Category Archives: Travel
Pearls from artists* # 90
Walking on Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
While it is not true that only artists understand art, for there are in every generation some people who not only understand it but also enhance its reach by appreciation, there is a freemasonry among us. We stand shoulder to shoulder, generation to generation.
Anne Truitt in Turn: The Journal of an Artist
Comments are welcome!
Q: Are there any final photographs you would like to share from your Mexico trip?
Museo Nacional de Antropoligia, Mexico City
Museo Nacional de Antropoligia, Mexico City
Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan
Mexico City
Museo Templo Mayor, Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have more photographs to share from your trip to Mexico?
Museo de Antropología de Xalapa
Museo de Antropología de Xalapa
En route between Xalapa and Chalcatzingo
En route between Xalapa and Chalcatzingo
Chalcatzingo
Chalcatzingo
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 88
Teotihuacan
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
To men like Ayers, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayers sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayers!”
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.
David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas
Comments are welcome!
Q: Can we see more photographs from your Mexico trip?
San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan
Lake Catemaco
La Finca Hotel, Lake Catemaco
El Museo Tres Zapotes
At Tres Zapotes
Suit of armor, Santiago Tuxtla
Santiago Tuxtla
Popocatepetl
Comments are welcome!
Q: Reconnecting with an important source of inspiration, you recently traveled to the Gulf Coast of Mexico to study Olmec art and culture. Would you share some of your photographs?
Parque Museo La Venta, Villahermosa
Parque Museo La Venta, Villahermosa
Parque Museo La Venta, Villahermosa
La Venta
La Venta
La Venta
Comments are welcome!
Q: When was the last time you flew? Do you ever miss it?
Over the Gulf of Mexico
A: I last piloted a plane out of Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, some years after I moved to Alexandria, Virginia. It was in the mid-1990s.
Now and then I miss flying, but my interests have changed considerably and I am much more passionate about art than aviation. I still love physically being in the air – on an airliner, in a helicopter, etc. – and sometimes I dream about taking a few lessons to become reacquainted with flying small planes again, but I haven’t taken any action.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What is your earliest visual memory?
Arizona road
A: I remember being in a crib at the house where I lived with my parents and sister, a two bedroom Cape Cod in Clifton, New Jersey. I must have been about two or three years old. The crib was next to a wall and I remember putting my right leg through the slats to push against it and rock my crib. I spent hours looking at the space age wallpaper in the room, which depicted ringed planets and flying sci-fi space men. My parents had recently bought the house and the bedroom’s previous occupant had been a boy. This was in the 1950s and I dare say, the wallpaper was very much of its era!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 76
Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What stops us in our tracks? I am rarely stopped by something or someone I can instantly know. In fact, I have always been attracted to the challenge of getting to know what I cannot instantly categorize or dismiss, whether an actor’s presence, a painting, a piece of music, or a personal relationship. It is the journey towards the object of attraction that interests me. We stand in relation to one another. We long for the relationships that will change our vistas. Attraction is an invitation to an evanescent journey, to a new way of experiencing life or perceiving reality.
An authentic work of art embodies intense energy. It demands response. You can either avoid it, shut it out, or meet it and tussle. It contains attractive and complicated energy fields and a logic all its own. It does not create desire or movement in the receiver, rather it engenders what James Joyce labeled ‘aesthetic arrest.’ You are stopped in your tracks. You cannot easily walk by it and go on with your life. You find yourself in relation to something that you cannot readily dismiss.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 75
Half Dome at Yosemite
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We realize now that our common human language is not Esperanto or computers or something having to do with vocal cords and speech. It is, rather, our sense of proportion, our balance, harmony and other aspects of simple and fundamental form. Our universal language, in other words, is beauty.
Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty
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