cross off and move on

Adela, Bernice, and Charna, the youngest—all gone for a long time now, blurred into a flock sailing through memory, their long, thin legs streaming out beneath the fluffy domes of their mangy fur coats, their great beaky noses pointing the way. From "Cross Off and Move On" by Deborah Eisenberg, full story on NYRB

Painting: Confrontation 1 (1988) by Gerhard Richter, via Tate

gerhard richter painting

Oh. OH, wow, this documentary: Gerhard Richter Painting via Blood is the New Black

Painting: Gerhard Richter via Blue Vertical Studio

nothing other than this

"Gymnast Karin Janz, 15, had been nominated Athlete of the Year in East Germany, where the Cold War propaganda tool of athletic training was an emblem for Soviet triumph (for the East), and personal escape from grinding Soviet repression (for the West). Richter, who had fled Dresden for Düsseldorf, fuses that inherent contradiction with "Leap Into the Void," a famous photograph of French artist Yves Klein appearing to soar out a second story window on tippy toes, which Richter saw in a 1963 Paris gallery exhibition.

The smile on the girl's face seems caught between joy and hysteria, youthful optimism and forced cheer. Forget exalted painterly uplift. A chilly, meditative small masterpiece, "Gymnastics" refuses idealized fantasies of escape -- athletic, artistic or political." LA Times review of from Calder to Warhol:Introducing the Fisher Collection (a completely staggering exhibit).

Gymnastics, 1967 Gerhard Richter

maps of the world in its becoming

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Gerhard Richter, Apple Trees, 1987

a roomless door

I walked past a house
I walked past a house I heard weeping
I walked past my father's house I heard weeping
It sounded like a roomless door, a piano's 89th key

- Jane Hirshfield, via The San Francisco Panorama
Painting, Besetztes Haus, 1989, Gerhard Richter

after betty

"I've always felt the gap between words and things, the impossibility of articulating what's really out there in the world, the strangeness of naming everything, including the self, how completely arbitrary it all is, and yet, at the same time, how it determines identities."

Siri Hustvedt in conversation with Thisbe Nissen
Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Painting: Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988

in a dress my mother made

"I was married ten years ago, on a brazenly warm day in January, from my father's house, in a dress my mother made, with the same blithe blindness that sends a bungee jumper off a bridge" For Better or Worse by Lynn Darling

Photo by Estelle Hanania via Montmartre's Sketchbook
(Reminiscent of a Gerhard Richter painting)

sleeping

Painting by Gerhard Richter, Schlafende (Barbara N.), 1970

twilight of the superheroes

Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It's as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history—a sensation, really, that's a lot like hope. From "The Flaw in the Design," by Deborah Eisenberg.

Painting: Seascape (Contrejour), 1969 by Gerhard Richter.