untitled (sea moss) 2009

No, it's not Ireland, Cornwall, Nova Scotia or Iceland. It's the Brooklyn shore of the East River just below the Manhattan Bridge. I took this picture late Saturday afternoon while Barry and I had stopped for lunch just inside the northern entrance to Brooklyn Bridge Park before we went on to visit the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation open studios.

The mud, the rocks, and the sea moss were photographed as the water was still receding with the power of the tide. While we were munching on our sandwiches, sitting on some rocks only a few feet away from the water, I realized we were at almost exactly the same spot where I stood in the mid-80's to capture an image of a burned-out car heavily-camouflaged by tons of other dumped metal. There appeared to have been a protracted battle with some pretty aggressive weed types, but by the time I got to the site, the trash had clearly gained the field.

The Brooklyn shore environment is very different now, infinitely less romantic of course, as I suppose is all of New York. The Minox 35 print was black & white (as was everything I was doing then) and today even in my memory the entire under-the-bridges landscape is pretty noir. In my mind's eye it all looks like something inside a Jarmusch film, maybe "Permanent Vacation".

untitled (springs) ca.1985 silver print 13.25" x 8.5" [digital photograph of installation (minus mat and frame) of 35mm print behind plexi, showing flash hot spot]

It seems to me like it's been around forever, but today is actually the seventh anniversary of this blog.

For those of us who follow these things, this is also the anniversary of what turned out to be the most important event in my life, the night Barry and I met, eighteen years ago.

And, making the day even more perfect, . . . it's also Paddy Johnson's birthday!

I just checked on what I had written one year ago. Today I may be more upbeat about the world outside the circle of our friends, but only a bit.

[the image is of one the three metal street numbers mounted on a metal service door belonging to a building down the street from our own]

untitled (blue ties) 2009

Waiting for the #7 train at the 74 Street - Broadway station in Queens this afternoon, scorning the more obvious idea of going for a shot of the complex Manhattan skyline visible off to the west, I looked around for some simple patterns and found these lines.

deleting the offense: first the white paint, then the message, in a classic font of course

Sometimes it seems that the canker of commercial advertising won't stop until it's succeeded in plastering every surface in New York, but now we learn that we don't really have to put up with all of it. Thanks to the alert folks at the Municipal Landscape Control Committee of New York City [MLCCNYC] (with the help of Eastern District, as I understand it) hundreds of illegal billboards put up all over the city by City Outdoor and NPA Wildposting have been spotted and are being rendered faceless by skilled, activist artists even as I write this.

Progress at just one of the sites is documented above, in a picture taken earlier this evening. The wall shown is on the west side of Eldridge Street, just below Houston. The letter attached to the frame of the illegal billboard is copied below.

While doing some searching on line just now I found this spot-on paragraph posted by Jordan Seiler on the "Public Ad Campaign" site, outlining the proper concern of any New Yorker who is not personally a business or corporation:

Outdoor advertising in public spaces transforms those locations into environments intended for commerce and thus for private agendas. Maybe the subway was once a transportation system, but today it is a carefully crafted advertising distribution system with a controlled target audience. These NPA City Outdoor ads turn our city streets into private messaging boards sold off to the highest bidder. In the process, my interest in painting political messages about the failure of our city government is criminalized and my public voice silenced.

ADDENDA: The image I'm adding below shows what the wall looked like when it was completed. It's from the artist's own site. Ji Lee is seen painting in the picture at the top. Also, it now looks like the proper acronym for the project is to be NYSAT [New York Street Advertising Takeover], Eastern District wasn't really part of the project itself, and a concise description of the action can be found on the Wooster Collective site.

[third image from pleaseenjoy.com]

James Hyde Wave 2009 acrylic on digital print 32: x 42.75" [view of framed work in installation, including shadows]

James Hyde Recline 2009 acrylic on digital print on stretched linen 70" x 115.5" [view of work in installation, including lighting hot spot at top]

James Hyde Blender 2008 silicone on digital print 28.5" x 43" [view of framed work in installation, including shadows]

James Hyde Tao 2009 acrylic and metal on styrofoam on digital print 14" x 9" [view of framed work in installation, including shadows, particularly evident as cast on projecting block]

This show closes on Sunday. It was a top pick on ArtCat, and was extended from its original closing date of April 19. Barry and I were there in the middle of March. We both agreed immediately that it was a terrific show, but I'd somehow forgotten to tell any one who might visit this site, and to post some representative images while I was at it.

I've always thought James Hyde's work was terrific. I once fell head over heels in love with a luscious, smallish, lipstick-red, wall-mounted cube* he had created which seemed to me to represent painting, in its purest, most fundamental form. Hyde has never stood still, and the show at Southfirst certainly shows that he's still moving: painted abstract shapes and structures joined with his own conceptual photographic images.

*
something on this order (I found this particular image on evanread.net)

[detail]

Since the middle of March Barry and I have been assembling posts for a very modest new site, "Hoggard/Wagner Food Blog", which we want to use to document, mostly for our own use, some of our more successful meals and make it easier to dig up information we could use in preparing others. Actually, the ArtCat calendar started out much in the same way: It was originally built for our own use as a device to simplify the listing of gallery shows we wanted to visit.

To date the Food Blog has been used only to write about dinners we've enjoyed at home, but some day it may be stretched beyond that limited assignment. Even the colorless name is probably just tentative. And, speaking of color, I hope to add some by including rotating pictures at the top at least, probably in the form of my Greenmarket images rather than pictures of the food being described, since Barry and I have both found that food photography is not easy - especially if you're hungry.

Last night I tried something I'd never done before: I made pizza at home. I had never thought it made any sense for me to try to make fresh pasta in a tiny Manhattan kitchen, especially with so many store-bought or Greenmarket choices available close by, and I felt the pretty much the same about pizza. There were a number of times however when I'd dreamed of putting some very fresh or unusual greens or vegetables on white pizza, or even tomato pizza, the kind of thing I'd never be able to arrange for delivery.

When I changed my mind it was on account of the dual blessings of finding I had fresh ramps and fresh guanciale in the larder at the same time. What I went for wasn't a pizza that most people would recognize: White pizza with ramps and guanciale doesn't show up on the menu of the corner pizzeria.

I had already decided I was never going to make my own dough from scratch, and even dealing with the frozen ball I picked up at Whole Foods almost exceeded both patience and counter space. I'm going to be looking into alternatives, although we both thought their product was delicious - and very inexpensive.

After letting the dough rise (twice) and arranging it on top of a sprinkling of semolina flour in a large stoneware pan, I brushed it with oil and covered it with shredded mozarella, a dozen or more tiny ramps from the Union Square Greenmarket which I had quickly blanched, adding a scant ounce of guanciale [wanna make your own?], chopped and slightly pan-warmed, which I had picked up at the Murray's Cheese location inside Grand Central Market, and I finished working it by adding some grated Parmignano-Reggiano before I slid the pan into a hot (450 degrees) oven for nine or ten minutes [barely enough time to clean up a messy counter area now covered with flour glue].

While I was fretting over the dough, Barry was deciding we'd accompany the pizza with a Venaccia di San Gimignano 'Rondolino' 2006 from Philippe Wine. I suppose, if we had found any in our wine rack, a bottle of a more northern Italian white (or red) would have seemed even more appropriate, but the Vernaccia, one of our favorite everyday choices, worked very well.

As I said earlier, it was the first time I'd ever attempted a pizza of any kind, so until I had actually put it into the oven on the (previously-heated) heavy pan I thought the whole thing was going to be a total disaster. Instead, I think it may have been the best pizza I've ever had, both a perfect crust and a rich, savory topping.

We're being more and more conscious of costs these days (we're now eating at home more not just because I really enjoy cooking), so I've been very happy and proud to see that some of our best meals can be reproduced for very little money. On the food blog I should really make it a habit to point out those that shine in that category. I estimate the total cost of this particular meal for two, without the wine, to be just under $10.00.

[images by Barry]

the fire this time: the towers are are forever collapsing up above 116th Street

Each time I head uptown for something going on at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, almost always with friends who haven't been there before, I look for this capital above one of the massed columns surrounding one of the formal entrances on the West Front. I had come to assume that almost everyone had probably heard about this treasure, and its various companions, but after a look around Google-land just now, I found that they may not be as well known or photographed as I had thought.

Barry and I went up to Harlem once again last week with friends from the East Bay area on the other side of the country. They were former New Yorkers, visiting the city for the first time after an absence of seven years. We had decided we were all interested in a concert of ancient and modern Spanish choral music being offered that afternoon inside the cathedral's crossing.

Naturally while we were there I showed them one of my favorite things, this stone capital, which had been completed well before September 11, 2001. It and several others were carved by workers who were a part of an apprenticeship program proposed in 1978 to serve urban youth but also intended to preserve the stone mason's craft. During its existence one of St. John's own twin towers managed to grow fifty feet (still 100 feet short of the height intended for both). The money ran out in the early 1990's, and both structural and decorative work on the Cathedral was once more discontinued, for the third time in that last, very messy century of ours.

For more images of the stones, and more on the church and its Close, see Tom Fletcher's New York architecture site, or that of the church itself.

Louise Fishman Berm 2006 oil on canvas 12" x 16"

[detail]

Louise Fishman Arctic Sea 2007 acrylic on canvas 72" x 65"

[detail]

Louise Fishman Heart On Fire 2007 acrylic on canvas 66" x 39"

Louise Fishman Geography 2007 acrylic on canvas 72" x 65"

Barry and I went back to Louise Fishman's show at Cheim & Read on Saturday, partly because we knew the artist was going to be there, and partly because I wanted to photograph one of the paintings I had seen hanging in the rear of the gallery during the opening reception. That small oil, which is not actually part of the show, is the image at the top of this post. The next three images represent a little of what I referred to in my first post, Fishman's enormous confidence with color and the diversity of the means used in displaying it.

In the back of the gallery, in addition to "Berm", we saw another dozen or so paintings. All of them were equally as terrific, and all of which Fishman had completed in the last two years or so. We were told that the gallery had literally run out of installation space well before the artist had run out of work.

Louise Fishman Loose the Flood 2009 [approximately 66" x 38"]

I hope this image doesn't make the blog look too sentimental, especially coming after my last post (a picture of some yellow spring flowers in front of a blue wall), but today, or some other day close to it, is a big holiday for a lot of people - for many different reasons, some of them even related.

Easter was one of my favorite holidays growing up. We were observing Catholics, but my obsession with the holiday was more about the return, finally, after another interminable Lent, of lots of smells and bells: colorful church vestments (including pink!), fresh flowers everywhere, lots of music, and candy of course (even before church).

The ancient Germans, who seem to be behind all of our biggest holidays, revered a fertility goddess called Ostara (there are many spellings), who was associated with the rising sun and spring, but who was also a friend to all children. She had a pet bird that for some reason she had to change into a rabbit to produce brightly colored eggs, which the goddess gave to the children as gifts.

None of this makes sense to me now, and I'm referring to the yarns spun by both Catholic and pagan cults, so the fact that once every year at this time I pull out of the cupboard an opaque nineteenth-century glass egg (made for darning socks?) which has sat forever on some dry grasses inside a two-inch-round antique splint basket from the same era would seem to represent as much nonsense as its inspirations. Maybe it's my way of freely rendering an astronomical calendar, but I do know it makes me feel good.

We have another very old basket which I also set out early this morning, this one in the living room. It's a bit larger. Inside its ancient woven splints rest three hollowed-out and brightly-decorated real eggs. The eggs have grown old themselves since the day they were purchased at a Ukrainian holiday fair decades ago, although they don't look like they've changed a bit. Although These curios are real, and they definitely have color, I think I've always preferred their glass replica, and it's the one I'm looking at now as I type these lines.

Happy spring!

Forsythia on 24th Street, down the street from our apartment and behind the Visual Arts Theatre, which opened as the RKO 23rd Street in 1963.

Untitled (Pan Am) 2009

ghosts in the night: the Pan Am Building kisses the Commodore Hotel

I had originally intended to post this virtually abstract shot as an image alone, with no commentary, like I do with many of my photographs, but then I got to thinking about some of the follies that these two barely-seen structures (the Met Life Building* reflected in the windows of the Grand Hyatt Hotel) represent, and what they continue to tell us about New York's past. Finally, during a long-anticipated visit to the new Hearst Tower last Wednesday I looked out a window in the northeast corner of one of the higher floors and I realized that some of us haven't learned a thing. I now knew how I was going to finish this post.

Almost 30 years ago the Hyatt Hotel group demonstrated that there really are second acts in New York, but they may not always be worth staying for, or even bearable. The early twentieth-century "skyscraper" which stood on the Hyatt site, adjacent to Grand Central, was until 1980 known as the Commodore Hotel. Not surprisingly, it had been named for "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad entrepreneur who built the first Grand Central Terminal in 1871.

The Hyatt corporation's architects retained the shape of its mass, and left most of the exterior bricks of the old hotel in place, merely covering everything with a highly-reflective glass skin.

Anyone who thinks this kind of philistine rape is a thing of the past might be advised to take a walk across town. An equal or even greater abomination is being committed between Eighth Avenue and Broadway in the upper fifties. I'm referring to what owner/developer Joseph Moinian calls "3 Columbus Circle". Originally known as "Columbus Tower"**, when it was finished in 1928 (Shreve & Lamb, architects), the building occupies the entire block, between 57th and 58th Streets. Some will remember It once sheltered the much-missed Coliseum Books inside its southeast corner.

Last week I saw huge sections of masonry gouged out of finely-laid brick walls every few feet of the building's surface, all destined to hold brackets for a totally-redundant glass curtain wall. I couldn't keep looking, and, inexplicably, didn't take any pictures. Maybe I couldn't imagine looking at them once I got home. For those with the stomach, here's the website devoted to the building's transformation and marketing.

The site of this commercial-developmental obscenity is cater-corner from the bold, newly-topped-out Norman Foster Hearst Tower, which shoots out of the cast-stone facade of the six completed floors of the landmark 1928 Joseph Urban-designed New York Hearst headquarters. But it will bear a dramatically closer affinity to the new facade tacked onto 2 Columbus Circle, one block north of it, a monstrous work of destruction commissioned by the institution which I mischievously continue to refer to by its original name, the "American Craft Museum" (and not just on account of its notorious architectural crime).

The Pan Am Building may not be anyone's favorite New York skyscraper, but at least it's still permitted to represent something other than a shiny siding job.

*
(1963) architects: Emery Roth & Sons, with Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi

**
New York Times architecture critic David Dunlap has dug back even further. In a board post [with interesting pictures] on Wired New York, he writes: "For now, a palisade of three-story Ionic columns, supporting a neo-Classical entablature, surrounds the base of the structure. This is a visible vestige of the Colonnade Building, designed by William Welles Bosworth . . . .

Shreve & Lamb’s brown-brick facade was far simpler than the monumental colonnade. That incongruous combination of ornate base and spartan tower still speaks subtly — to anyone patient enough to listen — about the rise of Automobile Row in the early 20th century. But in a few months, it will be gone; another quirky corner of Manhattan that has been scrubbed, smoothed, polished, branded and lost."

NOTE: The image is of the west wall of the Grand Hyatt, showing a few white-ish rectangular windows; the smaller, more numerous blue-ish shapes are the lighted windows in [what I normally call] the Pan Am Building, reflected on the Hyatt glass. The photo was taken from the sidewalk on the south side of 42nd Street.

gods, demigods, heroes and zombies, running into and through each other, for a very fine evening

It's the most brilliant performance (theater and/or music) I've seen and heard in ages. The Wooster Group's current miracle, "La Didone", is an incredibly-inspired conflation of two relatively obscure Italian dramas, a 1960's space adventure film and an early seventeenth-century opera.

The result is a magnificent burlesque (or let's say, burlesco) which "rockets" past Mario Bava's 1965 cult movie "Terrore nello spazio", and could on its own great merits restore Francesco Cavalli's early baroque opera "La Didone" [libretto by Giovan Francesco Busenello] to the canon of Western music. It's a seemingly impossible creation, a moving jumble of exquisite beauty and low comedy.

It's unlike anything I've ever seen or heard, and I'm a veteran Wooster Group-ie.

We saw the work last night in the St. Ann's Warehouse space in DUMBO. Performances will continue through April 26, for the very, very lucky. And, yes, there are [very discreet] supertitles.

Sanya of the Argos (Kate Valk) encounters dying boar of Carthage (Scott Shepherd)

The entire company, both individually and as an ensemble, was superb, but mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn as Dido, and bass-baritone and countertenor [sic] Andrew Nolen (Neptune, Jarbas, Ilioneus, Jove, Ghost Chorus, and Kir) were absolutely amazing. Also, the primary three instrumentalists, who worked with a synthesizer keyboard, a Theorbo alternating with a Baroque guitar, and an electric guitar, were augmented on and off throughout the evening by the accordian and tambourine of Kamala Sankaram when this voluptuous and engaging performer wasn't called on to sing Juno, Mercury, Dido's sister Anna or the voice of Cupid, representing, if I can remember correctly, just about every female vocal range.

When we returned to the apartment last night and sat down to dinner, Barry chose to play some more unconventional music. His choice was perfectly in sync with what we had just heard in Brooklyn: Luc Ferrari's "Cycle des Souvenirs". Just a little night music.

[video from St. Ann's; still image by Paula Court from Performance Club]

view of the extremely elegant installation on the fourth floor (where I started), showing, from left to right, Loris Gréaud, Kerstin Brätsch, Kerstin Brätsch for DAS INSTITUT (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder), DAS INSTITUT, Adam Pendleton (two large black canvases), Josh Smith (far right), and James Richards (video installation on the platform)

Josh Smith Large Collage (New Museum) 2009 mixed mediums on panel, each 60" x 48" [large detail of 15' x 28' installation]

Katerina Šedá It Doesn't Matter 2005-2007 160 photocopied drawings, dimensions variable [large detail of installation, including two monitors showing four videos]

Dineo Seshee Bopape thwebula/ukuthwebula (the process of making someone into a zombie, which is also the same word for photographing someone) 2009 mixed media, dimensions variable [still from video within larger installation]

Icaro Zorbar Golden Triangle 2006 4 turntables, disc, and amplifiers [large detail of installation]

[artist at work]

Chu Yun This is XX 2006 female participant, sleeping pill, and bed, dimensions variable [large detail of installation]

Jakob Julian Ziolkowski Untitled 2007 oil on canvas 15.75" x 12.5"

Adriana Lara Installation (banana peel) 2008 [installation view]

Guthrie Lonergan Myspace Intro Playlist 2006 two-channel video, color, sound, 8 min. 13 sec. [large detail of one video channel]

Cory Arcangel Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn 2007 plasma screen monitor and DVD player 26" x 41" x 21" [view of installation on front counter of Museum]

Brendan Fowler Untitled (Spring 2007-Fall 2008) 2009 archival inkjet print, enamel, lightjet photoprint, acrylic and frames [installation view]

Liz Glynn The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, or, Building Rome in a Day 2008-2009 24-hour performance and installation with mixed mediums 21' x 21' [detail of installation as of 12:30 pm April 7]

[thumbnails, also taken from the other side of the glass; first, the plan]

[then, the reference]

[and a closeup of (some of) the builders]

[finally, the aerial advertising]*

The New Museum's much-anticipated new exhibition, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus", opens tomorrow on all four floors of the building. It's a wonderful, elegant carnival of a show which doesn't really pretend to represent much more than an accident of birth - in this case, a putative international "generation" of artists who were born around 1980. None of the works installed here ever saw the twentieth century, and many of them joined us just yesterday.

There are some strains running through the rich, heterogeneous catalog assembled by the curators (Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman, with Jarrett Gregory, Curatorial Assistant): They include a fascination with obsolescence and the anachronistic; a playful handling of serious issues with an innocence and directness normally confined to childhood; individual identities described by technology as well as the artist's traditional tools (sometimes both); and the intimacy and anonymity of collaboration.

The images shown here are really just a teaser, representing nothing more than what caught my attention on a hurried run through the show and could be quickly captured by my camera before the press preview ended at noon.

*
Hmmm . . . . Nero himself was only 30 when he succumbed to the effects of an assisted suicide.

JJ PEET Luxury War Lader Kit 2009 grapes, plaster, sock, brick, aluminum, stolen door knob, steel 8.5" x 21" x 9.5" [installation view]

JJ PEET Middle Management Mustache Prize 2009 oak, copper, icepick, cardboard, plaster, brick, pink paper clip, whiteout, chewing gum 13" x 16" x 9" [installation view]

JJ PEET Untitled acrylic and graphite 11" x 7" x 1"

JJ PEET Buoy 2009 cardboard, plaster, sock, foamcore, steel, vulture feather 56" x 17" x 15" [installation view]

Maybe I'd eventually have thought of it on my own, but it was artist Dan Rushton, to whom I was talking at yesterday's crowded opening of JJ PEET's "The TV Show" at On Stellar Rays, who brought up the word "surreal" in response to something I had said about the terrific floor and wall sculptures which surrounded us. Not being there long enough to do much more with that adjective, I couldn't and still can't say more on the subject, but the reference seemed to provide a warm, familiar place [Breton would be horrified by my adjectives] for the excitement the work had immediately broadcast to me. But if this is surrealism, although it doesn't look like the same as the higher reality that shook up our grandparents during the inter-war period of the last century, I'm all eyes.

I'm going back.

There's even more of an excuse for a return visit since these enigmatic pieces are actually only one element in an exhibition which is built around the artist's own ongoing television program, live and broadcast, and which does or will include during the run of the show a series trailer, reruns, sculpture (subject to alterations), paintings and photographs.

The gallery's promise:

Central to the exhibition is the weekly presentation of a new TV Show episode, broadcasted live by PEET from The Resistants’ local station, and viewable in a TV room in the gallery. The TV Show’s first episode will premiere at the opening reception. Four subsequent episodes will be broadcast live each Saturday at 5pm. Reruns will be on view throughout the week.

these portraits of León Ferrari and Mira Schendel introduce "Tangled Alphabets"

Schedule complications kept Barry and me from MoMA's Tuesday press preview of "Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel", so I missed my only chance to photograph anything in this wonderful show. The only part of the exhibition free to cameras on our visit the next day, during one of the members' previews, were these two handsome blown-up photographs mounted outside the entrance to the galleries, taken when these South American artists were young. Schendel died in her late sixties, in 1988; Ferrari, almost 90 now, is still working - and still making righteous mischief.

I am very, very sorry I didn't have a chance to capture and share here some images of Ferrari's metal sculptures and Schendel's hanging filaments or transparent papers.

I really recommend the show, and the museum itself has to be commended for mounting a serious exhibition which is, as Barry said when we left the museum on Wednesday, hardly designed as a money-making tourist magnet; being virtually entirely monochromatic, it almost seems to be discouraging traffic.

I was ignorant of both of these artists until I found myself marveling over and over at the beauty, the audacity and the conscience of the works by Ferrari which I saw displayed by several galleries participating in PINTA last November, and before I spotted some stunning drawings by Schendel at Eleven Rivington two months earlier.

The brilliance of the art scene in New York can easily turn us all into provincials. Until visiting "The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection" at the Grey Art Gallery in the fall of 2007 I had probably operated under the assumption that if there were anything to know and value about South American abstraction, as New York sophisticates most likely we already knew it and knew its merits: Any exhibition devoted to the subject would probably be largely a kindness or an exercise in recondite art history.

The Cisneros collection was an eye opener for me, and a lesson for avoiding similar surprises, embarrassments really, in the future.

ADDENDA:

• Roberta Smith works her magic in a review of the show which appeared in today's New York Times.


• This chronology from the Cecilia de Torres gallery includes some great images of Ferrari's life and his work.

Xylor Jane Bombinating 2009 oil on panel 44" x 41"

Xylor Jane Tunnel 2008 oil on panel 31" x 29"

Xylor Jane Gates 2008 oil on panel 53" x 43"

The dots and numbers seen in the paintings in Xylor Jane's recently-closed show, "N.D.E.", at CANADA actually add up (unlike the dots and numbers assembled by what was formerly, and rather quaintly referred to as our "financial system"*). I met the artist when I visited the gallery last weekend, but I think that because I already had a huge respect for the work, I was too intimidated to ask her for details.

The gallery assured me that Jane definitely uses a method in selecting and arranging what might appear to be a random working of digits. My informant admitted that he himself probably hadn't comprehended it fully when the artist described it, and although he gamely began to explain it (in this case to someone who almost certainly wouldn't have understood it anyway), we eventually decided to spare each other further embarrassment and I went back to drooling over the art.

I've just read the press release again, and I'm still stumped.

I can only say that I don't think these works could possibly have the power they do, even if you weren't aware there was some kind of very personal "formula" involved, if they owed their appearance to aesthetics or mathematics alone.

I love these pictures.

*
has everyone seen this? [a graph like this can only work its full magic in a hard copy]