Katherine Sharpe | a pilgrim’s blogress

Modern Art

Two quotes I liked from Adam Gopnik’s article about van Gogh’s ear in the January 4 edition of the New Yorker.

On art-making:
“Where art since the Renaissance had attempted to limit luck in a system of inherited purpose and patterns, modern art demands that you press the pedal as hard as you can, and pray.”
On van [...]

Perhaps You Were Thinking of Spending Thousands of Dollars on a Gift For Me?

Might I ask you to consider this painting by Jocelyn Hobbie, which Tim says reminds him of me? It’s even called “The Writer.” She even has nice hands. Who sat for this painting? I like it. It’s airy, yet slightly sinister. I want a pony.

Enjoyed This Over Breakfast Yesterday:

“Late Bloomers,” by Malcom Gladwell, in the current New Yorker. It’s about creative process, contrasting precocious wunderkind geniuses (like Picasso) with late-blooming masters of craft (like Cézanne). Gladwell describes these as two distinct types, but I have a feeling that the reality may be more of a continuum—a great Kinsey Scale of creativity. Definitely a [...]

Reading Frenzy, and Thoughts: Why New Yorkers Love and Hate to Read About New York

I’m in a reading frenzy recently: two thick novels in the last ten days. I inhaled ‘Then We Came to the End,’ by Joshua Ferris, and then moved immediately into ‘The Emperor’s Children,’ by Claire Messud. Purely by coincidence, each novel features an unstable character whose catalytic effects on the plot are driven by an [...]

“It’s a good place for a retrospective”: Louise Bourgeois @ the Guggenheim

It’s a drizzly night and starting to feel like early fall. Alison and I just came back from the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the Guggenheim. The exhibit is a retrospective. It showed work from the 1940s to today. It’s hard to imagine one person’s active working life spanning so much history, but there it all [...]

A Big Empty Room No More

…by which I mean, maybe I’ll start posting on this blog some.
I found this on Der Speigel’s website recently: Dieter Grube’s pictures of Berlin at night.

All the more special to me for the fact that they’re taken on slide film and not digitally manipulated.
I love the star-points around the street lamps: