I have always felt an affinity for the sea. Perhaps it coincides with early days of scouring the dark surf of Vancouver Island searching for seashells, a collection that to this day I loyally amass, or perhaps it is something much more primal like that oceanic womb of being from...

The following is excerpted from an accepted article that never reached print. . .so I’m reworking here and condensing into a series of posts. . .voilà Part 1: Land of Enchantment A summer ago, I had the time and resourcefulness to arrange an extended stay in New Mexico.  I’d just...

Continued from Part I New Mexico: New Art A few in between thoughts on White Sands and the Alamogordo Museum of Space History . . . I saw in the newspaper today that it was the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.  History, but history is only the yesterday...

Continued from New Mexico:  New Art — Part I (and 1/2)   Back in Albuquerque the University of New Mexico comes in a tight second as the city’s largest employer, falling only behind Kirtland Airforce Base.  With Route 66 cutting through the city’s main drag, the congregating buzz of low-riders,...

The Revere of the Ravine. . . Part III in this excerpted series beginning at Part I: Land of Enchantment and Part II. . . (again, reworked slightly for this blog).New Mexico’s stunning landscape has inspired an aesthetic mystique rooted in the deep tradition of romanticism.  In romanticism, feeling, spiritualism,...

Final addition in the NM series featuring the First Church of Nuclear Disarmament and the Shidoni Foundry continued from Part III the Revere of the Ravine . . . Perhaps it is this very rift between the dreamscape and reality that distinguishes great art in this land of many artists though...

Back in the 90s I remember an evening in East London when, running around with the Chiba City crew, the lads had found a vacant factory of sorts in the Old Street area for one of their, late-Saturday-night/early-Sunday-morning parties.  The soundsystem (a monstrous exertion of speakers, decks, and lights) had...

Clarion Alley San Francisco I am someone who loves museums and libraries, the quiet, the calm, and the prevailing sense of order under the guidance of history.   I am also someone who loves street art. . .playful, political, pretty, or polarized. . .one of my greatest enjoyments in life is...

Art and Places — Off the Similkameen, Hedley, BCMost people come to the country for rest and relaxation but it feels like I come to the country to work. I’ve been in the Okanagan for the past few weeks now and it’s been busy. Perhaps it just goes with country-living–...

Minimalism in an Age of Hoarding: Artist Jennifer Vanderpool I first experienced Jennifer Vanderpool’s hypersensitive reality close to a decade ago, having walked into one of her elaborate installations at the former Bandini Gallery in Culver City. It was one of the most obsessive, engaging installations I had come across,...