Category Archives: Bolivia
Q: What non-art book are you reading now?
Tiwanaku
A: I am reading Kim Mac Quarrie’s, “The Last Days of the Incas.” It’s fascinating to discover the intricacies of the epic conquest of the short-lived Inca empire. The book is actually thrilling to read. Mac Quarrie makes this story come alive.
Last summer I traveled to Peru to investigate the history of the Incas and the civilizations that preceded them. In May of this year I continued my studies with a trip to Bolivia. Both trips are proving to be highly inspirational for my art practice.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 259
In Bolivia on Lake Titicaca
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In college, I made two important decisions about my career.
First, I would put my writing on the back burner until I became well established in science. I know of a few scientists who later became writers, like C.P. Snow, Rachel Carson, but no writers who later became scientists. For some reason, science – at least the creative, research side of science – is a young person’s game. In my own field, physics, I found that the average age at which Nobel Prize winners did their prize-winning work was only thirty-six. Perhaps it has something to do with the focus on and isolation of the subject. A handiness for visualizing in six dimensions or for abstracting the motion of a pendulum favors an agility of mind but apparently requires little knowledge of the human world. By contrast, the arts and humanities require experience with life and the awkward contradictions of people, experience that accumulates and deepens with age.
Alan Lightman in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I have two works in progress. Both are based on photographs I shot at a stunning mask exhibition in La Paz, Bolivia in May. At present I am tying to ‘ramp up’ my imagery and believe these two pastel paintings to be particularly striking. However, both still have a long way to go so I hope I’m not speaking too soon.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 258
Isla del Sol in Bolivia
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Does this imply that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ that there is no objective property that we recognize and about whose nature and value we can agree? My answer is simply this: everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature, and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the center of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.
Roger Scruton in Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I’m working on a large pastel painting based on a photograph shot when I was vacationing recently in La Paz, Bolivia. How fortuitous to stumble upon a mask exhibition at The National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore! It felt as though the exhibition somehow was staged for me, just waiting for me to come along and photograph it.
Incredibly, I returned to New York, after a spectacular trip to Bolivia, and found myself with photographs that are inspiring a new series. Certainly this has never happened before! The series is tentatively called, “Bolivianos.”
Comments are welcome!
Q: What would you say is your underlying motivation as a contemporary artist?
Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia
A: What motivates me is the desire to make great art, to develop my innate talents to their fullest, to share the hard-won knowledge I have gained along the way, and to bring as much beauty into this life as possible. It’s never been easy, but I’m trying to spend my short time on this earth as an artist, doing the work I was always meant to do!
Comments are welcome!
