I stare out at bare window pane above and netted screen below. Drops of rain move across, smooth, quick, lithe on the glass and awkward, meandering, stilted across the finely textured squares of mesh. Windows as release, as way out and through, but my depth of field is shallow, my view shortsighted. In fall, the… Read more »
The world appears different through glass. A window frames a view. A lens refracts and focuses light. Our eyes, too, have light-bending lenses, shape-shifters that widen to focus close objects into images on our retinas and narrow for distant views. And so vision is embodied; it’s in our bodies. Our eyes and brains recognize the… Read more »
Others Who Were Here, Cris Bruch’s sparely installed exhibition that just came down at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, used looking and language to summon the expansiveness of eastern Colorado, where Bruch’s family worked as farmers in the early twentieth century. Titles and wall text worked in tandem with Bruch’s sculptures and installations to… Read more »
At the Seahawks-Vikings football game several weeks ago, players exhaled clouds of heat and moisture as they lined up for the snap. Their breaths swelled from their mouths, spread away, and then disappeared into the frigid Minnesota air. Welcome to Jupiter, sportscaster Al Michaels quipped. A galaxy away, at the Henry Art Gallery, artist Demetrius… Read more »
One evening, as he is losing the king’s faith and his own power, Cardinal Wolsey counsels his protégé Thomas Cromwell on their present impasse. King Henry VIII will dissolve his first marriage and take Anne Boleyn as his new bride. Wolsey and Cromwell are to find the means to the king’s end. Confounded, Cromwell questions… Read more »
During the week, I look often from my office to the flickering work lights of a half-finished building south of Lake Union, where Seattle’s skyline is acquiring a new shape and solidity. The lights are distributed regularly throughout the building’s boxy frame, and they radiate in morning fog, pulsate in the fair skies of midday, and shine like beacons… Read more »
“Beauty is vapour from the pit of death.” (The Peregrine, p. 180) For the last several months, I’ve been coming to the Henry Art Gallery most Wednesdays to read from a book about a hawk season in the fenlands of eastern England. To describe J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine as only that, though, would be to diminish it. Baker’s… Read more »
Fall, in Seattle, is a time of spiders. Giant house spider males, close relatives to the Tegenaria duellica David Sedaris writes about feeling such easy if fraught kinship with in his essay April & Paris: Caught in the Web of Nature, search for females in our basement, darting away at our step. Outside, the garden… Read more »
We’re coming to the end of daffodil season in Seattle. Everywhere I go, the flowers have been announcing spring, trumpeting forth the news with their proud center coronas and blaze of yellow. It took me a long time to see something more than the daffodil’s bold color and message of seasonal change. These perennial flowers… Read more »
“America’s identity lies in its open spaces, the space of possibility, but also of speed, movement, and unobstructed will.” – Rebecca Solnit, “The Desert: Scapeland,” As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, page 87 I grew up mostly ignorant of football. My Dad would listen to it on the radio occasionally,… Read more »