Serendipity, a mentor once told me, is a secular way of speaking of grace; it’s unearned favor. Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling. We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won’t be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.
Garnette Cadogan, “Walking While Black”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Equals Pi, 1982
2021:
Some of the photos show the couple posed in front of a large turquoise painting — Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Equals Pi. The 1982 work came from a private collection and has never been seen before in public, according to Tiffany.
2018: Go Inside the Understated Yet Eccentric Milan Home of the Fabulous Sabbadini Family
This “new” Vermeer is blowing my mind a bit:
the first image of the completed restoration of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (around 1657-59) has been released today by Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, fully revealing a hidden image of Cupid. The change to the composition in one of Vermeer’s most famous paintings is so great that the German museum is dubbing it a “new” Vermeer in publicity materials.
The painting has been in the museum’s collection for more than 250 years and the hidden Cupid had been known about since an x-ray in 1979 and infrared reflectography in 2009. It had been assumed that the artist himself had altered the composition by covering over the painting of Cupid.
To produce a perfect pearl the oyster needs some piece of matter, a sandcorn or a small splinter round which the pearl can form. Without such a hard core it may grow into a shapeless mass. If the artist’s feelings for forms and colours are to crystallize in a perfect work, he, too, needs such a hard core - a definite task on which he can bring his gifts to bear.
E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art
I think the thing with passion is that it has to find you rather than you finding it. For me, it’s all about trying new things. If you’re going to write, you want to read a lot before you write, without any purpose. I love watching TV, love watching movies, preferably with no sense of purpose. Just being open to things that might inspire you—and staying open.
Every morning, therefore, at about 9.30 after breakfast each of us, as if moved by a law of unquestioned nature, went off and ‘worked’ until lunch at one. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professonially for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much.
Leonard Woolf
I am but a nervous man, by circumstance and by my own deeds; but I am observant. As my beloved Akutagawa Ryunosuke once said, I have no principles; all I’ve got is nerves. What follows, therefore, has to do with the eye rather than with convictions…
Joseph Brodsky, Watermark
fireland
