Before the 20th century, religion claimed special skill at understanding the soul. You could consult priests, the Bible or just straight up pray. By the 20th century we were turning to psychology to understand our spiritual selves. That approach favored emotions and later neurological process, ending up with an aura…

The Magic Forest. Edvard Munch. 1919–1925 Trembling earth, haunted forests, bleak shores and white nights express Edvard Munch’s eco-melancholia, paintings of prophecy mixed with nostalgia for a world in harmony. Munch worshipped nature and the stark allure of his Norwegian and German imagery shows us a soul thoroughly imbued with…

“This wooden barrel on wheels is the most important piece of field equipment we have,” says Duane Adams, a Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum docent who worked 46 years in the tobacco farms of the Connecticut Valley. He slapped the weathered sides of a wooden barrel, and pointed out how essential…

Nature’s Core Photography Exhibition Souterrain Gallery, West Cornwall CT By Kathleen Hulser Béla Selendy is perplexed and riveted by the processes which vitalize all life and yet remain mysterious and inchoate. In Nature’s Core, light is always a portal to the unknown. The artist refers to “involuntary perception,” a notion…

A frolicsome display of food-themed art opened at the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village, CT on October 15. Curated by Garth Kobal, the show teases our taste buds with an array of delectable work. These artists know that food is fun, and leave worship at the Altar of…

In artist Emily Waters “Persistence/Insistence” exhibition at the Souterrain Gallery in West Cornwall, Connecticut, Grecian women and Egyptian-style Birdmen face off: sometimes connecting, sometimes stalled in a baffling war of the wills. The female figures clad in chitons of the Hellenic world, foreground a woman’s gifts and aura. …

We love to map our lives on geometry. Work is a grid of many discrete boxes. Play is the tangent refreshing the unpredictable impulse. Romance is a Venn diagram where overlap turbocharges the heart. Friendship plots to X and Y where the point of intersection undulates in the great sine curve of closeness. Aging is an arc bending towards infinity. Fibonacci numbers shape our thoughts into graceful proportions, an echo chamber of golden ratios. The fractals of enthusiasm bump against the paisley of tenderness. Euclid and Pythagoras made the body Earth’s measure, and Nature harmonizes our internal geometry.

Don Gummer at Five Points Art Center Sculpture loves the sky, taking cloud, rays, forest and field as volumes to shape. Don Gummer’s sculpture spread around the generous acreage of the Five Points Art Center in Torrington, Connecticut features porous structures that frame and reframe the environment, letting metal members…

After a slam bang ride on the #1 train, I bounded into the Museum of Modern Art to catch some highlights from the 1970s and 1980s. Astounded at how many artists I knew from that period who have pried their way into these exclusive collections. Once upon a time they…