by Nancy Casciato
We only see what we look at.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
I manage to keep quiet while we order our brownie and coffee, but as soon as we sit down and prop elbows across the tiny museum café table, I blurt out: “She looks just like Girl with a Red Hat!” Continue reading “Still Light”
by Lillian Deja Snortland
Winter of 2024, I find myself standing before Dorothea Tanning’s painting Notes for an Apocalypse at the MoMA in Manhattan. Continue reading “The Tragedies of Ecstasy”
Welcome to After the Art’s twenty-third issue.
We hope you enjoy these three essays:
“‘Good Grief!’: Getting to the Heart of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts” by Daniel A. Hill
“Nothing Can Be More Abstract, More Unreal, Than What We Actually See” by Daniel Barbiero
“The Campell Soup Cans: A Reluctant Appreciation” by C. Graham Campbell
by Daniel A. Hill
I suppose I could say that I’m writing about Charles Schulz and his venerable Peanuts comic strip series because the guy lived his formative years less than a mile from my house in St. Paul, Minnesota. Or that as a kid I devoured his three-panel portraits of childhood mischief and despair. Neither reason really explains why I’m writing about Charles and Charlie now, though. Continue reading ““Good Grief!”: Getting to the Heart of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts”
by Daniel Barbiero
Seven objects crowd close together on a plain surface within a neutral space. Continue reading “Nothing Can Be More Abstract, More Unreal, Than What We Actually See”
By C. Graham Campbell, Ph.D.
I have always been proud of my name and its heritage from the highlands of Scotland. But then to suddenly see it plastered all over campus dorms, magazine covers, and television news stories about the new ‘Pop’ art was just more than my twenty-one-year-old self could rationally tolerate. Continue reading “The Campbell Soup Cans: A Reluctant Appreciation”
Welcome to After the Art’s twenty-second issue.
We hope you enjoy these three essays:
“Beautiful Thinking” by Lucille Lorenz
“L’Origine” by Linda Lappin
“Violent, Dark Revolts of Being” by Wes Jamison
by Lucille Lorenz
What does it mean to be able to think beautifully? What does it mean to not be able to live?
I discovered Hemingway for the first time when I was 16. It was during one of the worst periods of my life. Continue reading “Beautiful Thinking”
by Linda Lappin
The Musée d’Orsay is packed as usual over the holidays, with visitors swarming in and out of rooms displaying the spellbinding animal portraits of Rosa Bonheur, the nineteenth century artist who captured the wild gaze of beasts and deflected them to the viewer. My goal today, instead, is a little red room on the ground floor, Salle 6, which holds one of the most notorious if rarely viewed paintings in the world: L’Origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet, created in 1866. Continue reading “L’Origine”
by Wes Jamison
Portraiture used to be mimetic, representative of the actual human stuff sitting before the painter. The belief was that a person’s essence, their subject, the spirit correlated directly to the uniqueness of their face. We believed in physiognomy and phrenology: Chaucer’s Summoner’s narrow eyes, black scabby brows, and whelks of knobby white or Whitman’s animal will and large philoprogenetiveness and size. Continue reading “Violent, Dark Revolts of Being”
After the Art 