Picturing Realism What is real, the painting of the bowl of fruit, or the bowl of fruit. Is the mountain more real than the painting of the mountain? Is the man real, or is the painting of the man real, or are both real, or neither? If you guessed, “neither”, you might be correct….
ARCHITECTURAL .ART Architecture is an art, a craft, a practical necessity. Sometimes, architecture is man’s grandeur writ large: Saint Peter’s Basilica, The Parthenon, Taj Mahal, Le Mont-Saint-Michel, The Pantheon. Sometimes architecture is foolishness scribbled everywhere: The Guggenheim, Dancing House, Niterói Contemporary, Le Centre Pompidou, The Gherkin. Lately, the art of architecture has been an absurdity…
You will notice the all-to-obvious differences between the Classive stacked-stone of Athens’ Acropolis and the Progressive stone-stacks teetering all around us. The one is permanent, ennobling, difficult, the other is transient, degrading, all-too-easy and ethically squishy. Picture, if you will, the intelligence of Athens’ Propylaea, the idea in stone, the divine geometries, the artistry in…
Equity Diversity Inclusion: Firmness, Commodity, and Slight of Phrase “Equity diversity inclusion” is a pretty little phrase, quaint, nice and polite, well suited to swimsuit contests, campus riots, and advertising campaigns. We find this fawning phrase graphicly projected on smart boardroom screens, carelessly taped to smudgy coffeehouse windows, and boldly italicized upon preachy university…
Fire and Ice (detail) Adam & Eve, and Willie (detail) Bacchus and Ariadne (detail) the theoretical period Professionally, Girard was growing away from the civilized cocoon of his fatherly patron into the wild flights of America’s ill-advised social liberations. Too, by notice of Sarkis Sarkisian, with assistance from Abramson, Girard in 1968 secured a…
The National Gallery of Art Petting Zoo Here we are in the picture gallery, the Pinakotheke, looking from the Propylaea to John Russell Pope’s National Gallery of Art, and what a view, 5,125 miles and even farther in time, 2,500 years, the distance between Phidias, Pericles, Plato and you. What a view. Over the…
Perhaps your school-desk was alike my school-desk covered edge-to-edge in sketches. The desk surface, as you know, is an almost perfect blank canvas, a clean slate, a tabula rasa*, of sorts, where knowledge acquired might be reflected eye to mind to hand, to nun who might correct wayward drawing knuckles with a smart, wood-ruler, snap,…
Perhaps you assume, which, if you did, you would be mistaken, that Progressive decline is inevitable, that Classive ascendence is impossible, so very loud are the screams of maddened youth, so very droning are the innuendo of obsequious newsreaders, so very disheartened are you that all you honor, all you love, all you believe is…
