Category Archives: Quotations

Things people said.

‘A Way of Understanding Who You Are’

Posted on September 2, 2021 by JMN

“Human beings have always been storytellers and you use that as a way of understanding who you are, and who the people around you are, and what’s going on,” he says. “If I look back, which I don’t very often, … Continue reading →

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Peter Bradley: ‘What’s Important Is the Color’

Posted on September 1, 2021 by JMN

“In person, Bradley is warm, refreshingly irreverent, unapologetic, and potty mouthed.” Bradley was among a handful of Black artists, along with [Sam] Gilliam, [Ed] Clark and Williams, making abstract work in the late 1960s and 1970s. Now as then he … Continue reading →

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Sancho Panza Appreciates a Nip of Good Wine

Posted on July 30, 2021 by JMN

Sancho Panza takes a memorable pull from a companion’s proffered wineskin (“bota”) in this scene from part 2 of “Don Quijote.” Y diciendo esto, se la puso en las manos a Sancho, el cual, empinándola, puesta a la boca, estuvo … Continue reading →

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‘Hotch-Potch of the Pure and the Impure’

Posted on July 29, 2021 by JMN

Some of my most compelling reading is that which others do for me. Here is a quotation shared with me today by a blogger who consumes more good literature than I can shake a stick at. “…that there is no … Continue reading →

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Trees

Posted on July 20, 2021 by JMN

Below are excerpts from Françoise Mouly’s interview with artist Christoph Niemann. I became obsessed with drawing trees when I was a teen-ager. I took the same approach as I did when learning to draw the human body—trying to understand the … Continue reading →

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Jane Kaufman

Posted on July 16, 2021 by JMN

The savory quotation that leaps from this obituary of artist Jane Kaufman (1938 – 2021) is from Holland Cotter’s review of a 2008 retrospective at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y. “It’s funky, funny, fussy, perverse, obsessive, riotous, accumulative, … Continue reading →

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‘Art Has Many Mansions’

Posted on July 12, 2021 by JMN

The NYTimes, as well, has sumptuous reportage on this exhibit of Medici-sponsored artworks. The portraits have a preternatural technical brilliance that’s otherworldly. “Laura Battiferri,” fingering her legible volume of Petrarch, is a creature contrived from mannerist lunacy. An interesting wrinkle … Continue reading →

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The Moncrieff Proust

Posted on July 11, 2021 by JMN

C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1889 – 1930) published the early-twentieth-century English version of Marcel Proust’s “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” Adam Gopnik reviews the first full-length biography of Moncrieff by Jean Findlay, “Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. … Continue reading →

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‘This Is a Rooster’

Posted on July 6, 2021 by JMN

Don Quijote’s reference to Orbaneja the Painter stuck with me fondly over the years. It’s as savory now on second reading as it was on first. … Orbaneja el pintor de Úbeda, al cual preguntándole qué pintaba, respondió: <<Lo que … Continue reading →

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Worse Than God Made Us

Posted on July 5, 2021 by JMN

… Cada uno meta la mano en su pecho, y no se ponga a juzgar lo blanco por negro y lo negro por blanco; que cada uno es como Dios le hizo, y aun peor muchas veces. (Sancho Panza, “Don … Continue reading →

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