Even though I fell in love with art history and got my PhD in early modern art, it turns out that it was never the academic stuff that interested me. I’d look at a Caravaggio painting and imagine how the flickering torchlight might create a dance of shadows on the wall. I’d imagine the dampness on that wall surface or its crumbling plaster. Then my mind might go to the street. What’s happening out there? What is this world and what might it mean? Every work of art seems to be shouting at me with some story or other.
That’s what I do in this section of my blog: I tell those stories. Completely letting go of formal art history, I allow my imagination to run wild. Click on the titles for more.
Sergei Avdeev, Evening Outdoors, 2014
Cynthia W. Iliff, Untitled (Men Playing Cards), 1942
Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth, Children by the Christmas Tree, early 20th Century
Wouter Johannes van Troostwijk, The Raampoort in Amsterdam, 1809
Dorothea Lange, End of an Era: Funeral Cortege in a Small Valley Town, California, 1938
Dormition Cathedral, Vladimir, 12th Century
Anne Brigman, The Breeze, 1910
Giuseppe Pellizza, Il Sole, 1904
Gravestone from the Taifa Kingdom, Almería, Spain, 1044
Pyotr Konchalovsky, First Snow. Blue Dacha, 1938
Pieter Breugel the Elder, Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, 1565
Isaak Brodsky, Fallen Leaves, 1929
Otto Marseus van Schrieck, A Forest Floor Still Life, 1666
Rebecca Davis, Honeycomb Quilt, 1846
A. E. Staley Pump House, 1919, Decatur, Illinois
Agnes Martin, Flower in the Wind, 1963
Winged Victory of Samothrace, 220–185 BCE
Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940
Chi Rho Iota page, Book of Kells, 800
Vasily Perov, The Last Tavern at the City Gates, 1868
