Tag Archives: drawing

‘They Can Feel Almost Like Exquisite Texts to Be Read’

… Each [painting] presents so much information that you have to move in close for further contemplation and deciphering, trying to figure out how the paintings were made and which of their weird little details are accidental, which deliberate. They … Continue reading

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Drawing in the Dark

… As a young artist living in Georgia, he spent nights alone in a dark room, teaching himself to draw without the meddling of his eyes. Unlearning is still a kind of learning. (Jackson Arn) (Jackson Arn, “Cy Twombly, the … Continue reading

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Super-Diatribalistic Mega-Magadocious

(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Trills and Spills from ‘Gilgamesh’s Snake’

Verses are from Ghareeb Iskander, Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems, Bilingual Edition translated from the Arabic by John Glenday and Ghareeb Iskander, Syracuse University Press, 2016. Translations here are mine. (c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Poetry PowerPoint, Crossdressing Wolf

Cartoons can slay. Here are two that plaster a grin on my face for the connections they make. The first is from The New Yorker. The second is from Larson’s The Far Side Daily Dose website. (1) I once had … Continue reading

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The Case for Rhythm and Emptiness

Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre speaks of how exposure to Kerry James Marshall’s painting made him aware of “an absence of representation. You would ask a Black kid to draw a person and he would draw a white person… Just by … Continue reading

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What He Simply Tries to Do

“In his view, painting and drawing are exactly the same difficulty and take roughly as long as each other.” (William Feaver, art critic and one of Auerbach’s regular sitters) Asked whether he has learned something new about his face, [Auerbach] … Continue reading

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‘Writing a Chrysanthemum’

On scrolls of Japanese paper each 19 feet in length, Barton documented the underbelly of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood before the hippies showed up… A friend and fellow artist recalled that Barton began a portrait with the sitter’s fingernail… … Continue reading

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The Secret of Drawing Is to Make a Mark

Complexity is what we create; our familiar cussedness comes out and easily defeats us. The harder things in life are the simple ones. Whenever I manage to disregard the rulemonger holding class in my skull-room, the method-nazi intoning, You are … Continue reading

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‘Drawings Are the Great Teachers’

… The mark-making basic to drawing is the starting point of so much else: the development of written language, numbers, musical scores. Drawings are the great teachers; they educate the eye and make us more conscious of seeing. They present … Continue reading

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