drmstream[writing]

A pho­to­graph can make some­thing mun­dane appear unique and dis­tinc­tive. The ren­dered image metas­ta­sizes into some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. One of my favorite exam­ples is street pho­tog­ra­phy. A tal­ented pho­tog­ra­pher can take a can­did photo of two women at a street cor­ner, star­ing jaun­tily at the cam­era. If we encoun­tered these women in every­day life we […]

I The bath­room is a squared-off bit of dry­wall at the far back of the garage. It’s in Chelsea, near to the river, where the streets get wider and the air car­ries some of the fra­grance of the salt off the ocean. As you walk back to the dark door of the bath­room, slip­ping sideways […]

At Storm King, the unpar­al­leled sculp­ture gar­den in New York’s Hud­son Val­ley, an decay­ing stone wall wound through the old dairy fields. The sculp­tor Andy Goldswor­thy over two sum­mers in 1997 and 1998 directed the struc­ture of a new stone wall along the path of the old one. The new wall has a for­mal ele­gance that […]

The pho­tog­ra­pher is hid­den behind the lens. We see our­self through him, pass through his iden­tity in pur­suit of our van­ity with hardly a thought. What does the pho­tog­ra­pher think? A few weeks ago I posted a sketch inspired by a iconic photo of the civil rights move­ment taken by an iconic pho­tog­ra­pher, Ernest With­ers. I […]

Worldly suc­cess has been elu­sive as has been sup­port where I live and work which makes me think I have mis­used my gifts.  Eas­ily refuted by rea­son and not a very exclu­sive club either. There’s going to be an end, a time when the lights go off, the vapor of life expires.  Then the brushes […]

The clues are every­where, but it isn’t until you see the title that the entire mean­ing becomes clear. I stum­bled across these paint­ings because I fol­low the artist on Twit­ter. Her han­dle is @julia_hensley. I don’t fol­low her because she’s an artist; a writer that I fol­low fol­lows her and I added her as I […]

The artist who painted this works exclu­sively in images. In her fifty-year career, rep­re­sen­ta­tive images make up a tiny por­tion of her work. She is an abstract artist. This is one of the few works where she uses words. The oth­ers were in a series of reli­gious works that she did mainly in the 1970’s, […]

The paint­ing is Olympia by Edouard Manet. In 1865, it was pil­lo­ried by peo­ple of good sense as depraved and immoral. A jour­nal­ist wrote: If the can­vas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the pre­cau­tions that were taken by the admin­is­tra­tion. Years later, Manet’s paint­ing has been pegged as the start […]