Praeterita

Number 93 in this series returns to the subject of Ana Mendieta, about whom I talked in my last post for Hyperallergic .   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I was really hoping that I would get 100 full days in the studio this year, but evidently could only make 79. I did lots of art-related activity outside the studio, of course: the Lucerne Project; the Urbana public art project; writing for Hyperallergic; writing this blog. Anyway, on my last studio of 2011, I started adding some of those acrylic collage shapes (dots, in this case) to a drawing/painting on paper that was a mixture of watercolour, acrylic paint, and airbrush pigment: Nice, n'est ce pas? Let's see if I can make my mind up about all this in 2012.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

View Praeterita Interviewees in a larger map Here is a Google Map that I've created, showing the locations of all the artists and writers I've interviewed on this blog in the last two years. Each push-pin locator also has a link to that person's interview. I intend to add other things to this map, starting with photos of the artists' work.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I was going through a folder of photos that I took during a summer that I spent in Prague in 2007, when this one caught my eye. Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, with its medieval castles, old monasteries, maze-like central streets with no logical pattern to them, churches with eastern-looking onion domes, red-tiled roofs that spread out like a sea of terracotta when seen from above. Maybe I took this picture because it didn’t fit with that mental image I have of Prague, because it’s so ordinary, untidy, even dirty. On its own, it could stand as a suitable alternative to the picture-postcard view of the ancient city. If you look closely, you can see laundry hanging from windows, and weeds growing up between the cobblestones in the yard. It was the middle of the day, but the young woman lounging on the chair has the look of someone who has been sitting there for a while, with nothing to do. Maybe she had many days like this, to go by the look in her eyes. Th...

Playing with more dried acrylic collage shapes: Some time after Christmas, I will probably have a new phone with a camera that's better than 1.5 megapixels.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Number 91 in this series is about colour and eyes.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

... and told me something very gratifying to me personally. He said that he took one of the stories that he started writing in the Story in Fiction and Film class that I taught this semester, and turned it into the following fake movie trailer. He shot it last weekend with the help of friends and peers (he's a Film and Video major). His name is Noah Kloor - remember his name when the 2015 Oscars (or thereabouts) come along.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader