A day in the country.
Boxing kangaroos
Mt Lofty, Victoria

Wondered the same on a recent crossing of Cook Strait, NZ.

Ahh. Crossing New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

This Week’s Forgotten Picnic Tables of New Zealand:
—Lake Pukaki
—Lake Tekapo
—Pines Beach
—Lake Wānaka

Lake Tekapo spillway.
Mackenzie Basin, New Zealand.

Loitering along on my cop-out escapist tour and sorry if I’m not doing enough to help clear the Strait of Hormuz. Glenmore Station, New Zealand.

My escapist tour continues, now heading through the ranges south of Lake Wakatipu.

Okay, I know, it’s a cop-out, but I’ve paddled to the furthest place we could find to escape it all.
Keiteriteri, New Zealand.

A flightless Weka, often mistaken for a Kiwi, on New Zealand’s Abel Tasman trail this afternoon.

Aboard the Kaitaki to Picton.

Cook Strait (Te Moana-o-Raukawa) crossing today.

Wes Anderson on Joseph Cornell | The House on Utopia Parkway | Gagosian Quarterly YouTube video by Gagosian

Wes Anderson brings Joseph Cornell’s Queens studio to the heart of Paris, transforming Gagosian’s storefront gallery into a meticulously staged tableau—part time capsule, part life-size shadow box—for the first solo exhibition of Cornell’s work in Paris in four decades.

youtube.com/watch?v=SBKX...

George Orwell Diary
4 March 1941

Crocuses out everywhere, a few wallflowers budding... Couples of hares sitting about in the winter wheat... Now and again in this war, at intervals of months, you get your nose above water for a few moments and notice that the earth is still going round the sun.

"Bourgeois’s art is less a product of the psychoanalytic treatment she sought than an extended comment on psychoanalysis itself, on the stories—simultaneously disturbing and ridiculous—it encourages us to tell about ourselves."
@chrisirmscher.bsky.social

A.I. Loves Fake Images. But They’ve Been a Thing Since Photography Began.

“While it is not fundamentally new that we can create fake photos, Farid said, we can now ‘do it at a speed and a scale and a level of sophistication’ as never before.”
@rijksmuseum.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/a...

The stunning art trove hidden in a D.C. building marked by Trump for disposal Packed with frescoes, paintings and reliefs, the federal government’s Cohen Building has been called “the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” Advocates fear these works could be at risk.

"Cultural institutions have long had space on their walls for political leaders and wealthy patrons, but in the Cohen Building murals, it's ordinary American workers that star."
@kelseyables.bsky.social
@washingtonpost.com

www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

Beer With a Painter: Michael Berryhill “You can’t think your way through a painting,” the artist said during our conversation at his home studio in the Catskills. “You can only act, mark, or feel your way through.”

“In art history, meaning shifts over time, even if it was created for a specific intent or commissioned.... It is proof that, at some point, the power of the painting has nothing to do with the literal intent.” –Michael Berryhill

George Orwell Diary
14 January 1939

"Four eggs (about 4 of the hens now broody)."

George Orwell Diary
13 January 1939

"Two eggs (135 since 26 October 1938.)"

George Orwell Diary
12 January 1939

"Three eggs."

George Orwell Diary
11 January 1939

"One egg."

(Orwell often recorded the egg count from his chickens, and sometimes not much else.)

The hunt for a stolen Jackson Pollock — and answers to a family’s pain Decades after a brazen art theft drove Merry White’s father to despair, federal agents closed in on one last missing work. For White, the search is personal.

"If someone grew up with a Jackson Pollock hanging above her bed... and that painting was subsequently stolen from her family home, how would she feel about the resulting absence?"
—Sebastian Smee
www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

“Marshall can be solemn, portentous, improbable, joyous and slyly funny, sometimes within the space of a single canvas, mixing registers and messages to the extent that his paintings escape any simple, narrative reading.”

“In an ultimate act of appreciation for the artist's practice, The House on Utopia Parkway itself becomes a shadow box, viewed only through the windows of Gagosian's softly lit storefront.”
@surrhealism.bsky.social

Review | To see America’s greatest living painter, you’ll have to cross the pond A Kerry James Marshall retrospective traveling across Europe reveals the extraordinary power of his art.

“The Royal Academy galleries are the perfect venue for his paintings. Not only do they match the architecture’s scale, they resonate with a level of ambition that was once expected from figurative paintings but was long ago disavowed.”
www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

“These are substantial, engaging, compelling works, but they don’t feel particularly connected to the longer history of surrealism and its origins in violence, dreams and desire.” @philipkennicott.bsky.social

Review | It’s almost surreal how disappointing this surrealism show is The Whitney Museum of American Art’s ambitious effort to rewrite art history is largely a grab bag of disparate stuff.

“Throughout much of the exhibition, you can hear a slightly befuddled, fuzzy-thinking voice lost in a marijuana fog, expressing all the reductionist, simpleminded political truths of the age.”

www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

How Constable ploughed his own furrow The painter abandoned his father's corn business to pursue his artistic training – but it was his real agricultural knowledge that set him apart from his contemporaries

‘Open his sketchbooks and Constable’s preoccupation with ploughs, carts and barges is impossible to ignore.’ Susan Owens explores how the artist’s brush with his family’s agricultural business made him the most practically minded landscape painter of his time

Turner is regarded as a singular genius, but looking at his social and artistic milieu also reveals him as a product of his time.

Enjoying the company we're keeping these days.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_...