Has This Happened To You? If you go to art museums and galleries you will probably recognize this. You leave the Met, say, and step back out into the world of Fifth Avenue and everything is changed. This happened to me most memorably leaving the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. His urban landscape was suddenly there, as if Gansevoort…
I’ve been reading Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund It’s a biography and art collection by Caitlin McGurk celebrating the pioneering cartoonist Barbara Shermund who drew for The New Yorker and Esquire. More on that anon. Here’s a seasonal cartoon from Barbara Shermund from 1958 I won’t be eating turkey…
“While sketching in the street, Eardley would set her easel up on a child’s pushchair. Andrew, then twelve, cheekily asked, ‘Do you want to paint me, missus?’ And she did. Ann remembers: ‘My mum said to Andrew, “I want to know where you’re going after school.” And he said, “I’m going to a woman’s house.” She got him by the…
Poetry and the landscape are changing – and the poets are on the move. On a train leaving Paddington, to be precise, on a Sunday in April c.1943, in a special carriage stuffed with them. Joseph Gurnard’s Poets’ Excursion is an extended metaphor of the shifting tide of British poetry and of the changing face of the landscape poets wrote…
What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer? In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-school man with a bleak past, a murderer burdened by a morbid wish to be caught. (You can read the novel here.) One aspect of the…
Refugees They have no need of our help So do not tell me These haggard faces could belong to you or I Should life have dealt a different hand We need to see them for who they really are Chancers and scroungers Layabouts and loungers With bombs up their sleeves Cut-throats and thieves They are not Welcome here We should…
Another daily poem from The Paris Review – this time an early piece by Adrienne Rich. Recorders in Italy It was amusing on that antique grass, Seated halfway between the green and blue, To waken music gentle and extinct. Under the old walls where the daisies grew Sprinkled in cinquecento style, as though Archangels might have stepped there yesterday. But…
For if ever you are in danger of feeling a wave of quite unreasonable cheerfulness descend, here is a simple antidote: The Three Miseries This is the key to misery It opens its miserable door Attendants glum & gloom greet you half way You bring your fears you call a number They provide the tissues This other key is for…
This painting dominates a whole wall in the exhibit at the Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity exhibit at the Neue Gallery in NYC. It’s Eclipse of the Sun, by George Grosz (1893–1959) and painted in 1926. There’s a short video with an overview and introduction to the exhibit at the link The exhibit features over 140 works by more than 60…
A cold, wet February day – perfect backdrop for a journey into Romanticism—off on the M4 bus to the Met to see Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature The exhibit is there until May 11, 2025 so if you are in NYC it’s highly recommended. To whet your interest – or to compensate if you can’t visit – there is…
I kept coming across paintings of London by Yoshio Markino – gauzy portraits of a mysteriously colorful, old-world city often shrouded in gray mist or yellowy brown fog but always dreamily evocative of another era that was both familiar and yet eerily distant. Time to find out more. Yoshio Markino: The Japanese Artist Who Painted London’s Fog Yoshio Markino (1869–1956)…
Most of us have done it at some point or another – accidentally locked ourselves out of the house. Raymond Carver’s poem tells a quite simple ordinary story but it becomes so much more. Read it to see what he does. He’s locked himself out and of course it’s raining and the people who have the spare key are away.…
“The pleasure [of motoring] is seeing Nature as I could in no other way see it; my car having ‘tops’, I get Nature framed —and picture after the other delights my artistic eye.” * Henri Matisse is famous for his paintings of views through the windows of hotel rooms, studios, and houses. This is a landscape triptych through the windscreen…
We’ve been lucky with the weather in NYC this September. Many bright, warm days The aftermath of the powerful hurricane that has devastated areas of the South East is now giving us a little rain. Not so lucky there where hurricane Helene was deadly across five states after making landfall on Thursday. Some of the worst flooding the South has…
The 2024 harvest moon is September 17th. First a poem courtesy of the Daily Poem at The Paris Review – from August 28. Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down. Only the night is wound up tight. And ticking with unpaused breath. Sweet night, sweet, steady, reliable,…