RSS

Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

Cropped tableau courbet header

RFRA & My Wedding Ring

It has been some time since I gave thought to the day my soon-to-be husband and I bought our wedding rings. But the spectacle over RFRA—all the panting hysteria of a predatory media and toadying politicians aided by timorous clergy—brings it back with great clarity. And even greater poignancy. Our wedding date was set. It was time to pick a ring. But where to look for one? How to shop? The two of us were young, broke, and scrappy. It would be some years yet before we could afford to pay retail. Continue Reading
Screen Shot 2023 07 10 at 1.55.56 PM

Where Did Ash Wednesday Go?

What has happened to Ash Wednesday? Is the wearing of ashes in decline everywhere? Or only in New York City, a sanctuary city for people of every faith or unfaith? Or was I just in the wrong part of town at the wrong hour?   I took an early commuter train into the city this morning, and was on the subway to Columbus Circle between 8:30 and 9:00 am. Coming up out of the station, I passed a young woman with ashes—the first I had seen since I left the house. Continue Reading
Screen Shot 2023 07 16 at 12.58.57 PM

Sistine & Porsche – A Marriage of Brands

Your friends are not religious; they are only pew-renters. They are not moral; they are only conventional. Don Juan to the Devil in Shaw’s Man and Superman
A sense of the holy brings with it a sense of taboo. We tread cautiously in the tenting place of the ineffable. A Presence abides. We dare not profane. The Vatican’s recently announced Art for Charity initiative directed toward high profile corporations raises a question: Is the Sistine Chapel still the sacred space it was built to be? Continue Reading
The Sistine Hall of the Vat

Beauty, Balthasar, & Boilers

Beauty is my business as thoroughly as trouble is Raymond Chandler’s. Still, you will never catch me talking about “the beautiful.” I have no idea what it is or what it might look like. A transcendental is a bit like a virtual “friend”—you never get to see it. In the lived life, beauty is sensible. It resides in individual things, in matter, the stuff of the world and of man’s hands. Making things is the artist’s métier. Reflection on the appearance of particular things, and opinions on them, is within an artist’s bailiwick. Continue Reading
Elie Nadleman sculpture

Remembering Jacques Ellul

We do live in history, and this age is hard to bear. Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment
To be of one’s time means to attend to the nature of the times. It means resisting the siren call of the day’s enthusiasms—zeal for environmentalism, sustainability, multiculturalism, global fixes, et alia—in order to stay mindful of the root character of those enthusiasms and their ultimate ends. In short, it means becoming a critic of one’s time. Jacques Ellul, devoted to the life of the spirit no less than the life of the mind, was a critic of the highest order. Continue Reading
  • Contact
  • Recent Posts
Subscribe To The Newsletter

Subscribe To The Newsletter

Join the Studio Matters mailing list for an occasional heads-up. Thank you.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Premade image 14

Subscribe To The Newsletter

Join the Studio Matters mailing list for an occasional heads-up. Thank you.