Dimensionally Barrett

I am still kicking around a continuation or a companion piece to a painting I did for my sister a few years back and things took a different tack. In the course of reading some Daoist alchemy texts and essaying my first stab at Chinese translation, I found a sudden visual inspiration/corollary to the work. I’ve also been teaching taijiquan and qigong to seniors – until the first week in March, to be sure – and I think the additional load of those practices may have opened up additional gates for this. In any case, there’s a fair bit of work coming out of me again. Some of it okay, some of it wretched, and some of it, I actually like. What I’ve been mulling over today is the digestion of specific visual/aesthetic events and their metamorphoses into something else. “After Ellsworth”, the work in progress under consideration here, is a case in point. Ellsworth Kelly - Houston Triptych, 1986 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston  In 1986, a sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly wa...

Man, I’m not so sure I care to post anything political on FB anymore. Not because I’m worried about negative reactions and not because I don’t recognize that some of us have radically different opinions on certain things. Nope, I’ve been ruminating on something that strikes me as both funny and grossly overlooked in myself and it kind of hit me out of the blue. A lot of us – and oh, boy, am I guilty of this – will use this phrase, “go ahead, if you voted for or support X, then just unfriend me”. This is kind of a big “fuck you” to people that you are friends with. It’s also a peculiar form of – what…self-preservation? We gear ourselves up for some kind of backlash by expecting the worst from friends with whom we disagree? Yeah. I think that’s it. And let's face it: it's pretty (very?) passive-agressive. There’s also the “well, we’ll never see eye to eye, so I don’t see the point in continuing this any further”; but do we ask ourselves what this “this” is? It ...