The first time I saw this portrait of Mary at Chora church in Istanbul, I had no idea what to make of it. Questions flooded my mind: What did it mean? Was there any significance in it’s placement over the door exiting the church? And most confounding: Why was Jesus holding a baby swaddled in white? Who was the infant in the Savior’s arms?
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Sculpture, I thought, is the opposite of void. Sculpture, I thought, projects itself into space. Sculpture, I thought, is presence. That’s what I thought, at least, until I met Anish Kapoor’s voids. I expected to see sculpture at the Kapoor show at Sakip Sabanci Muzesi in Istanbul, and I wasn’t disappointed. Kapoor has garnered international…
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Mary Magdalene has a reputation for being emotional, if not unstable. Meanwhile Mary the mother of Jesus is usually depicted as supernaturally composed, her emotion perfectly contained beneath a serene expression. She’s not human; she’s all saint. Reflecting on a set of terracotta sculptures in Bologna and a Dorothy Sayer’s play, I consider how we can move from caricature to complexity in our understanding of these two women.
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When I see Giacometti’s sculptures I don’t see anxiety, I see dignity. I don’t see alienation; I see presence. I don’t see frailty; I see endurance and resolve. I don’t see victims; I see survivors. These works have been “enthrallingly handled.” They have been loved into existence.
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Yesterday the arresting question, “Can we survive the visual tsunami?” showed up in my Twitter feed. The tinge of apocalyptic concern in the title of Mark Galli’s meditation for Christianity Today got my attention. Tsunami sounds bad. But for me, a designer who loves the arts, visual sounds good. I respect Mark Galli tremendously and…
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Five years ago I read W.H. Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, for the first time. I’ve found myself drawn to it during Advent every year since. His psychological insights into the players that populate the narrative breathe life into a story that often feels too familiar to fully appreciate. But it’s his meditation…
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“If one called this day the beginning and day of Orthodoxy (lest I say something excessive), one would not be far wrong. For though the time is short since the pride of the iconoclastic heresy has been reduced to ashes, and true religion has spread its light to the ends of the world, fired like…
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When I saw the Damien Hirst retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, I had only known Hirst’s work from headlines. My impression from a few poor reproductions was that he was all about death. The retrospective told me that I had been, well, dead wrong. He has a lot to say about life and…
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Alice Neel was eighty years old when she resumed painting a self-portrait she had begun some four years earlier. In it she leans attentively forward, one eyebrow raised in critical assessment of her subject, glasses perched on her nose as if to sharpen her clarity of vision. She wields her paintbrush as a suggestion that…
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Tina Boesch 