FREDERIC TUTEN FOUND A NEW JOY

“At this time of my life–someone would say, the winter of my life, although I don’t feel cold,” Frederic Tuten, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and art critic, tells of finding a new joy in painting.  “Practically no day passes where I’m not either writing and painting or painting and writing, whichever comes first in…

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RALPH STEADMAN: “GENIUSES ARE REALLY LOSERS WHO TRY HARDER.”

The genius of Ralph Steadman can be found in the more than 50 books he’s written or illustrated (or both written and illustrated), in his famous partnership with Hunter Thompson and the creation of Gonzo journalism—the two not just covering a story but becoming it. “Bats over Barstow,” reproduced here, is one of his drawings…

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ZELDA’S LEGACY

On March 10, 1948, at 48, Zelda Fitzgerald, widow of F. Scott, died in a fire in a locked hospital room during the last of her many confinements for chronic mental illness. Variously diagnosed as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, at least one biographer asserts that a major objective of her treatment was to restore her…

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MY CONTRIBUTION TO THE LATEST INTERFACES ISSUE

interfaces

Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image and my contribution to it–an extended essay on writer and conceptual artist Roberta Allen along with an on-camera interview with her in 2021.  Note this is not the brief commentary previously posted but an expanded discussion of the prolific author Allen and her…

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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…

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The 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.

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ENJOY THE LATEST ISSUE OF INTERFACES

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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!

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Fernando 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.  

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Enjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES

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…

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Roberta 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.

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