A book I’ve been working on for almost ten years was supposed to be published last February. At the last moment, the University that was going to publish it dropped their publishing program due to political issues between the departments. There I was, back at square one, not knowing if my book would ever find [ Read more … ]
Books
“To know a thing is to awaken to its depth and presence”
To create is always to learn, to begin over, to begin at zero. — Matthew Fox In John O’Donohue’s book The Invisible Embrace of Beauty, O’Donohue mentions St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that beauty was the perfection of a thing. “To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence.” [ Read more … ]
Paying attention is an act of love
In many respects, all we have in this life is our attention. We’re shaped by what we pay attention to. Our lives are the result of what we pay attention to. My current favorite read is Eric Booth’s book, The Everyday Work of Art. Booth writes on page 61: “If our experience of being alive [ Read more … ]
The aesthetic is what holds the world together
In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards brilliantly shows us the importance of background or negative space when we draw a contour of any object or person. By noticing the negative space and drawing the edge that defines that negative space, we shift into right-brain mode and can much more accurately [ Read more … ]
Getting Messy
One of my favorite art quotes is from Herbert Marcuse, a hard-to-read but brilliant philosopher. In The Aesthetic Dimension he writes, “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the established reality principle…The encounter with the truth of art happens in [ Read more … ]
