Her Star Is Still with Us: Hildegarde of Bingen, Mystic, Artist, Composer, and Advisor to Kings
This first image shows Hildegarde receiving Divine Inspiration and sharing it with the monk Volmar. She was famous throughout central Europe in the late Middle Ages, advisor to kings; venerable abbess, composer and musician, artist and mystic. She is called the ‘Sibyl of the Rhine.’ Hildegard of Bingen was as Sir Roger Penrose is to […]
Escape from the Convent School Tower: On Remedios Varo’s 1960-61 Triptych
Mother Superior and her creepy bearded henchman have come to retrieve the septet of uniformed captives from their human beehive. It is time for the girls to go to work. As always, mysterious hypnotic forces compel them to mount their bicycles, starry-eyed, and follow their captors towards the tower. The tails of their habits become […]
The Places You’ll Go: The Art of Walking
During this time of the pandemic, in addition to reading, what I have been doing a lot of is walking. Every day, sometimes going two or even three times, just for the purpose of getting out of the house, getting some space to think or reflect. A change of scenery at a slow pace. An […]
Another Online Visit: A Blue Thought in a Blue Shade: Anna Atkins and Cyanotype Photograms
A few years ago, way back when art could still be encountered in person, Emily Bauman, Photography Curatorial Assistant at the CAM, wrote an online note about the experience of being able to handle and see up close a cyanotype by Anna Atkins, the figure who is generally credited with being the first woman photographer […]
Art Acquisitions
What goes into acquiring art institutionally? Aeqai takes a look at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Skirball Museum at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion. Cynthia Amneus, curator, fashion arts and textiles at CAM, is an expert in acquisitions which can be gifts or purchases. Sometimes, a curator will receive a call […]
Another Online Visit: Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man Rising from his Chair” at the Taft Museum of Art
The High Renaissance portrait sought to depict dignity—the sense of worthiness that was, typically, an even more valuable quality in a portrait than likeness—in repose. The great 16th century portraits tried to capture what was least changing about their subjects. Though the period knew, of course, that human beings were subject to time, they assumed […]
A Salome Like No Other: Reflecting on Gustave Moreau’s Salome (Salome Dancing Before Herod)
Damn. I should take drugs when I paint. Look at French painter Gustav Moreau. He must have taken something to make these mind-bending paintings in the 1800’s. I know contemporary painter Peter Doig takes drugs because he admitted so, figures; his paintings are breathtakingly hypnotic, mystical, irrationally emotional and compelling. But Moreau? He’s dead. We […]
Exploring the Transmutative Power of Food and Painting in Leonora Carrington's Spellbinding "Kitchen Garden on the Eyot"
During this time of quarantine, it’s enjoyable to get lost in The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot (1946) by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Delicately limned in egg tempera on a small panel, the scene is easy to enter online, and its cryptic serenity casts a rosy glow over one’s feelings of confinement. A sense of mystery […]
Summoning the Ghost in R. A. Blakelock’s “Moonlit Lake”
“These capricious vagabonds fly somewhat in the manner of bats,” Camille Flammarion wrote in 1872[1], “which seem to dive at the turrets, and suddenly turn back, describing a parabola, to vanish in an unexpected direction.” Although the French astronomer was describing the movement of comets through the cosmos, he may as well have been describing […]
ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED: Jenny Holzer // Wanda Orme Earth Day and COVID-19
There are / were a lot of holidays effected by COVID-19 measures this spring; Ramadan, Passover, and Easter to name the heavyweights. For me what stood with a heavier weight than normal was Earth Day. Every year on April 22, we celebrate the beginning of what is now known as the official beginning of the […]