The premise of The Oxford Project is simple, and I suspect it’s one that you’ll either get or really not get. In 1984, Peter Feldstein photographed every resident of Oxford, Iowa (I can’t recall if he ended up photographing every single resident, but if not it was extremely close). The photographs are simple and stark, with people rarely posing but just standing frankly in front of the camera. Sometimes they’re accompanied by a bicycle, a baby, a gun, a lion. In 2004, he went back […]
Ladies Who Paint
When I first started reading The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Dominic Smith, I was pretty sure I didn’t like it. The first chapter felt like it was about dissatisfied rich people and I was not in the mood for that nonsense. Happily, it is not about dissatisfied rich people, nor is it about the theft and forgery of a Dutch painting, which is what I thought it was about after I decided it wasn’t about rich people. Really though, it’s about three […]
Do good work and share it with people.
A few pages into this book, I thought that it was really not for me. If I’m being perfectly honest, I only continued because it was a fast read and I’m several weeks behind on my Cannonball. It’s a book about creativity, and making things, and getting off your ass and actually doing it, and finding inspiration, and living a healthy life instead of just being a creative who drinks and stays up all night. I ran into some weird identity stuff here. I couldn’t […]
Faking It
Faking It is a rather carefully contrived series of coincidences, but then, most romances are. I like Jennifer Crusie’s novels because the heroines are rarely 20 year old waifs. Matilda Goodnight is definitely not a 20 year old waif. Neither is she cosmetic-ad gorgeous. She’s struggling to hold together a family and a failed art gallery when a problem from her past announces itself, propelling her from mural painting to art theft in a single evening. And Davy Dempsey, the brother of Sophie Dempsey (Welcome […]
What’s old is new again.
I spent a large portion of my teenage life aspiring to be an artist, and I surrounded myself with art books. Hell, my screen name (which I’ve used since the mid-90s) comes from a French Neoclassical artist. For all that, however, I mostly only read the books for the pictures – not the text. So while I’ve memorized every line in some of Ingres’ sketches, or Michelangelo’s sculptures, I can give only quick outlines of Leonardo, or Michaelangelo, or Delacroix, or any number of other […]
Cerebral and unapologetically feminist.
Taking myself as a reader out of the “ratings game” for a moment, The Blazing World deserves five stars for its ambition, passion, ferocity, and intelligence. It’s a complex book about a complex woman who is consistently undermined and undervalued (probably because she is a woman, and certainly because she’s an older one), and who vows to expose to the world the bias and hypocrisy of those who do so. It’s told after her death through a series of her journal entries, along with written […]
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