A model turned into a bee by lemon and honey. A model who, out of lipstick, used blood instead. How can this be called “Fun with titles”? Jeremiah, long ago, may have been on to something: “Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace?
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N’importe quoi
I went to the Whitney Biennial, and, you might say, all I got was this pastiche. (None of it “true,” and this even if we are realizing that true doesn’t mean what we long thought—and wished!—it did.) The subject, the scourge of explanation in art. “Image of the Week” from William Eaton.
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Letter to a young model
What makes a good artists’ model a good model? An aspect or mood of the model speaking to an aspect or mood of the artist? And what’s in the model’s head or heart matters more than any physical forms, however unclothed? Not to ignore the advantages of bad models and bad moods! Short text accompanied by images from William Eaton’s drawings, and with a closing text adapted from Rilke (on the marriage of model and artist?).
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The Black Model, Portraits, Naming and Renaming
Comments and translation regarding the renaming of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait d’une négresse”, a.k.a. “Portrait de Madeleine.” This as regards the show “Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse” (Musée d’Orsay), earlier known as “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today.” The comments also touch on Degas’s “Petite Danseuse” and work by Thomas Eakins, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and the piece includes charcoal drawings by William Eaton.
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Sweet potatoes, marriage, divorce, Rodin
Erotic sweet potato drawings/watercolors, done in the manner of Rodin’s erotic drawings? With commentary that begins with John Stuart Mill on happiness, marriage and divorce, and includes a link for a recipe for duck breast (plus sweet potatoes, of course).
Read MoreSample from “Wild life, wild mind”, The Chronicle of Higher Education
We ignore how our thinking—about feelings, bodily functions, friends, politics, what’s on the television— lets us down. I am not talking about the possibility that someone else—Sontag, say—might be smarter than I am or have more-incisive insights than I do. I am talking about thinking on a much more basic level: that a particular peach…
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Surviving the Twenty-First Century (the book)
Parenting, Corporate Thievery, Aging, Technology, Ideals – one might easily feel overwhelmed. With a unique approach to the personal, the political and the intellectual, William Eaton’s essays keep asking: “How might we live?” Excerpts from Amazon 5-star reviews: “William Eaton thoughtfully and gracefully examines his experiences as father, wage earner, consumer, citizen, dreamer, ethicist. (Spoiler…
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