Art and the Homeless

At the risk of going off the self-disclosure scale, I will admit to a fascination for tales of The Paranormal. Knowing I'm not the only one gives me courage. The Internet is burgeoning with personal reports of paranormal encounters, reports that would never have been published -before now. Some of the reports I have read have literary value (in my opinion). Let's suspend critical judgment about the veracity of such reports, shall we? I really don't care if they're true or false if it's a good read, agreed? I should also admit to trying my hand at writing a simulacrum of a paranormal encounter based on ideas cribbed from various reports that I had read. My lurking in the paranormal account forums has not gone unnoticed. A spirit followed me home today. I have become the proud owner of a Doppelganger. How do I know? A picture "fell" off the wall, just as told in countless reports, almost as if intentionally. At least, I can think of no rational explanation f...

At some point it occurs to everyone who hopes to make sense of the Picasso phenomenon what he must have been like as a person. A plethora of clues are provided in a new publication titled "Picasso the Foreigner" (2021), written by Annie Cohen-Solal, and translated by Sam Taylor in 2023. I count it a blessing that I am not naturally a celebrity hound. The lives of creative people are always a disappointment to me. I would not want to be one. I, personally, have had to come to terms with this reality. Not with the fact that I am not a celebrity, but with the reality of Human Nature (as such). Painting bums, as I do, would not be possible if I had not come to terms with the reality of human nature. Picasso, like a bum, is only human. Some bums are more human than others and we must forgive the exceptions on account of their genius. That which would be rottenness in an ordinary human being is tragic flaw in a genius. Picasso is one such genius. Annie Cohen-Solal's ingenuity i...

The miraculous resuscitation of a child by a descendant of the ancient Girolamo family, who was subsequently made a saint, is memorialized in 14th and 15th Century Florentine art. It is not one of the more popular subjects of Renaissance art. A reproduction of Zanobi della Famiglia Girolamo risuscita il bambino dalla morte, on the cover of a paperback edition of Alberti, drew my attention. My own art involves men laying supine and (apparently) dead.  It is a difficult theme. Mention of “martyrdom art” brings examples to the mind of every art aficionado. Casual observers of art look without enjoyment. Among connoisseurs, no matter how expertly painted the painting may be, it never attains the high bar of acclaim enjoyed by (to give a robust example) images of the Madonna. Death is a painful subject -the more so when it is a dead child. Canonically speaking, miracle themes such as Saint Zenobius occupy a lower tier in the Divine Comedy of art than serene scenes of Platonic cont...