Why does any bird sing?
The above cartoon has been making the rounds among my musician friends this week, and for good reason. Maya Angelou said the caged bird sings for freedom, but in fact birds—caged or free—sing because their songs are hardwired into them. The mother of a young performer said to me recently, “She has always been a …
I’ve been looking forward to this!
My website is online as of today. It’s not a finished piece of work, and has been beset with difficulties, including a hijacked URL, but here it is: https://www.watch-me-paint.com/ The website has an RSS feed from this blog, so I went back and captured an image of it with this post repeating itself. Call this …
Rejuvenation
Workspace or spiritual battleground? This weekend I spoke with a former student who is now in his fourth semester at Rhode Island School of Design. Inevitably, we discussed criticism. He made a point I’ve heard from other students: all art school criticism is fundamentally self-referential. What matters isn’t the technique, intellectual rigor or theory brought …
Seven Deadly Sins
Justicia, left, and Veritas, right, by Walter Seymour Allward, c. 1920. Cast for the never-finished memorial to King Edward VII, which was interrupted by the onset of WWII, they were found buried in 1969 and installed in front of the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa in 1970. (Photos by Carol L. Douglas) In reading …
Dissidence and the triumph of audacity
Nadia Jelassi with two of the figures from her sculpture, Celui qui n’a pas. Until her arrest in August of last year, artist Nadia Jelassi was unknown in the West. (As of this writing, she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.) She might have remained unknown, but for her arrest on August 17, 2012 in Tunis …