Some years ago I had a studio in the old Cobb Lane building on Southside in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, up on the third floor. I had been there for two years and would have stayed longer but one day I came up all those stairs and opened the door to my studio and there was… Read More

Reading For the Time Being by Annie Dillard. The book explores the far reaches of cruelty and of faith, from the Chinese Emperor Qin, Pol Pot of Cambodia and Stalin in Russia to the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a man of profound faith and also an anthropologist who discovered Peking Man. Dillard spends… Read More

I am working on the pastiches of old master paintings with modern technology intruding. Reading Carly Simon’s autobiography – Boys in the Trees –  nearing the end. So much of the book devoted to sex, you would think there is no other thing to do in life. Our beings being divided, as we are, among… Read More

Re-reading Anna Quindlen’s Still Life with Bread Crumbs, a novel about an artist moving on in age who moves out from the city to save money and finds her “real” life there. That rings all kinds of bells with me. Her artist is a photographer named Rebecca Winter. In this scene, Rebecca ponders why she… Read More