the same time. Maybe it's just me.....?

Is This Really A Poem For Children?

Another Version

Contemporary Artists I Can Tolerate #1

Sometimes The Standards Seem Really Low But I Don't Know How To Have Fun!!

Fascinating Mid-Nineteenth Century Painter

Thomas Chambers (1808-1869) was a rather naive English born American  painter who seems to have painted many marine scenes and eastcoast landscapes. I love the color and the primitive realism. Below is a picture of the Connecticut river valley very near where I live. The foreground bush like shape has me perplexed. In the background you can see the Oxbow feature of the river right near Mt Tom. See more of his work at the 19th-Century American Women blog.

Thomas Chambers . Connecticut Valley. National Gallery of Art

Thomas Chambers View of Nahant (Sunset), Boston, circa 1843

Thomas Chambers View of West Point

Harold Bloom-Guilty of Having Strong Beliefs in a Post-Modern World

I love Harold Bloom! It's like being a hidden Fascist or Marxist in a world that only accepts context and relativism. Check out this article in The National Review.
Here are a few of the criticisms leveled at Bloom, ideas that I cherish about the man (who is unafraid of any post-modern claptrap!):

"BE THAT AS IT MAY, Bloom’s ideas, as he elaborated them across a half-dozen more books, came to center on notions derived from gnosticism, the ancient body of mystical beliefs. Gnosticism held that the world of matter, created by inferior gods, represents a fall from a condition of divine unity or fullness. Each of us contains a fragment of that godly fire, a spark trapped within our material selves—which means not only our bodies, but our minds or psyches as well, our intellectual and moral beings. Our true soul is hidden to us, occulted: salvation consists of achieving gnosis, experiential knowledge of that daemon. (This is very far from “self-knowledge” as we ordinarily understand it.) All this matters because Bloom finds gnostic ideas, which persisted well beyond the ancient world, to be widespread in modern spiritual thought, not only at the heart of the Romantic tradition, but also in what he calls the American religion, which he sees as having emerged in the nineteenth century in such sects as Mormonism, Southern Baptism, Christian Science, and others—and which, he says, has little to do with Christianity"

And here is the angst that I fully understand:

Romanticism sought to overcome the world of death, in the wake of the loss of religious explanations and comforts, by creating what Stevens called “supreme fictions”: new systems of symbolic meaning to redeem the cold universe of matter. Bloom sees gnostic ideas—Emerson’s Over-soul, Whitman’s “real Me”—at the center of those attempts; but more to the point, gnosticism serves as a supreme fiction for him. Beneath the jargon and the self-inflation, there is in Bloom an undersong of yearning, of spiritual hunger, a lonely person’s need for solace and belief. What eloquence his writing has—its subsidence, sometimes, into calm simplicity—what claims his work to be the thing to which he says all criticism should aspire, wisdom literature, originates in this urge. (“The ultimate use of Shakespeare is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing.”) The pathos of his thought, as he wrestles the poetic angels for their blessing, lies just in the fact that he both believes and disbelieves his fables of redemption. The ecstatic certainties of Blake or Whitman—imagination’s infinitude, the soul’s immortality—are not for such as him. He is condemned, instead, to Stevens’s melancholy skepticism. Supreme fictions, but only fictions—held together, for the space of the verse, by poetic lines of force."

I Love Helen Mirren-Kandinsky Not So Much

Artist I Just Discovered

Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan The Chase 1946

Sidney Nolan The Slip

Sidney Nolan Death of Sergeant Kennedy at Stringybark Creek 1946

Elizabeth Langslow poses with some of her grandfather Sidney Nolan"s  Ned Kelly and Kelly Gang paintings  at the NGV.

In the following video is a beautiful multi-panel painting of "The Riverbend; look closely for any of Nolan's trademark figures. Read about Mr. Nolan here.

Sidney Nolan - "Riverbend"

What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?

de Kooning: The Great Woman Paintings

Must See Show-Perhaps The Best Paint Handler Ever!

Top Twenty

Albert Pinkham Ryder by Marsden Hartley

I had thought about putting together what I consider the top ten greatest artist of all time. But then I couldn't decide what "great" really meant. It is not merely most important, meaning most influential, but also having a timeless quality. An example would be my friend Andy Warhol. I must grudgingly admit he is the most important, influential artist of the second half of the twentieth century extending into the present. But I feel that influence has been so damaging to the humanist tradition of painting that I can not consider him great. All I could come up with was three and one of those was a tie. They are (in order) Michelangelo, van Gogh/ Gauguin and Picasso with perhaps (don't know) maybe Giotto or Courbet or Manet? And I guess maybe the whole ancient Greek sculpture/ architecture team. So I put together a list of my top ten favorite artists:


1. Michelangelo

2. van Gogh

3. Gauguin

4. Picasso

5. Beckmann

6. Guston

7. Hartley

8. Bacon

9. Titian

10. Cornell

And now for the next ten:

11. Ryder

12. William Blake

13. Kitaj

14. Manet

15. de Kooning

16. Winslow Homer

17. The Mystical Beuys

18. Matisse

19. Gorky

20. Morris Graves

Of course this list can and will change without notice on the wings of whimsey. Notice that I am mostly attracted to dead artists. What can I say? Next I will try to put together a list of living artist I can tolerate. Pardon me for being a misanthrope!

Failure Will Set You Free If You Let It

BEING AN ARTIST MEANS you never have to say, “I failed.” Think of the advantage that gives artists over the rest of the plodding classes. Artists never have to admit the lack of wit, talent, or stamina needed to conceive of work, realize it and see it through. All they have to do is rummage through their junk pile and declare everything in it “unrealized.”

More at Studio Matteras

Total Studio Envy...Though He's Been Painting Exactly The Same For 30 Yrs.

L'Hippocampe (The Sea Horse)

Pure Life-of what we are made