Neglect nothing
This sense of completion in an artist’s life struck me, and it made me think about what I may be neglecting now. I take as read the implication that he means ‘nothing important’. A no-regrets summary of life. It also echoes something my father has...
Alive on this earth
Grossman’s essay on the Sistine Madonna by Raphael is one of the most splendid responses to art I have read. He deploys all his descriptive powers to encompass what it means to him and to us. Above all, it is a symbol of precious, tender, vulnerable, resilient...
The body’s thinking
An unusual take on the physicality of our reactions to art or beauty, which Esterly attributes to Yeats as the ‘thinking of the body’. I like the wholeness of it, the combination of mind and body in responding to something splendid, man-made or natural....
The other reality
An intriguing thought, that art is the means to receive hints from another reality. Â I am not sure what he means by it, but as I get older, I sense something more numinous. Â And I like the idea of art as a kind of antenna – it was Ezra Pound who described poets...
Beautiful and full of sunshine
Spending a few days in Ljubljana, we enjoyed a visit to the National Gallery of Slovenia and in particular, an exhibition dedicated to Ivana Kobilca (1861-1926), a Slovenian artist who flourished around the turn of the 20th century. She spent much of her life in...Yes, sign me up!
