• Film/TV - Painting & Sculpture

    Protest and Patriotism: Kota Ezawa’s “National Anthem” Video

    July 30, 2022 - By 

    A row of black men clad in black uniforms is down on one knee, their arms interlocked along the sideline of what is obviously a football field. Their heads are bowed, while behind them stands a row of racially varied men in casual, mostly identical civilian clothes, their arms also hooked together as they stare into the near distance. It commands a kind of tender patriotism that asks: What is it to love one’s country, and, for that matter, to love anything? Music from deep mournful cellos begins to play as the scene comes to life, though the figures and…

  • Painting & Sculpture - Poetry

    Thanks, But No Thanks: Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation”

    February 13, 2022 - By 

    We’re not much given to ecstasies, visions or fantastical disruptions of form, light and sound in the workaday world. Observe the social conventions, show up in the conference room at the appointed hour, monitor your in-box, and don’t say anything stupid or offensive on social media from the confines of your cubicle. Keep that up for 40 or so years, let the IRA compound, then hunt for the perfect landing place—single-story, welcoming and with a woodsy name—to ensure your own version of domestic, senescent tranquility. And then there are artists, whose creations, in the words of 20th century French philosopher George…

  • Painting & Sculpture - Visual Arts

    Artist of Repose: Sculptor Tinka Jordy’s Profound Humanist Vision

    May 7, 2017 - By 

    Sculpture, like all other art forms, has always ridden along on historical waves of style and sensibility. It both joins in with and helps to direct the prevailing currents unique to any given era. Not much cottoning to the hottest new trends in painting, sculpture, literature, music or film? Just give it 20 minutes and, as in springtime, the clouds will probably shift again and the light may manifest in ways more to your liking. But as we look through the long-running project of humanity trying, with a considerable assist from its artists, to define itself within and against the world,…

  • Painting & Sculpture

    Dark and Resplendent Nights: A Study of Van Gogh’s Two Cafés

    November 26, 2016 - By 

    Decades ago, when I had my head buried in theology and philosophy at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, I used to regularly wander over to the Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue, a kind of rough-hewn and clattery coffeehouse with a 1950s pedigree, way before coffeehouses-ala-Starbucks got chic. The place had a kind of Mideast/Turkish vibe, the servers usually dark and mustachioed, the patrons hunched over their espressos with stacks of art books or Heidegger and Sartre philosophical tomes prominently displayed next to them on the round tables. The “Med” wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, as it were, but its tone of…

  • Painting & Sculpture - Religion

    Curiosity, Holiness, Science: An Homage to Eve

    September 11, 2016 - By 

    A recent scene at my neighborhood pool: It’s closing time and the lifeguards are rolling the tarp off its big spool and laying it out across the water. A 3- or 4-year-old boy bolts away from his mother at the gate leading outside and squats down poolside, gazing intently as the tarp unfurls. His mother calls to him, “O.K., let’s go!” All he does in response is reach his hand out so he can touch the tarp as it moves under his fingers. His mother may as well be a million miles away. I am smiling to myself at the whole scene, don’t even realize my smile shows…