Roberta Allen: “Language is the bridge…”
“Language is the bridge…” Roberta Allen began making and exhibiting her conceptual art more than a half century ago, before she came to author eight books and more than 200 works of short fiction. Indeed, as she explains in this 2021 interview, her earliest writing was about her art. Allen had her first solo exhibition…
Read MoreThe Two Sides of Peter Selgin
A two-fisted writer-artist, Peter Selgin, award-winning novelist, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer, earned his living as a freelance artist for thirty-six years, before deciding to abandon the visual arts for the literary in 2009. By 2014, well into his writing career and established as a professor of creative writing he realized he could not separate the writer from the artist. That they needed each other.
Read MoreENJOY THE LATEST ISSUE OF INTERFACES
Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on format. By that is meant the vehicle selected by a creator — a writing or a painting, for example — to express her ideas. Included is my extended essay and on-camera interview with Fernando del Paso, among the greatest Spanish language novelists of the last 100 years, who began drawing to kill time between news reports while working at the BBC and before he knew it was being exhibited alongside leading figures in the art world. Also included is my review of “The Lehman Trilogy,” which utilizes a stripped-down set and localizes and identifies characters through language, and telescopes more than a century into a few hours. Click on the link and enjoy!
Read MoreFernando del Paso: “I dream that I paint, and I paint the dream.”
With the 2015 award of the Cervantes Prize, Fernando del Paso’s place among the greatest of Spanish literary figures was cemented. Acclaimed as both novelist and essayist, the Surrealist-influenced del Paso was also an internationally exhibited artist whose work, both in ink and paint, offers precisely rendered, dream-like images that juxtapose and merge the real and the fantastic.
Read MoreTHE LEHMAN TRILOGY: IS THERE A POINT?
I repeatedly tried and failed to get a ticket to The Lehman Trilogy when it was mounted at New York’s Armory and, despairing, would have settled for a streamed version, but couldn’t match the odd venues and times with my own. So I jumped at tickets on its return to Broadway, even before Covid was…
Read MoreEnjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES
FacebookTwitterShare Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on format and the myriad ways writers, artists, sculptors, and photographers play with format to achieve their effects. Included is my extended essay and on-camera interview with Peter Sacks who began making the tiniest of images rendered with a…
Read MoreRoberta Allen: Art and Language as One
“Drawing saved me from the insanity of my family.”
Allen’s art has been exhibited globally, and her more than 200 stories have been anthologized and published in collections as well as literary journals. She is a conceptual artist: the connection between writing and art is vivid in her work—text and image are one as you can see in this recent piece shown beside.
Read MoreFrederic Tuten Fulfills a Youthful Fantasy
“George Moore said, ‘School … killed the life of love and art.’ I would not let it kill me.” As a young teenager, distinguished novelist and short story writer Frederic Tuten dreamed of being a painter and living in Paris. Inspired by such books as George Moore’s memoir, Confessions of a Young Man, and…
Read MoreHow Peter Sacks Joined the Greats
“Paint seems more embedded in the cosmos than language.” The Poet Picked Up a Paintbrush You are about to witness a historic moment. A little more than twenty years ago, Peter Sacks, a successful poet and Harvard professor, decided to pick up a paintbrush for the first time. Today, hailed internationally, his work is…
Read MoreEvan Hunter/Ed McBain, “there is no frame in writing.”
Among the very rare group of writers whose books have sold over 100 million copies, the inventor of the police procedural with his dozens of 87th Precinct novels, the author of The Blackboard Jungle, and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” Evan Hunter as the boy Salvatore Lombino was art editor of his school…
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