Solitude

Alexander Thomas Harrison (1853-1930) - Solitude, 1893 from Uncertain Times

"It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious... he must once more sink himself in solitude." ~Edgar Degas

Twilight - not the movie

I just picked up this book of photography and I'm really enjoying it. The book features work from Gregory Crewdson, Robert Adams, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and five other exceptional photographers. The book could function as the the photography equivalent of Like Breath on Glass. Recommended!

The Overlove of Knowing

George Inness, "October Noon" (source)

"The overlove of knowing is a chronic trouble of artists...this abominable tendency to believe only in what can be defined, this desire to realize all things of life sensuously, is the cause of human misery."

~Geoge Inness

Our own small, transitory life

Lowell Birge Harrison, (1854-1929) - source.

"More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life."

~Rainer Maria Rilke

A Pair

Edward Steichen

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Like Breath on Glass

Like Breath on Glass accompanies an exhibition of the same name at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. I just got the book in the mail yesterday and it is absolutely gorgeous. The work of the Tonalists in the late 1800s is really exquisite. It makes me look at my own paintings like I made them while wearing oven mits and a blindfold.

Eduard Steichen
Cooper's Bluff—Moonlight Strollers
1905
Oil on canvas