Thinking about the history of lace and early digital art. In a room full of Serra and the usual suspects at MOCA, this Ruth Asawa stood out.

Surprise visit this week by a curator from Milan I haven’t seen in years, aka serendipity. Rambling around the usual places yet with her eyes, always learning from how different it feels to see art with different spirits. Then of course the chicest woman I know ropes me into trying on the next cute black satin jacket and we’re swapping favorite songs too loud on the 10 at sunset.

Just returned from another residency in Utah, part of my ongoing work as a Granary Arts Fellow. Collecting light, pattern, and color.

Uniquely among sculptors, Constantin Brancusi made a practice of photographing his work in his studio. Haven’t looked at these much until lately, gaining only greater appreciation for his inquiry from the timeless images he made. Such a feel in his light and space.

As I’ve nosed around niches, I’ve been lucky to meet some fascinating shadowy-coder types (hat tip to Liz Warren) here and there. As a seeker of clarity, in a preface to convos with elusives I tend to say: You’re in control of the privacy settings. Such respect and regard can be natural among private persons, a bit rare as we may be these days; it also gets me thinking about my experience of that terrain.

From age 7 to 18 I was an athlete propelled by a zealous drive that mystified those around me. I performed and won at national and even international levels in front of crowds, yet was somehow at the same time a total introvert about whom few knew much. The kind of ease I’d found with public and private selves in sport in no way whatsoever translated to art, because by nature the creative self is our true self and can’t be split. When I began making art at age 20, it was extraordinarily difficult to even begin to share such dimensions of my experience publicly — as an endearing example, I managed to catch myself on fire before my solo thesis show in college — and this journey is certainly not complete. With creativity there’s a different order of distinction altogether between what is and isn’t said, because the mystery itself, which is our only subject, can never be spoken directly. I adore the writing of W. G. Sebald, a deeply private man and among the most incandescent of novelists. In The Rings of Saturn it’s as if with each sentence he gradually builds two books, the spare elegance of what’s written and the ever more expansive space he sculpts, with an unmatched dexterity, of all that isn’t. As we learn in meditation, firm banks make room for great rivers to flow.