Tag Archives: rhetoric

Poetic Researches

Posted on November 14, 2021 by JMN

Is the soul our dark matter — pervasive but undetectable by any instrument we possess? If there’s a part of me that isn’t glia, neurons, and enzymes, it has found a modicum of rest in the revelation that John Ashbery’s … Continue reading →

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Marlene Dumas: ‘Art Is Not a Mirror’

Posted on November 7, 2021 by JMN

This article gives a stimulating sample of Marlene Dumas’ painting. Here’s a whiff of its curatorial patter: “She is a master, in the classical sense: she makes masterpieces”… Dumas [takes] us somewhere beyond prosaic materiality… “[Faces and portraits by Dumas … Continue reading →

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Jenny Saville: ‘Humans Are Just Drawn to Eyes’

Posted on October 14, 2021 by JMN

Jenny Saville speaks in all the quotes here. Italy is a country of figuration, so I feel very at home here — but it was intimidating. I got through by really looking at Michelangelo… I started to do direct studies … Continue reading →

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‘A Gloriously Unsatisfied Painter’

Posted on October 7, 2021 by JMN

Brobdingnagian ocular hubbub. Colossus of hue and scream. Tympanic boom. These phrases leapt to mind — of course they did! — as I eyed Sarah Cain’s work. Confession though: Cain owns me for rejecting the term “murals” in favor of … Continue reading →

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Sean Scully: ‘Backs and Fronts’

Posted on September 29, 2021 by JMN

“Here’s another thing that I don’t agree with,” Scully says to me – the last comment he makes in our conversations for On the Line – “and that’s when Picasso said that art is war. Art is not war. War … Continue reading →

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“I’m Trying to Overwhelm the Museum,” He Said

Posted on September 12, 2021 by JMN

[Adam] Pendleton, 37, is best known as a painter of abstract canvases in a distinctive black-and-white style that challenge how we read language. Made using spray-paint, brush and silk-screen processes, they incorporate photocopied text, words unmoored from context, letters scrambled … 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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UK Sculptor: Hard Row to Hoe

Posted on July 3, 2021 by JMN

It will be [a shrine], but not for art lovers. Or for anyone who is easily embarrassed. Perhaps not even for Diana’s sincerest believers, for the statue group’s emotive symbolism is undermined by its aesthetic awfulness. In style it breathes … Continue reading →

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Write Infrequently, If Possible?

Posted on July 2, 2021 by JMN

… Unlike many great twentieth-century writers, who saw truth in despair, Milosz’s experiences convinced him that poetry must not darken the world but illuminate it: “Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the … Continue reading →

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Slant-Wise Talk

Posted on June 25, 2021 by JMN

Saying things that are graspably cockeyed is my kind of self-expression. Doing so skirts peekaboo obscurity and affectation constantly, but sometimes it feels like it’s working and those moments make me feel interesting. “Even your most serious problem,” [Stephen Dunn] … Continue reading →

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