These pieces are ongoing responses to Life, reflecting my interest in art and music, as well as what Buddhists call 'the manure of experience'. Future titles will include an essay on Silence, a piece on Aquinas and the Zen Master, and a short story called Chicken Legs.
What We Do With Love
GRÜNEWALD AT KARLSRUHE
"Paintings, drawings, prints, and carvings collected under the roof of the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe were gathered from all over Europe during the first six months of 2008 to celebrate the work of Matthias Grϋnewald (c. 1475-1528). This triple-location exhibition also showed just across the German-French border in Colmar, and his complete drawings were shown in Berlin. Works of art were loaned from all over Europe. Brilliantly curated to show the correspondences between Grünewald’s work and that of his contemporaries, the theme of the Karlsruhe show followed the Passion of Christ from the Annunciation to His death. It was a Lenten journey of almost unremitting gloom through a wilderness of ignorance, cruelty, idiocy and unimaginable pain that stopped on Holy Saturday: only one small piece suggested that anything happened after Calvary. The story of Christ told without Easter Sunday is a dark circuit unbroken by light.
An alabaster Annunciation portended nothing of the horror ahead: a graceful angel salutes Mary, beautiful in her modesty, carved in the late 15th century and now belonging to Munich. Two saints by Grünewald - Dorothy and Agnes - illuminated the gallery with their shining presence, while his grisaille of St Lawrence was a study in grace and dignity. A white portement du Christ by an unknown Dutch Master was set under the battlements of the walls of Jerusalem: nearby, a painting in mostly ivory tones showed a Christ staggering under the flailing whips and spears of his tormentors (Budapest). Durer had drawn a woman from Nϋrnburg in a pleated dress, pregnant, a humble bystander in her headdress, one hand folded over her stomach. His drapery on a ‘standing apostle’ is the work of genius. Among Baldϋngs and Cranachs, a windswept St Christopher carrying the Christ-child stood out as the product of Altdorfer’s astonishing originality. On the wall opposite, Durer had drawn and painted ajuga reptans with a tiny lily of the valley, alive on vellum. Wild comfrey from the brush of Hans Weiditz belongs to Bern..."