Twenty Summers

   Abelardo Morell, "On the Ground - In the Footsteps of Van Gogh" Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962.  Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014.  He was professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston from 1983 to 2010. His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland(1998) by Dutton Children’s Books, A Camera in a Room(1995) by Smithsonian Press, A Book of Books (2002) and Camera Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press and Abelardo Morell(2005), published by Phaidon Press. The Universe Next Door(2013), published by The Art Institute of Chicago.  Tent-Camera (2018), published by Nazraeli Press.  Flowers for Lisa (2018), published by Abrams Books. He has received a n

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. - Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" It Must be Abstract, Canto I       

It feels good as it is without the giant, A thinker of the first idea. Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around a lake, A composing as the body tires, a stop To see hepatica, a stop to watch A definition growing certain and A wait within that certainty, a rest In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake. Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence, As when the cock crows on the left and all Is well, incalculable balances, At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes And a familiar music of the machine Sets up its Schwärmerei, not balances That we achieve but balances that happen, As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist. -- Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"  It Must Be Abstract, Canto VII