Books like The Innocent Eye

I’ve had a life-long love affair with the arts. I intended to become an artist, but ultimately became a psychologist researching psychological aspects of the arts. My first book, Invented Worlds, examined the key questions and findings in the psychology of the arts. In Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, I wrote about gifted child artists. My Arts & Mind Lab at Boston College investigated artistic development in typical and gifted children, habits of mind conferred by arts education, and how we respond to works of art. The walls of my home are covered with framed paintings by young children, often side by side paintings by professional artists.

I’ve had a life-long love affair with the arts. I intended to become an artist, but ultimately became a psychologist researching psychological aspects of the arts. My first book, Invented Worlds, examined the key questions and findings in the psychology of the arts. In Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, I wrote about gifted child artists. My Arts & Mind Lab at Boston College investigated artistic development in typical and gifted children, habits of mind conferred by arts education, and how we respond to works of art. The walls of my home are covered with framed paintings by young children, often side by side paintings by professional artists.

I’ve had a life-long love affair with the arts. I intended to become an artist, but ultimately became a psychologist researching psychological aspects of the arts. My first book, Invented Worlds, examined the key questions and findings in the psychology of the arts. In Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, I wrote about gifted child artists. My Arts & Mind Lab at Boston College investigated artistic development in typical and gifted children, habits of mind conferred by arts education, and how we respond to works of art. The walls of my home are covered with framed paintings by young children, often side by side paintings by professional artists.

I’ve had a life-long love affair with the arts. I intended to become an artist, but ultimately became a psychologist researching psychological aspects of the arts. My first book, Invented Worlds, examined the key questions and findings in the psychology of the arts. In Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, I wrote about gifted child artists. My Arts & Mind Lab at Boston College investigated artistic development in typical and gifted children, habits of mind conferred by arts education, and how we respond to works of art. The walls of my home are covered with framed paintings by young children, often side by side paintings by professional artists.

I am a Graphic Illustrator, Muralist, and Educator, serving as an adjunct professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art and I love birds! I was born and raised in the Chautauqua Lake Region of Western, NY and I find myself very much at home with our feathered friends. My passion for color, shape, and nature enables me to draw the viewer's eye to things that otherwise might go unnoticed. Letter Birds was created when my children were 5 and 7 and I would draw while they slept. When they awoke they would find a colorful drawing of a feathered friend along with a new letter to learn. My children continue to be my creative muses - even as teenagers!

When I became a minimalist, I found that having less made my household chores so much easier. Before then, I thought I was a loser who lets dirty dishes and laundry pile up. But when my environment changed, what I had believed was my personality also shifted. Once my apartment was tidy, it became a habit to do the dishes right away and vacuum the floor before going out, and my life became consistently enjoyable. But other habits were harder nuts to crack, like quitting drinking or exercising regularly. In Hello, Habits I write about my journey of acquiring these habits through a process of trial and error.

I am a professor of International Studies and a former museum curator. This combination provides me with a unique perspective not only on the inner workings of the art world, but the way that those practices map on to broader social, political, and economic transformations that occur as a result of globalization. This leads me, for example, to an assessment of how free-trade zones affect the art market. In past research, I have focused on colonialism and French art in the nineteenth century, so I am attuned to power imbalances between the center and the periphery and I am fascinated to see how these are shifting in the present.

Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern art because the modern project (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.

I make prints and visual books. I founded Bridge Press, now in Kennebunk, Maine, 1989 to publish limited edition artist's books and etchings. The name of the press underscores the collaborative nature of book making. Visual books offered possibilities for the continuity, connection, and unfolding of images—each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the book. Books seemed an ideal vehicle to assemble and connect my prints, to order and unfold a sequence of images, with defined and recurrent shapes, motifs, and composition, and to create a setting in which each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the binding or enclosure.

Art, technology, and science…I have been seamlessly traversing domains all my life. I grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art and seeing creativity as being one thing rather than something living in compartments. Art influenced my research in chaos and complexity, and blurring boundaries characterized my work as dean of engineering when creating educational/research initiatives in design, art, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability. I also received visible external recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.