 |
| Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Shuffled (1987/2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Reverse Tracing (1987/2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Tracing (1987/2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Drawing (1987/2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Massed Areas (1987/2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, TSA - It's a Muscle - Rex Delafkaran & Colleen Keihm (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Rex Delafkaran at TSA (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Colleen Keihm at TSA (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Commentary on Learning to See by Keith Sawyer (2026) |
This is personal. As someone who had a flash of insight into how software works, and how when I was 16, I shifted my thinking to do it, I deeply believe that a mental reorientation is required to do software, data analytics or any "tech" or "hard science" well. It was my professional life.
I've watched people work in software development and database groups for years and always be struggling. Their code worked but never very well and they were often stressed out. I've seen others write code as a kind of poetry, a structure that flows from them. The same with people who get databases and how to design them, how to extract information and meaning from all those 0's and 1's. I've seen it with friends who are mathematicians and physicists.
These technical areas are design spaces, like the art spaces that Keith Sawyer writes about. They are disciplines that train the mind and change how our minds work.
There is something special to art in how the process of making becomes the path to knowing. It's not unique to art, it could apply to communicating with someone, of navigating through moments of confusion, when what one person says lands differently for the other, the "failure" to communicate could become an entry way to a deeper understanding of difference and connection, or it could become part of a larger disconnect.
I'm reading Sawyer's Learning to See to further make that shift in my art making.
[see also Keith Sawyer's substack. Lots of good stuff.]
 |
| https://www.instagram.com/matt__runs/ |
 |
| Martin Wong Wrightwood 659 - Martin Wong: Chinatown USA photo: Larry Wolf (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Torch and Crown (1998/2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, AIDS Memorial Quilt - March on Washington 1987 (1987/2026) |
 |
| Marsden Hartley, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1933) Milwaukee Art Museum |
 |
| Max Beckmann, Wally Barker (1948) Milwaukee Museum of Art |
 |
| Gertrude Abercrombie, brooch Milwaukee Art Museum photo: Larry Wolf (2026) |
 |
| Marsden Hartley, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1933) Milwaukee Art Museum photo: Larry Wolf (2026) |
“I think painting for him was a struggle. I think he was always struggling with those basic problems of being alive. ...
"Everything is a potential existential crisis. For an artist, you want potential. You want there to be conflict. Conflict creates friction. Friction create heat. When there's heat, there's potential for combustion, explosion, new knowledge. ...
"He was never satisfied with his work. At the same time, he was completely convinced of his own genius. That's enough to keep a person going. Why should you quit, if you're a genius? ...
"Hartley's most homoerotic work.. a totemic object.. it's all about the torso.. brute force.. like a tree trunk of a human being right in front of him. These men are elemental forms. It's not about the sweetness and tenderness of familial bonds between two men, it's barely homosexual. ...
"'I want this mountain. I need it. I have to touch it. I have to have it.' And the mountain rejects the artist. 'I have been here before you. You cannot possibly possess me.' Nevertheless, he's there trying. Grappling with it. Struggling with the thing he would like to possess. He gets the next best thing which is to possess an elemental symbol or idea of it. He does that with paint. ...
"I'm always excited to see a Marsden Hartley painting in the flesh, in person, in close contact with it. I'm excited. What I've learned to look for is there are big clumsy brush marks, clunky composition, it's thick. He's not trying to finesse reality, he's trying to beat reality out of the thing he's looking at."
Sam McKinniss, painter (b. 1985)
 |
| Advance Reader Copy of Douglas Stuart, John of John photo: Larry Wolf (2026) |
"There had been a time in their late twenties when it seemed John could no longer pretend. He would come to Innes, his eyes rubbed pink with guilt and exhaustion. ... In those days, John snuck away more frequently and it was a feast for Innes. They led the dogs on long unnecessary meanders, until they found a hollow in the hillside somewhere dry, somewhere away from the eyes of their neighbours. The land was so bare it was a hard thing to find, but over the years they had come to map all the places they could be together and they came to know them by the flowers that grew nearby, or by the shape of the rocks that hung overhead.
...
"He would ... ask John to spend a sunny afternoon curled up with him, the curtains drawn tight against the world... He had magazines about the gay community and he would read articles about the need to abolish Section 28, about the director who tended a garden next to a nuclear reactor. He would declare that what they were was 'gay'. And John would bear it silently. And he would hate it."
[Douglas Stuart, John of John, pages 169 & 222]
the director who tended a garden next to a nuclear reactor / Derek Jarman
 |
| Larry Wolf, Spring (2026) |
 |
| Paul Thek, Meat Cable (1969) Art Institute of Chicago photo: Larry Wolf (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Ghosts of Bodhisattvas (2026) Bodhisattva Reimagined: The Buddha of the Future Made Whole Art Institute of Chicago |
 |
| Larry Wolf, Worktable (2026) transfer drawings from used risograph stencils |
 |
| Larry Wolf, untitled (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, untitled (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, untitled (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, untitled (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, untitled (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, untitled (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf, untitled (2026) |
 |
| Larry Wolf: Today's Stickers (2026) Realm Books photobook pop up at Kimball Arts Sugar Hijinx zine distro pop up at Ridman's Coffee |
 |
| Larry Wolf, More or Less Transparent (2019/2026) gif created with Philip Bell and Risomoation |
 |
| Larry Wolf, More or Less Transparent (2019/2026) risomotion version using tools by Philip Bell risograph print at Lot'sa |
 |
| The Evergreen Chronicles at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives photo: Larry Wolf (2026) |
 |
| The Evergreen Chronicles Fall 1996 at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives photo: Larry Wolf (2026) |
Looking for the Spring 1996 Pride Issue, XI/1, and the short story that led to the poem, Two Mathematicians.
