I thought seriously about discontinuing the blog. I couldn't help thinking that her example should serve as an inspiration for anyone faced with the bewitching lure of compromise. "To draw a male or a female, you just need to imagine in your mind a male or female, and then draw." Wonderfully unaffected. She begins by outlining the eyes with pencil lines (crushed into the paper with forceful conviction), then sketching the form with brush and black ink, and finally smearing color in left-right arcs with her fingers ("the fastest way to get color onto the paper"). Her art is thus disarmingly artless, and, accustomed to being filmed on the Japanese 1-hour television format, her technique is adaptable, efficient, and rowdy with speed. She has no idea (or interest in?) what critics in the U.S. She speaks of artistic process rather than artistic significance, and she exhibits a purity of purpose unsullied by pragmatism. Maya does not consider herself an artist who needs to self-consciously expound or theorize. It's as if her artistic production cannot grow and develop without an attendant transformation in herself. Having attained considerable success in Japan, she's planning to move to NYC in 2008 to 'reset' her career and start from zero. Japanese artist Maya Maxx gave a 1-hour "live painting" demonstration tonight, leaving behind one wall-sized mural depicting a pair of monkeys and the cryptically open-ended legend "everytime, everywhere, everybody." Inclusiveness aside (a concession to the throng of grade-school children in the front row scribbling with crayons?), her mission and method carried an inspiring message of anti-pragmatism: she does what she does because it is fun. Jeffrey Eugenides' prose is somehow both excessively exuberant and precise in metaphor, characterization, and insight.
But I couldn't help thinking that the work was designed for post-college reading circles, with "study questions" in the back, and a plot strewn with obvious symbolism and life-affirming messages.Ī massive, flowing cultural history of the United States as an immigrant nation, but also a statement on gender, national, cultural ambiguity.
For one, the joy is in the numinous power of mortal transcendence, for the other it is in the luminous principles of science, but both reach the summit equally gratified.ĭuring my months of silence, I've read a few more books:Ī meta-narrative on story-telling, this book makes the incredible fabulously credible. The other, delighting in the empirical validation of mechanical advantage, switches to the highest gear. One boy, inspired by the human capacity to overcome adversity, leaves his bike in the lowest gear. Two boys riding bicycles arrive at the foot of a steep hill and begin their ascent.