The following c.v. was sent to me via email. I checked it out, and it’s real. I am humbled.

Claire V. Oyant* is a Certified Practitioner, LMT, Intuitive Healer, and Reiki Master/Teacher, Ordained minister through the Universal Life Church, Certified Angelspeake Facilitator, and Psychic/Medium. She has been working with energy for over 11 years and is a graduate of the Boston Institute of Shiatsu and Complementary Therapies. She has training in several modalities, Distant Healing, Magnetic Therapy, Reiki, Qi Gong Energy Healing, and Quantum Healing. Claire is a gentle and gifted intuitive/psychic medium who is clairaudient, clairvoyant, and clairsentient. Claire offers both psychic/mediumistic readings and is a channel — a bridge working with the spirit. Claire is a psychic/medium who validates there is an after life, that is sensitive to the frequency’s of the spirit as well as past,...

What’s with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), anyway? When they first started out, they seemed like a crazy fringe group. They liked to do stuff like break into science labs during the night to release guinea pigs from their cages, completely disregarding any human beings that might be hurt in the process. They then moved on from guinea pig and bunny rescues to spraying fur coats, which seemed a little bit more acceptable, in my mind, at least, even if it violated the sanctity of private property. Spraying fur coats didn’t put anyone’s life at risk.

I myself am practically a vegetarian, and I’ll admit I secretly admired PETA activists when they were going around New York spraying fur coats. Anyone who wears fur is vain as well as willfully oblivious to the cruelty that produced that fur, period. Long ago, fur was necessary for people living in northern climes in...

Equality — the central tenet that gives meaning and purpose to American democracy—has a way of generating real-life headaches. (This is an admittedly simplistic summing up of Tocqueville’s rich and subtle argument in Democracy in America, but it’s useful for my purpose here.) The hallowed Declaration of Independence eloquently affirms our commitment to the democratic principle that all men are created equal. Yet who of us, deep down, really believes this? To reconcile our lofty democratic ideals about humanity’s equality with our everyday experiences of people requires we modify the word “equality” with the words, “of opportunity.”

Two articles — “No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils,” in this morning’s New York Times, and “...

With Shakespeare taking up residence in a part of their brains almost from the moment they’re born, the British possess an inherently finer knack for writing in the Queen’s language than we Americans. To be sure, there are fine American writers, but we’ll never, ever be as good with English as the English. This is both a bad thing and, as you will see, a good one.

The Nuffield Review, released a few days ago, is the first comprehensive review of British education for 14- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales in 50 years. (The U.K. system doesn’t quite jibe with ours; the subject group approximates our high-schoolers, with a year of college added on.) The review team, funded by the independent Nuffield Foundation, was led by Professor Richard Pring of Oxford, but included several others from different institutions.

The study took...

Dear Giotto,

Thanks for the chance to see your work. After all the winking and blinking and shouting and “investigating the social construct of” this or that in the national pavilions and the Arsenale of this year’s Venice Biennale, my husband and I took the train over to Padova to see the installation you did back in 1305 in the Scrovegni Chapel. You were famous back then—probably more famous than anyone in the contemporary art world that I inhabit. You did work for the Pope, and people were in awe of the way your paintings captured nature—especially the expressions on faces, and the folds of cloth, and the way buildings and trees and rocks occupy 3-dimensional space.

We’d seen your chapel once before—almost twenty years ago, when visiting it was no big deal. Back then, visitors simply bought tickets at the door and strolled on in. You could stay as long as you wanted. My husband...

Untitled, 2009, by Laurie Fendrich

A few nights ago I had a dream in which my left hand had suddenly turned into a charcoal-broiled lump. I don’t need a shrink to interpret this one. The dream comes directly from the way my two tired hands feel right now. I draw with both my right and left hands (the left for filling in tone only). Having just completed 33 drawings in 30 days, my hands are exhausted. Instead of one of those lovely pairs of soft Hollywood hands — finished with a lovely white-tipped French manicure — my hands are raw and numb. The skin around the fingertips is stained with conté-crayon, and the nails are cracked and worn all the way down. My hands are not a pretty sight.

Anybody who’s read my posts over the past few weeks might have reasonably concluded that I’ve been doing nothing during my residency at the Dora Maar House other than drinking wine, musing on the...

Fellow Brainstormer Mark Bauerlein’s recent post (along with the comments it elicited) on what the digital revolution has done to young people got me thinking again about the effects of all of this on art.

Yesterday a colleague who teaches painting emailed me that it’s hard for him to get his students to go to a museum to look at a work of art. They just can’t see the point. Why schlep into New York to go to a museum to see a painting, especially since, as often as not, the hyper-bright, clean crisp image of it that’s posted on the museum’s Web site makes the real thing look limp and lame by comparison? (The brightness of Web color is always several notches higher than that of either pigment or natural color.)

Most of us can agree that sustained, undistracted linear thinking challenges many of today’s college students to the point where it’s hard for them to slog through an essay, ...

Although experts dispute how much and what kind of exercise we’re supposed to have in order to live forever, I recently learned that the consensus is that walking isn’t enough. To live forever (or at least to the age of 100, which is a kind of forever), we need to get up off our bottoms and do the following: Rid ourselves of stress and anxiety, assume an easygoing personality, be an optimist, reside in the Midwest, avoid all food that doesn’t taste like cardboard, drink nothing but water, and (most important) get our hearts heavily pumping, our sweat seriously dripping, and our arms and legs flailing wildly, at least three times a week.

The thought occurred to me that maybe walking does more harm than good, since its very nature invites looking at the world, which in turn leads to ruminating on it, which rapidly evolves into philosophizing, which produces stress and anxiety. ...

If you caught my post on how Picasso actually had two eyes on one side of his head, you probably thought I was trying to be cute and clever about cubism. Well, OK, yes, I was. But underlying my attempt at humor was an idea that I’ve been playing with for the past couple of weeks. What if cubism, at its birth, was more realistic than art historians ever give it credit for being? I’m wondering if it wasn’t invented at least partly because of the direct visual encounter — particularly in the case of Braque — with the landscape of southern France.

After countless strolls in and around Ménerbes — the tiny village where I’m currently doing an artist’s residency at the Dora Maar House — I’ve realized that many of the views I encounter — if they were to be framed into rectangular planes (i.e., turned into pictures) — look exactly like cubist paintings. Obviously, some of this comes...

The other day, I took a break from my serendipitous Ménerbian life of drawing, hiking, sitting in the garden while gazing out at the landscape, dining (oui, avec du vin), and then repeating all of that again, in order to travel by bus — with some supporters of the Collection Lambert, the contemporary art museum in Avignon — to the studio of the mega-famous, ex-pat German artist Anselm Kiefer.

The complex is located about an hour and a half out of Avignon, near Nîmes, in a village called Barjac. The outing set me back 100 euros, but the experience included a nice outdoor lunch, a four-hour tour (in two parts) conducted by a curator from the Collection Lambert, and some miraculous driving (those narrow roads! those curves! those precipices hanging over the river!) by the conductor of our huge motor coach.

“Studio,” mind you, is hardly the word for what we saw. Kiefer, who...