… an art lover’s companion.
Pictures That Talk & Words That Paint A Picture There are written languages, past and present, that are less phonetically oriented and more pictographic in their appearance and usage. The “logographic” system is somewhere in between. Sometimes it pictures a “thing,” [...]
Attention Finds Beauty Everywhere In The Age of Images The iPhone has revolutionized picture taking. I have nearly 30,000 images now stored up in my 3” x 6” “smart phone,” and about 3000 Videos. It’s almost overwhelming to keep track of them all. A good portion of them are of paintings—the art [...]
CONSIDERING THE NEXT ART LOOK — PREAMBLE There is a rumbling, more than just a casual pull, but more like an unavoidable draw to LOOK at something of a whole continent almost ignored. An ART LOOK I never thought I would write, but here I am LOOKING again at something I avoided all too long. [...]
We are looking again, at best, at something we mostly have already seen. We seem to be re-creating something that has been created before. Therefore, we are copying the past. Is it possible to create something unprecedented and new? Great artists do this. Someone appears on the scene who [...]
(In the Winter of Our Discontent) This is Markus. Ususally I write my ART LOOK posts on my Website here: MarkusRay.com/Art-Look . The last post I titled “What Do You See?” It was about the act of looking itself. Can we be astute in our observations of things? Any “thing?” It [...]
Can You Look Without Judgment? When it comes to “looking,” and in this case of ART LOOKING, what do you see and how do you see it? What makes a work of art “great” in your eyes? Could it be some genius in the artist who transmitted something truly profound and beautiful [...]
A Painting Pilgramage A couple years back we found ourselves in Amsterdam with the good fortune of tickets to the Vermeer Retrospective exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. I wrote an ART LOOK on it, VERMEER IN AMSTERDAM. Our good Dutch friends, Monique Van Der Toorn and Lennard Van Splunter, [...]
The Stars Aligned Somehow the stars aligned and I was able to get myself to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim. I am not going to say it was on my “bucket list.” That implies a place you wanna go before you die—when you “kick the bucket” as they say—and I certainly do not want [...]
A Walk Through Rothko’s Works on Paper I took one of my Art Look walks today. In 33 minutes I arrived at the gates of the National Gallery of Art, East Wing. I went there to see the works on paper by the artist, Mark Rothko. My friend Dana, who lives in our building and […]
Albrecht Dürer Shaped My Sensibility I was 17 or so in 1971, 500 years exactly after the birth of Albrecht Dürer. I grew up in Mount Vernon, a small town named after George Washington’s estate, on the banks of the Kokosing River, amidst the rolling hills of central Ohio. We were 40 miles [...]
