In my previous post, I talked about how my experience in changing my way of sneezing taught me how hard it is to change a habit even in instances where we know it would be better for us if we did. Habits don’t merely concern things like the way we sneeze, however.  For example, habits writ large are what define a culture, for a culture is nothing but a vast collection of shared habits that go by the more lofty designation “customs.” And though it’s not apparent at first glance, habits also deeply affect artistic style.

In my case, for example, after more than forty years of painting, I’ve developed a “mature” style (or what’s known as a “signature” style). People who have seen my pictures easily recognize one of my new paintings even when they encounter it outside my studio or gallery. All serious painters, no matter the quality of their work, inevitably end up with…

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“Texas Cow Poke” by Clotee Pridgen Allochuku via Flickr/CC

Sometimes I find it useful to think about things that bear no obvious relation to one another. For example, I’ve recently been thinking about sneezing, cars, and cows, and a connection to the problem of climate change has occurred to me.

First, sneezing. When I was young, I was taught to cover my mouth with my hand whenever I sneezed. Good girl that I am, I followed this rule until a couple of years ago, when I read that in order not to spread germs, it’s best to sneeze into one’s elbow. (You don’t shake hands, set the table, or serve drinks to your guests with your elbow.) But it was no small matter to alter a longstanding habit that was sustained, in part, by a feeling that I was doing what my mother had told me was the right thing. With a lot…

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It’s been almost half a century since Apollo 11 carried Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong to the moon. I remember running to make sure I’d catch the actual landing on television. Like many who heard Neil Armstrong’s first words when he walked on the moon, I heard them incorrectly. They are much more moving the way he actually said them: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” That a single man was walking on the moon was a magnificent idea, even though it was awfully hard to fathom. That mankind, in a historical sense, was now moving into space was unfathomable.  In effect, many of us never did much with either of these ideas. Landing on the moon became merely one of many things that marked the 20^th-century.

For me, part of the shock of watching men land on the moon came from their having done it on such a rickety-looking mechanical…

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Protesters in front of Pennsylvania Station on Aug. 2, 1962 (Photo by Eddie Hausner/The New York Times. Click on image to get to source page.)

In 1882, New York Central Railroad president William Henry Vanderbilt declared, “The public be damned.” Although one might think this sentiment an anachronism that went away with the demise of 19^th-century robber barons, it’s actually a perennial problem for democracies whenever private owners own what function as public spaces.

Here’s an example of what I mean. To get to Hofstra from where I live in Lower Manhattan, I take the train from New York’s Penn Station. I always stop first to grab a coffee at the Starbucks along the main corridor inside the station. While waiting on line, I groggily gaze at the large, black-and-white posters with images of the old Penn…

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(Photo by burstingwithcolors, Flickr/CC)

What better event is there to capture the competitive spirit of Western civilization than the Olympics? From their start as simple sprints in 8^th century B.C. Greece, the Olympics have been all about fierce competition and winning. Baron de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics (after a long hiatus beginning in the 4^th century, the Olympics were revived at the end of the 19^th century), famously described the Olympics with the words “swifter, higher, stronger.” He ought to have said, “swiftest, highest, strongest.” Face it. Who remembers the winners of the silver and bronze medals? Coming in second or third in the Olympics is much worse than kissing your sister; earlier today, I even saw a headline about the U.S. swim team earning a silver medal that read, “…

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Photo by Tanaka at New York Daily News site, from a 2009 article

Together with his wife Dorothy, Herbert Vogel, who died Sunday at the age of 89, spent about half a century accumulating an enormous collection of edgy contemporary art. In 1991, the couple gave almost their whole collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2008, they divvied up what remained of it among fifty museums in fifty states.

More striking than the couple’s generosity and sense of giving back to society is that unlike most contemporary art collectors, the Vogels were not wealthy. Herbert Vogel was a high-school dropout who earned his living as a postal worker, sorting mail during night shifts at various New York post offices. His wife worked as a reference librarian at a Brooklyn library. Even after they retired, this middle-class …

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The Madonna and Child, Duccio di Guoninsegna, c. 1300, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In my last post, I blogged on a column David Brooks wrote last week on the rising inequality of opportunity between rich and poor children in America. Now comes a long New York Times article identifying single motherhood as a key factor in that increasing inequality. In the Times article, Jason DeParle (who in his separate blog includes statistics purporting to show the link between rising economic inequality and single motherhood) tracks the paths of two mothers who started out more or less the same—both young middle class women who went to college—but ended up leading very different lives.

One of the women finished college, got married and then had children, and remains married. Result: Two incomes, stable…

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In his most recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks laments the results of a study led by Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, which demonstrate an “inequality of opportunity” between rich and poor children in America. The children of the rich and poor, we’re told, are raised “in starkly different ways and have different opportunities,” and rich parents “invest more money in their children” than poor ones.

Although this sounds a lot like observing that faces come with noses, Mr. Brooks considered the study noteworthy enough to write a column on it. He blames the calamitous situation of an increasing inequality of opportunity in America on “a long series of cultural, economic and social trends.” In particular, he singles out the demise of working-class jobs and the increase in out-of-wedlock births. To climb out of the bleak future where the gap…

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An artist friend once said that it’s best to consolidate your disasters into one “inconvenient day.” Now I know what he means.

My Italian sojourn was going perfectly. Getting to Siena on June 1^st went off without a hitch, the apartment assigned to me and my husband turned out to be beautiful—view of the Duomo out one window, the Campanile from another, and my studio was clean, light-filled and accessible at any hour. Lots of trips to the Siena Pinacoteca to see hundreds of  Sienese paintings, a day trip to Florence to see an exhibition, another trip, in the evening, to attend a concert of the wild Pogorelich playing Chopin, a few trips to the Tuscany countryside, including swims in pools, dinners under the June moon—man, this was what life was all about.

Eager to see more painting at the end of my residency at the Siena Art Institute, my husband and I headed off to…

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Happy birthday, you wild child!

Today, June 28, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 300th birthday. Although it’s hard to imagine philosophers as squalling newborns, in Rousseau’s case, it makes sense. His whole philosophy hinges on the idea that we humans are born good but, along the way of making civilization, we manage to destroy what’s good in ourselves. From the moment the umbilical cord is cut, Rousseau essentially says, we systematically obliterate our real nature, which is one of benevolent beings happily living a simple existence.

But for someone living in any complex society since the Industrial Revolution, Rousseau’s philosophy is not only difficult to believe (aren’t education, exposure to the arts, technological progress inarguably good things?), but inconvenient to practice—even in …

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While walking around the walled town of Siena this past month, my husband and I have quietly observed that even though most of the tourists here are European, if not Italian, a lot of them wear T-shirts printed with English words. The English is often goofy, as if it was translated from the Hungarian by Google translator. Today my husband saw a T-shirt that read, “MILLBURY COLLEGE RALEIGH CITY USA 1968.” I’ve traveled in Europe enough to know that American pop culture has been viral for generations. But what I’m now noticing are the dates: 1983, 1972, 1968, 1956. (The 1950s, now three score years in the past, are about as far back as hip Europeans seem to want to go.)

In the States, the same sort of temporal wistfulness applies. When I walk by my local wine shop, with its sign proudly announcing Est. 2000—meaning it’s been in business for more than one entire decade (wow)�…

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Jackson Pollock in a photo by Hans Namuth at Wikipedia

Here I am, blogging my heart out about what it’s like to spend an entire month in Siena submerged in Sienese painting, when I casually click on The Chronicle’s Web site only to see The Chronicle has chosen to illustrate Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s “In Praise of Leisure” with the clichéd image of paint brushes in a jar to signify a recreational activity. The Chronicle is hardly alone in seizing on the image of paint brushes for this kind of thing.  Everyone does it. But it galls me as a serious painter, and I hope you can see why.

While my sentiments accord entirely with the essence of the article, I take exception to the illustration. Couldn’t it have been an image of shuffleboard? Or a birdhouse built in a basement? The image of…

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Title page from Petrarch's Virgil (c. 1336), by Simone Martini. Illuminated manuscript, 29,5 x 20 cm Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (Wikipedia)

In his exuberantly written, highly informative book Sienese Painting (Thames and Hudson, 2003), Timothy Hyman quotes the art historian  John White saying, “The patent on the history of art was taken out in Florence.” As Hyman observes, Vasari’s 16^th-century Lives of the Artists bequeathed us a closed narrative whereby Western art culminates in Renaissance linear perspective, mastery of naturalistic anatomy, and empirically-based imitations of light and shadow—all the tricks that make for great illusionistic painting (what most people call painting that “looks real”) that were perfected in Florence.

The problem with this account is not that…

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A cantrada drummer and flag bearer practicing for the Palio (shot from my apartment window).

While being an artist-in-residence at the Siena Art Institute in Italy means I get to spend a good part of each day working on small gouaches inside my light-filled studio, or tracking down as many of the tenderly moving Sienese paintings in situ as I can, it doesn’t mean I leave no time to meander the streets and observe the city and its people more generally. Al contrario.

While the thousands of Sienese swallows swoop about the sky in search of flying insects, I relentlessly hike up and down the steep and narrow streets trying to feel my way to what I know, in the end, can add up to only a partial understanding of this city. By dint of timing, I’m taking a crash course in the Sienese system of contrade a…

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Piazza del Campo and Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy

Lucky me. I’m artist-in-residence at the Siena Art Institute in Italy, for the month of June. I accepted this residency (turn it down? are you kidding?) for multiple reasons—because it gives me the chance to immerse myself in Sienese painting (which, like most artists, I love), because it generates an intensity in making my own art that can only come about when I’m pushed by an end date, because it lets me escape the quotidian patterns of my own life in New York and see if something exciting and new happens out of that, and finally, because I get to taste once again what a real, non-Monsanto tomato tastes like.

Since last Friday, I’ve been ensconced in a beautiful top-floor apartment (a healthful climb of 103 steps) in the center of the old…

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Mitt Romney is on record saying he thinks President Obama was born in Hawaii, but his former rival Donald Trump, whom people living above insect life know full well he loathes with a passion who is now a supporter  at whose feet he groveled for heaven knows what reason  and with whom he worked a Republican fundraiser in Las Vegas last night, is a fraud who will lie through his teeth whenever it suits his repulsively over-the-top ego thinks  the man does not think—I can’t believe I am typing out this word as if it’s a verb that could pertain to him  Obama was born in Kenya.

People say Mitt was born in America and is an American citizen, although what’s with his father and the Mexico story? is a nice and decent man, so his excuse for bottom-fishing for wacko voters  campaigning with  the most vulgar man in America   the man  who’s perpetrating the biggest and most racially…

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"What the ... A third essay question--on Erasmus and Renaissance portraiture! Save us! Save us!" (Photo by Patrick Denker via Flickr/CC)

On the last day of class, before finals began, a student asked me if it was possible to rewrite one of the essays for a course that had included three essays, a midterm, a final examination, and seminar discussions. “I need an ‘A’ for my scholarship,” the student announced. Although my brain quickly ticked off the ways I loathe this sort of appeal, I smiled, answered no, and suggested the student study hard for the final exam.

After submitting my final grades for the semester (I experienced a flicker of hesitation before I entered the above student’s final grade, which was not a grade of “A”), I began thinking about the underlying injustice–and…

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From Wikipedia, a Théodore Chassériau portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville, who may have known Americans better than we know ourselves.

Several commenters have asked Brainstorm bloggers to weigh in on the firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley. My conflicted opinion on the matter kept me silent for a while—perhaps no better than Hamlet’s dithering. In any event, with the dust now somewhat settled, I’d like to say something.

I found Ms. Riley’s two Brainstorm posts on Black Studies programs so sloppy, arrogant, repugnant and indefensible as arguments that they pushed to the very back burner the issue of free speech in general and, in particular, Ms. Riley’s rights or privileges as a Brainstorm blogger. All I could focus on was that Ms. Riley had violated the fundamental responsibility of any writer—…

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(Photo by Flickr/CC user muffinn)

Most working artists in America (certainly most who teach at colleges and universities) hold a Master of Fine Arts degree, established by the College Art Association, more than 50 years ago, as the terminal degree in the fine arts. As Dan Berrett writes in this week’s Chronicle, however, that may be about to change. The College Art Association is now tiptoeing around the idea of embracing the studio Ph.D. as the new terminal degree in the fine arts. Recently, the CAA hosted a workshop entitled, “Ph.D. for Artists: Sense or Nonsense?” The title tells you everything you need to know about how differently people in the art world view the idea.

On one side are those for whom a Ph.D. in studio art can’t come too soon. It would address the needs of internationally a…

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Picasso's "Ma Jolie." (Click to get to image's host site, MoMA.)

A couple of weeks ago, I lectured on Picasso and Cubism in a team-taught course for Hofstra Honors College freshmen in which I am one of 14 professors. The students in my two discussion groups also took a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso’s seminal Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and other Cubist works by him. For a short paper, I asked students to persuade an imaginary “Uncle Fred”—who’s hostile to modern art but nevertheless accompanies them to a modern art museum—that Picasso’s paintings are worthwhile art. I supplied “Uncle Fred’s” questions; the students wrote the responses.

With previous papers, I had my students make multiple revisions until they satisfied all my editorial comments—which started off…

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