Monthly Archives: March 2019

“Aroha, Manaakitanga”

Posted on March 24, 2019 by JMN

Masha Gessen’s article is unusually affecting for me at a time when I feel enervated by tinyness in my own country. The article is a sensible and sensitive appreciation of conduct that betokens great — I would say towering — … Continue reading →

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“Ars longa, vittles brevis”

Posted on March 24, 2019 by JMN

  “My goal is to keep drawing forever, to get to all the restaurants in New York,” [John Donohue] said. It’s a silly goal, perhaps, but what goal isn’t? It’s cheap, it gets him outside (as opposed to eating in … Continue reading →

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Trompe L’oeil

Posted on March 21, 2019 by JMN

“Painting objects and people as they actually appear….” (Andrew Ferren, “A 7-Hour, 6-Mile, Round-the-Museum Tour of the Prado,” NYTimes, 3-18-19) The phrase encapsulates my former goal: To paint something accurately, yet somehow enhanced: A simplistic, naive and ambiguous goal all … Continue reading →

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Embrace-Aversive

Posted on March 21, 2019 by JMN

Do I love this painting? Love is not a word I would use to describe my regard for Warhol, which is high. He and his art are too trouble-makingly elusive and embrace-aversive for that. But this is true of some … Continue reading →

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How Things Actually Appear

Posted on March 21, 2019 by JMN

Artists of the Spanish “golden age” in the 17th century seemed to delight in manipulating paint on the canvas to create dazzlingly realistic effects, such as the light shimmering on silk gowns in Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” or the churning clouds … Continue reading →

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“That’s not quite right”: Sociodicy

Posted on March 21, 2019 by JMN

How a target of students’ ire came to write a book about humanity’s transcendent goodness. To accept this belief that human beings are evil or violent or selfish or overly tribal is a kind of moral and intellectual laziness,” [Nicholas … Continue reading →

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“Something You Did in Latin”

Posted on March 21, 2019 by JMN

Carol Gilligan is the author of “In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,” published in 1982. The widely disseminated book “made her an academic celebrity.” She and Naomi Snider have recently co-authored “Why Does Patriarchy Persist?” The quotations … Continue reading →

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Overseas Research

Posted on March 20, 2019 by JMN

There’s a fun flub in the paragraph quoted below. A spellchecker would not have caught it, of course. Syntax-monitoring software might have. I’m not sure software that capable exists, however. It’s a reminder that good journalism is produced by humans. … Continue reading →

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Vivian Browne

Posted on March 18, 2019 by JMN

In 1965, the artist, educator, and activist Vivian Browne (1929-1993) began a series titled Little Men. Considered her first major body of work, it consists of oil and acrylic paintings of white-collar middle-aged white men… They’re dressed in button-down shirts … Continue reading →

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Yes, It’s in Focus, I Think

Posted on March 18, 2019 by JMN

Suh Seung Won, a pioneer of the process-based Korean painting movement known as Dansaekhwa, or monochrome, started out with hard-edge, translucent rhombuses that evoke unreal architectural spaces. In the large-scale recent canvases comprising most of “Suh Seung Won: Simultaneity” at … Continue reading →

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