JOHN DIAMOND-NIGH

#"Habitation" by Margaret Atwood Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder: the edge of the forest, the edge...

A book–rare, hard-covered, tip-top shape by an author you love. And signed. Slim, infinitely delicious, and yes, of course, expensive. Or...

Lynne talks often about the miracle of her junior high and high school on Long Island. Better by far than university would ever be. She...

Museums are funny places. You take something as inherently unruly, juicy and impious as a work of art should be, and place it in a home...

The first art museum I remember visiting was the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. My father took me there to meet Rembrandt. He made a big...

A friend asked me recently, for purposes of a piece he was writing, to list three life principles that have worked especially well for...

I thought I’d be sent to my bedroom for heresy. Perhaps I was kicking back against some parental remonstrance–I hadn’t mown the lawn, or...

Beyond the cotton fields and pine forests, and after that the turtle-spotted swamps, you enter a vast pane of charred, chopping waters,...

Waiting for Firestone to open, I spend a couple of minutes ferreting out those old receipts and Tutankhamun pistachio shells that find...

Snowfall, denser and denser, dove-coloured as yesterday, snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping. –Paul Celan Raised in Canada, I wait...

Nor has life in it aught better Than this hour of clear coolness, the hour of waking together. #Ezra Pound At a point in time when the...

I’ll get to art; but first some words on sorrow–its butterfly arabesques. My mother’s recent funeral was all one could hope for in terms...

What happens to the #jesters when the #king himself is ten times more obscene? What happens to the #subversive role of the #artist when...

Years ago I was an artist-in-residence at Alfred University. It was a fabulous gig. One day the dean asked if I’d give a lecture to the...

Good question. If you’re a painter–#Chardin, or Giorgio #Morandi or my neighbor who paints cold, elysian ceramic bowls–you would paint a...

As Asheville tilts more and more towards the mournful depravities of #tourism, mainstream arts can take on the hues of tour stop, of...

My intent is to keep this column somewhere within the misty township of aesthetics. Today I was going to talk about #nostalgia, murky,...

#Björk, #Sigur Rós (mysterious rock group) and #Olafur Eliason (multivalent artist) all hail from one steamy, glacial #island. Numerous...

#THE ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE: it’s a huge, scrolling LED sign by artist #Jenny Holzer that combines in its feminist critique...

Several years ago, Lynne and I decided to move to a whole new country–beautiful, exotic, and different than anything we had known before....