notanotherbookreview

  The World of Winslow Homer   ( Time Life  Library  of Art, 1966 ) by John Thomas Flexner shows unpeopled sea and landscapes, humans battling nature with revelatory emotion and technique. A favorite of mine is the watercolor of the  artist's studio, both specific and abstract.  Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was part of The Hudson River School but he also stood apart. Many of these self-taught "Yankee" painters, like Cole, an Englishman, came to paint the pure luminous light of the New World with unknown seasons. Cole, a portrait peddlar, knocked on doors with canvas and art supplies strapped to his back, until he quit to "learn from nature." Homer,  apprenticed to a printer, learned to produce in-depth black and white illustration. After his freedom, he became a  master of watercolors and taught himself to paint "what he saw" in oils.  Surprising to him,  the work sold.   New England light contrasted to a brutal environment, ...

Imperfect Love by Brandon Cole was the basis of Illuminata, a 1998 film he cowrote with John Turtorro and, in an unusual quirk of fate, the play first made into a film is now at the Connelly Theater in New York (thru February 18th.). I found it unexpectedly timely for 2018, though it first appears a period piece. We currently ride a wave of social and technological change, where the old verities, values and attitudes have suddenly become suspect, called to question, even irrelevant.  In Imperfect Love , the 19th century verities about love, the roles of men and women, class and status were celebrated in a mythic theater driven by tumultuous passion and poetry. As Imperfect Love begins, the old plays have lost ground to the  new nordic realism of Ibsen and Strindberg. Plays of the mind, psychologically driven, are replacing the "elevated"emotion of the Italians. This clever play surfs the wave, shifting from mythic reality to our modern psychological age. Imperfect ...