Blog – Ellen Kwatnoski

STARE… IT IS THE WAY TO EDUCATE YOUR EYE, AND MORE. STARE, PRY, LISTEN, EAVESDROP. DIE KNOWING SOMETHING. YOU ARE NOT HERE LONG.

– WALKER EVANS

Let’s stir up the mulch of inspiration — the sparking, loamy source of the creative process. At times, my mulch-stirring will have direct bearing on what I’m writing, and at others, none at all. Or, more likely, I just haven’t yet found the connection. Let me know what inspires you . . .

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Museums

The Most Famous Impressionist You’ve Never Heard of

Gustave Caillebotte? The name doesn’t spring to mind if you’re asked to rattle off a few well-known Impressionist artists. Yet he was a master of all they sought to do—to paint light, employ unusual perspectives, and render life as…

Museums

John Singer Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

Imagine you’ve been invited to a gathering hosted by the famous American expatriate painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Here you meet his teacher, his patrons and their children, as well as his close friends—painters, writers, actresses,…

Museums

LIfe’s a Beach: Photographs by Martin Parr

Strolling through Savannah’s many Spanish moss-festooned squares, I was transported to a by-gone era—the graceful houses, ornate balconies, magnolia-scented breezes, a horse’s hoof ringing on cobblestones—until I came to Telfair…

Museums

A Great Flowering at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s exclusive East coast showing of Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: the Art of the Flower is touted as the first major American exhibition to examine 19th century French floral still life painting and its development…

Museums

Water and Shadow: Kawase Hasui and Japanese Landscape Prints

A screen of snow, a curtain of rain, a spring shower, a sunset behind a bridge in summer: all vivid images created by the Japanese printmaker, Kawase Hasui (1883-1957). In the newly modern Japan of the early decades of the twentieth century,…

Museums

Winging it at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

The exhibit, “The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art,” now at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, marks two anniversaries: the 1914 extinction of the passenger pigeon and the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964. If…

Ellen Boyers Kwatnoski

Stories of Secrets Kept and Told

STARE… IT IS THE WAY TO EDUCATE YOUR EYE, AND MORE. STARE, PRY, LISTEN, EAVESDROP. DIE KNOWING SOMETHING. YOU ARE NOT HERE LONG.

– WALKER EVANS

The Most Famous Impressionist You’ve Never Heard of

John Singer Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

LIfe’s a Beach: Photographs by Martin Parr

A Great Flowering at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Water and Shadow: Kawase Hasui and Japanese Landscape Prints

Winging it at the Smithsonian American Art Museum