Tag: painting
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May 10, 2022
A few months ago, I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Krista Tippett, and I keep thinking of a point she made: how in every book I’ve written there’s “some connection between animals and . . . human courage.” This painting (by the artist Noah Saterstrom) of me, my brother and Una, the…
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December 24, 2020
This painting is in the window of my local coffee shop. At night, the snowflakes light up with tiny little white lights. I don’t know who made the painting, but whoever they are, I’m grateful to them. I’m grateful to everyone who puts light and magic into the world. Thank you. I believe, I believe,…
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January 24, 2017
This is Bagram Ibatoulline’s original art for the cover of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Bagram gave me the painting as a gift, and it has been hanging in my living room for almost ten years now. I still can’t get over it: the beauty of the painting, the rightness of it, how Bagram…
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March 15, 2016
A few years ago, I went to the Walker Art Museum here in Minneapolis to see an exhibit that featured Edward Hopper’s sketches and studies and some of his finished paintings. There was a painting in that exhibit that I’ve been trying to find ever since. I can’t remember the title of it, but it…
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January 21, 2016
I’ve written several times before about how I like to visit a particular painting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts—Vuillard’s The Artist’s Mother Opening a Door. Last week I was at the museum with a friend, and we went and looked at the painting together. “I’ve never really been able to articulate why this moves…
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May 26, 2015
I saw Edouard Vuillard’s Repast in a Garden for the first time years and years ago. I was maybe twenty-five years old. I remember standing in the National Gallery and staring at that light, at the people gathered around the table, at the magic circle of it all, and thinking: there is where I want…