This comes from Harriet Shore in conversation with Robert Berlind in this month’s Brooklyn Rail.

Dreaming of meaning
I wake to find the sky
Framed in a window pane.

—HS

Rail: There was a discussion recorded some place between Alex [Katz] and Paul Taylor, in which Alex said something about wanting to get rid of content and Paul Taylor said, “Yeah, I’m trying to get rid of form too.” (laughter)

Shorr: Well I really do think that it’s dumb, semantically dumb, as a way to put things: form and meaning. But I like the idea of meaning, because obviously things do have meaning, and they have meanings to you, and then they have other meanings to other people. And I had some very strange moments. I made two paintings that used these bricks, and one of them was painted in 2001 before September 11. It included bricks in water and a reflection of a statue. My friend Erica Kramer was in the studio, and I told her that after a while these paintings had come to mean ruined, in some way. And she said “Oh, this place Robert [Robert Kramer, the filmmaker who died in 2000] and I had in the country, it was a brick factory.” That kind of personal thing, and just the fact that people respond that way: I think that’s how paintings communicate. The meaning is… {Read More…}

Yesterday I was riding the train out to Ridgewood, NJ and for a while was reading Phong Bui’s interview with Ellen Phelan in the most recent issue of the Brooklyn Rail, that is until I read the closing paragraph.

Of course it’s hard to talk about sublime without beauty. The two are inseparable. I remember one conversation I had with Peter (Schjeldahl) where I was nattering on about wanting to be able to paint the beauty of the world and he said, “What are you saying? The world is not beautiful. It is a horrible place.” Well I just think if you can just slow down, stop and actually see what’s around you or see the light or any random arrangement that occurs in the world—it’s perfect and beautiful; you just have to notice it. Maybe that’s the Catholic girl in me. {Read More…}

After that I decide to just look out the window and watch the beautiful show of graffiti passing by in front of me.