Being “in the zone” for many artists is that alchemical moment when the literal representation of a subject is overwhelmed by the sheer momentum of working spontaneously with materials, marks, form, color and light. This is possibly how I should have started my comments about Thomas Agran the night of his opening here [...]
Category Archives: Artists
Introducing Thomas Agran
July 8, 2010, 7:09 am
Thomas Agran, working in his studio
I remember instructing Thomas Agran to look for a small, gray-haired woman at the Grinnell College’s Bucksbaum Center for the Arts opening for the summer of 2009’s exhibit.
I had a few pieces in the show, and I wanted to meet Thomas and visit his studio during the same trip to [...]
Sunday in Des Moines
June 30, 2010, 7:54 pm
“You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa
If you just tell it where.
So will you let it take you
Where you’ve never been before,
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your
Floor?”
- Shel Silverstein
Ours was a glorious, if brief, summer’s idyll this past Sunday. Taking a [...]
June’s bounty
June 23, 2010, 1:06 pm
What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade. ~Gertrude Jekyll
Drawing my amaryllis
With the summer solstice just past and the Fourth of July hard [...]
Uptown Marion is abuzz!
June 3, 2010, 8:44 pm
Periodically I am reminded that I share Uptown Marion with an assemblage of personalities who are all laboring in a universe roughly parallel to my own. Sure, the variables change, but they too ponder hours and staffing. They fret over display, and delight in sharing their goods with their customers.
I had one of these moments [...]
Artist Talks: Carlos Ferguson & Peter Feldstein
May 21, 2010, 6:40 am
I found myself laughing out loud all this week when I recalled how Charlotte, our seven month old granddaughter, would squeal as loudly as she could, until she turned red in the face, to see how excited we would be by her antics.
Blowing on dandelions with Charlotte at Squaw Creek Park
Other than play [...]
Spring ephemerals
April 30, 2010, 9:06 am
…”springtime ephemeral –simply meaning it disappears back underground after its early display…”
Violet
“These will be so great for a Mother’s Day post!” Maggie crowed after I sent her my first drawings of some spring ephemerals that we hope to use for a collaborative project. In short, I’ve done the drawings and the plan is that Maggie [...]
Orthodontics Through the Ages, or How I Spent My Winter
April 22, 2010, 7:04 am
Dr. William Olin
I have done a lot of crazy things in a lifetime lived as a “working artist”. Pair that status with a lifetime spent with Craig (easily the most outrageously creative person I have ever known), who seems to have an inexhaustible supply of great ideas, often, (but certainly not always!) executed by all [...]
Ladislav Hanka & Stan Fellows
February 22, 2010, 4:17 pm
Though there’s a light, fresh blanket of snow, water is running in the streams. There are frequent snippets of bird song as Buddy and I run along the creek each morning. And, that’s the sun sending shafts of light through the bare trees- just a bit earlier each day. There’s nothing like an Iowa winter [...]
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
December 22, 2009, 1:59 pm
I haven’t spent a part of these last two Sundays of the advent season within a church. Rather, I have begun them, as I begin most days, with a run with Buddy. The snows of December, however, have made me amend our routes, so on both Sundays, Buddy and I were jogging past snow-covered hills [...]