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Category Archives: Gayle Rodda Kurtz

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Goya, Still Life with Golden Bream, 1808-12. Oil on canvas, 17 5/8 x 24 5/8”. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Looking at Goya’s Still Lifes

March 5, 2015 by William Eaton

One of the many surprises at the recent extraordinary exhibition, Goya: Order & Disorder, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were his still-life paintings. They are remarkable for their departure from traditional still lifes of memento mori sentiments that usually include only a trace of the reminder of death. In Goya’s still lifes, the subject is death—recently killed animals or already butchered. Goya painted twelve still lifes, without commission, between 1808-1812, the years of Spain’s war with Napoleon […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Goya, Order and Disorder, Still Lifes

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Lu Zhang, Artist and Daughter of China

February 19, 2015 by William Eaton

  One cannot ignore or underestimate the emotional depth associated with traditional Confucian values in China, specifically in relation to the social environment and parental feelings imposed on a single daughter. Any attempt by her to break away from the conservative expectations of the traditional family unit often results in conflict. The artist Lu Zhang was born and raised in Xi’an, a major historical center in the heart of China. For her to leave this region and come to New […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz • Tags: art, love, Lu Zhang

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J.M.W. Turner, Self-Portrait, c. 1798, oil, 28 3/4 x 22 3/4, Tate Gallery

The Persona of Mr. Turner

January 11, 2015 by William Eaton

I have been teaching 19th-Century European Art for several years. I like to show self-portraits of artists to students so that they can imagine what these “names” actually looked like. With J.M.W. Turner, I use the self-portrait here when he was 23 years old. There is no paintbrush in his hand and he is looking straight at the viewer from a frontal position—not the usual over-the-shoulder-looking-in-the-mirror pose of most self-portraits by artists. It suggests an eager, handsome and romantic-proud young […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, movies, Mr. Turner

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Lights in the Dark and Random Thoughts

December 24, 2014 by William Eaton

  During the holidays one of the pleasures of my childhood was the night when my parents drove us around Sacramento to see the decorated houses. There was one street called “Christmas Tree Lane” with every house in a blaze of lights in strange and wonderful configurations. It was spectacular. I appreciate the creative efforts that these industrious house-decorating artists take to enliven our ordinary landscapes with bright, warm, good cheer once a year when dark descends early.  On my […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, New York City

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Holiday Mix

December 18, 2014 by William Eaton

A sight we have come to dread during the holidays is the invasion of Santas and Mrs. Santas for their annual drinking “pub crawl.” SantaCon 2014 took place this past Saturday, December 9, and, according to news reports, it was supposed to be saner and more sober. It did start out less boisterous in New York City, perhaps because the same day 25,000 people gathered in Washington Square Park to march against Police Violence. These two radically different populations intermixed in […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, civil rights

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Steven Hirsch, Photographs of the Contemporary Sublime

December 11, 2014 by William Eaton

(Note: For clarity and focus of the photographs described, and at the request of the photographer, we refer you to his website and the individual links to see images for this piece: stevenhirsch.com.) The Gowanus Canal The recent exhibit Gowanus: Off the Water’s Surface of Steven Hirsch’s photographs, at Lilac Gallery in New York City, reminded me of Edmund Burke’s famous definition of the sublime in the 18th century: The passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: photography, Steven Hirsh

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Thomas Struth on The Lure of Technology

December 4, 2014 by William Eaton

It isn’t often that one sees at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art an image that shocks. When I first viewed Thomas Struth’s photograph Figure II, Charité, Berlin 2013 (further reproduction not authorized by the subject), no text, except the title accompanied the image, and I spent a lot of time contemplating its subject: a person in a hospital, wrapped and entangled in myriad tubes and machines. Was she alive was? my question. And was all this stuff the result […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz • Tags: art, photography, Thomas Struth

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For the Holidays: The Phoenix of Xu Bing

November 27, 2014 by William Eaton

  “One-of-a-kind,” “spectacular experience,” “magical,” and “dazzling” are some of the words used to describe the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular. These words equally describe the Phoenix of Xu Bing now installed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street) until the end of 2014, and, I propose, a meaningful alternative to commercial holiday attractions in New York City. This is the second installation of the Phoenix Project in the U.S. From December 22, 2012 […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Phoenix, Xu Bing

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