Claudia Keep (American,b.1993)
Morning Swim, 2022
Oil on masonite panel
Solitude
Great Plains, Nebraska
photo Andrew Moore
“The day was mild, the light was generous. The German on the café terrace held a small book on his lap. I caught sight of the title: Mysticism for Beginners. Suddenly I understood that the swallows patrolling the streets of Montepulciano with their shrill whistles, and the hushed talk of timid travelers from Eastern, so-called Central Europe, and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?— like nuns in fields of rice, and the dusk, slow and systematic, erasing the outlines of medieval houses, and olive trees on little hills, abandoned to the wind and heat, and the head of the Unknown Princess that I saw and admired in the Louvre, and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings sprinkled with pollen, and the little nightingale practicing its speech beside the highway, and any journey, any kind of trip, are only mysticism for beginners, the elementary course, prelude to a test that’s been postponed.”— Adam Zagajewski, “Mysticism for Beginners”
“To meet him, I go back to the Leningrad of 1964. The streets are devilishly cold: we sit on the pavement, he begins abruptly (a dry laugh, a cigarette) to tell me the story of his life, his words change to icicles as we speak. I read them in the air.”
Ilya Kaminsky, ‘Joseph Bodsky’, Dancing in Odessa
Kazuo Shiraga, “Untitled,” 1998,
Oil on canvas, 60 x 96 cm.
alec soth, “sidney’s tomatoes, nubbin creek, alabama,” 2007, pigmented inkjet print
