Yesterday's NY Times had a feature on a woman who turned an old hunting cabin in the Catskills into a tiny Victorian-style cottage. The slide show is amazing, showing a gauzy white fairy house, filled with fluffy ruffled cushions and old Limoges tea sets, nestled in the middle of a forest. The accompanying article is even more fascinating, ( Read more... )

Sculptor Louise Bourgeois died today at the age of 98. She is a special inspiration to me as someone whose career really took off when she was 70 years old. Her obituary and a slide show of her work are at The New York Times.

My favorite picture of her and her work has always been this 1982 portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe:


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So glad we did not try to go to the big fireworks display. Watching it on TV everything looked rainy and miserable. We did see an unexpected live display somewhere a few blocks north of us while the Macy's show was on. I still can't figure out where it was from, exactly. We had seen lovely live fireworks after the symphony concert in Central Park ( Read more... )

Did you thrill to the artsy posing of "Girl With a Pearl Earring"? Swoon over the staged tableaux of "Caravaggio"? Were you rapt throughout the two and a half hours of "The Agony and the Ecstasy"?

If you love movies about paintings and painters, reserve your tickets now for The Christmas Cottage.

Went to MoMA today to check out the Dada show before I leave town. ( Art Talk )

I've been crazy about the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd since it came out in 1979. My original 2-LP set of the Angela Lansbury production is long gone, but I may well have worn it out, and that was the first show I saw on my first trip to New York City in 1979 ( Read more... )

It was the weekend and I did weekendy stuff.

( Friday I made pesto. )

I have been in a really interesting discussion about religious art in fabularasa's journal. In particular, we have been tossing around the different approaches to visual representations in Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. ( West, East, and Farther East )

It is freezing again here. What happened to that beautiful, floral spring of last weekend? I am chilled to the bone.

Emerson and I went down to look at art galleries on Fifth Avenue, particularly to DC Moore to see a show of Yvonne Jacquette, who paints dreamy night landscapes with no horizon from very high up in the air. They were exhilerating. ( Read more... )

This week is the last chance to see a really spectacular art exhibit. ( Paintings of Fra Angelico at the Metropolitan Museum of Art )