Word: eye
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...knew everything about glazing and underpainting. Those ultramarine blues, whites and lead-tin yellows make each image an epitome of a luminous world, a place not merely revealed by light but constructed by it. Even his darks shine. The late 17th century in Holland was an age of the eye: optics was a ruling scientific interest, and the telescope and microscope were opening tracts of nature that up till then had been below or beyond normal sight. As an aid to painting his View of Delft, Vermeer probably used the camera obscura--a box with a lens that captures...
...Music Lesson, circa 1662-64. The foreground is occupied by the elephantine bulk of a table draped in a Turkish carpet. Its thick folds of wool and the blue tracery on its shadowed flank, which looks dull in reproduction but fairly blazes in the original, delay your eye as it tries to get into the picture. More obstacles are built into the space between the carpet and the figures at the end of the room. There is a white pitcher on the table, a sky-blue chair with gleaming brass tack heads, and finally the voluptuous mass of a bass...
...negotiating these things, your eye becomes tuned to the distance of the figures and to the air around them: the woman at the keyboard whose back is turned but whose absorbed face can be glimpsed in the canted wall mirror, and her teacher (or perhaps, given Vermeer's interest in music as a metaphor of harmonious love, her suitor) in black. You can gauge the depth of the room from the perspective clarity of its floor tiles. It is real, but at the end it becomes a paradise of abstraction, in the sober play of dark-framed rectangles of picture...
...joke is that until now, Kinnear has been making eye contact mainly with a TV camera. On Later, a half-hour chat show with a single guest, he uses it with irony, as a mirror to check how very fabulous he looks. Or, after the guest has uttered some mild inanity, Kinnear stares ahead mutely, as if he'd just been whacked on the skull by a bear paw but is too stoic to wince. It's this bland poise that keeps him from blinking when film stardom stares him in the face...
LITTLE ELISA IS ANOTHER SAD EXAMPLE of the many shameful deaths that occur across the U.S. Many children whose lives are nightmares go unnoticed and don't have a prince in their lives to help bring their stories to the public eye, as Elisa did in Prince Michael of Greece. How many tiny victims have been hushed by the inadequacies of the system? How many battered women have ended up dead, their muffled cries for help unheeded? How many more unnecessary deaths will it take for the voices of the abused to be heard? Why does it take the torture...