Archive | Influences

Photograph by Dana Gluckstein / MPTV Images, from “The Subversive Imagination of Ursula K. LeGuin,” The New Yorker, January 23, 2018

I have been terribly blue these past few days over the news that Ursula LeGuin has passed out of this world. I came to know Ursula in the 1980s, when we lived a few houses apart in Portland, Oregon. We had a mutual (and mutually dear) friend in Andrea Carlisle, and we connected initially through our love of cats. We each had male cats of extraordinary character – Ursula’s Lorenzo, Andrea’s Max, and my Abraham – and soon we imagined a newspaper that they produced, The Cat News, “By Cats, For Cats, and About Cats.” Abraham, a big snowshoe Siamese, would be its major sponsor, with his product Kitty Pristine, the Paw Whitener for Cats. Cats loved Ursula and if she came to visit, Abraham made a beeline for her lap, where he was received with satisfying enthusiasm. Continue Reading →

Meridian and Bonfire, 1995

I have followed the work of Deborah Butterfield for thirty years and it never fails to reduce me to tears. It also leaves me in a puddle of the most pure and absolute desire. If I was allowed only one art book to last me the rest of my life on that proverbial desert island, it would feature the work of Deborah Butterfield. If Christie’s Auction House gave me a blank check, I would buy something by Deborah Butterfield. If only, if only, I could live with one of her horses. Continue Reading →

When I was 11 years old, I visited cousins in Downer’s Grove, a Chicago suburb, and they took me to the Chicago Institute of Art. I had never been to an art museum before, and I was thrilled. Back at the ranch, my mother subscribed to a series of art books from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and every month or two a new volume would arrive and we would pore over the 8×10 cut sheets from the envelope inside the back cover. But to see some of these works in person—Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, Monet’s Haystacks, Grant Wood’s American Gothic —took my breath away. Continue Reading →

The Red Horses, 1911

I believe that I am an artist, at least in part, because of a print that hung over the love seat in the isolated Wyoming ranch house were I grew up. All the other art in the house was Western, reproductions of works by Charlie Russell, Frederic Remington, and Will James. “The Red Horses” by Franz Marc was the single exception, something my mother had brought back from Germany after my father’s service there in the post-war occupation. Continue Reading →