Art

You have two choices: portraits and essays. To capture a picture in art or to write about it in discursive prose....

 
Francisco de Goya: El pelele
Portraits 
A collection of prose poems on individual works of art view them in the gallery here.

Portrait of a Young Woman Vaite Goupil

Essays

Slapdash Savant

Like many artists Miró lacks the historical sense.


A man thinking? We have our doubts. This chap can't look at pictures with the naked mind.

Frank & Grace
Grace Hartigan’s life has one big puzzle.

Kaffeeklatsch
Sentimentality, as coarse in its way as vulgarity and clumsiness, is a perennial threat to the artist’s delicate antennae. Grace lives inside herself. Her world a self-created one, which because it is created - living in the mind and across the sensibility - is fragile, and easily damaged by careless outsiders. It must be protected, often by quite brutal means. The presence of others is also a nuisance; their trivia - another’s life is always trivial to the artist - liable to overwhelm that inner world which requires tranquility and large spans of quiet space. 

Train Them Good
A great talent. A brilliant provocateur. Who died too young. But is Sergey Kuryokhin a critic of quality? We listen carefully…

Up Sheringham Way
When we pick up Julia Blackburn’s Threads...

Rain, Steam and Speed
How often do we read the art critics and think: you’re making all this up; your words fantasies; a painting merely the spring board from which you jump into your imaginary swimming pool; four sides of an echo chamber containing nothing but secondhand screams, reverberating cries; the heavy breathing of Sigmund Freud.

Creativity

It is a mother.  Giving birth to herself.  Constantly.  Endlessly renewed, endlessly reborn; it is fresher, more fertile, richer, with each passing year.  Hosukai, for instance:

Miles in Bed with Benjamin
I have always remembered this.  Miles Davis telling John McLaughlin “Play it like you don’t know how to play the guitar”.  It was, I guess, to get him to play much simpler, with a little uncertainty, more fragile and tentative, and spare; to create some space for In A Silent Wayto breathe. 
The internal life, whether it be one’s home or one’s own mind, has become a secret realm, not to be exposed lightly. 
An extraordinary passage, in a remarkable book.  Neizvestny’s talent, according to Berger, is his ability to portray endurance; the heroism of the 20th century, the citizen’s only resistance to the inhuman power of its war machines. 
The relationship of ideas to the world is a complex one, that it is not clearly understood; though the problem appears to be have been resolved many times; and millions of books have been written about it.
We’ve had the squire. Now we have the aesthete:
Nietzsche’s sophisticated and refined insights, albeit possibly misguided (so much rests on interpretation), about making our lives into works of art, is here turned into a vaudeville show.
I didn’t read all of Will Self’s commentary on De Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet. Already, after the first few words, the picture became loaded with too many meanings; with too much weight. The picture turned into a book, the paint into ideas. 
The symbols are different, but the ineffable remains the same – that is why they speak together so easily. But… what exactly is the ineffable?
Art and life are like two states that trade and war, and occasionally overrun each other, but, at the conclusion of peace, maintain their own languages, and state capitals.
People’s ideas about art can be very strange indeed. It is a religion, therapy, a cash point machine… and a symbol of class warfare. It is Van Gogh fighting it out with Che Guevara!
Breton absorbed too much Freud, mistaking a Freudian interpretation of the mind for the external world; that world which exists beyond our experiences.
For a lot of intellectuals there can be a tendency to overvalue the ideas, and the mind that goes with them. The ideas can be so strong, so vividly alive, that their vague origins are forgotten, or not even noticed. The ideas are so full of passion, but somehow that passion isn’t registered: it’s taken for granted, subsumed as part of the very nature of the idea itself.
Is there nothing outside the window?
Why wasn't Surrealism popular in Britain? With this question Gists and Piths begins its survey of the British movement. The question is the right one, but the answers are not to the mark, relying a little too much on Herbert Read.