Jean Zimmerman

Category: Art

  • Hear Me Roar

    Myriad gnarly lions guard the brick houses of Queens. These are among the gnarliest, even if they are surrounded by pretty posies.   There are chickens running uncooped down the street here, 104 street in Howard Beach. Maybe they’ll eat them.

  • All This and a Cow Face Too

    It looks like I will soon be working a new assignment, in a park rather than the mean streets of Brooklyn. Green! Summer! Lofty trees! Even a lake. Yet I already feel nostalgic for this world of impressively staunch street trees, truck exhaust and rough-edged asphalt corners. I’ve spent the last week on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn,…

  • To Wee or Not to Wee

    Let’s talk bodily functions. One bodily function. I have crisscrossed Brooklyn many times now saving trees. The availability of a place to pee structures my day. After my commute to the site, always on a residential street with nary a store, the first thing I do is trek to the nearest commercial stretch to beg some…

  • Mmmmmm…

    Mmuseumm isn’t a typical hoity toity museum but a 4×5 exhibition space tucked into an old elevator shaft in Cortlandt Alley, in Manhattan’s Tribeca. An eclectic assortment of collections and individual objects, it aspires according to artistic director Alex Kalman to be a “modern natural history museum devoted to the curation and exhibition of contemporary artifacts…

  • Stuck in the Middle of My Novel With You

    I have been meaning to write and say that I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from writing this blog — but I guess that’s kind of obvious. Not that I don’t adore posting here, I do. And I have the greatest readers in the world. But I am stuck in the middle of novel-world,…

  • A Bronze Frolic

    Interesting. The artist John Waddell, who is now 93, is best known for his larger-than-life bronze sculptures of young, frolicking nude women. He’s a longtime resident of the Verde Valley, and when I was in Arizona I got to see his tour-de-force Dance grouping in front of the Herberger Theater in downtown Phoenix. According to Waddell’s bio,…

  • Hummingbirds, Bats and Butterflies

    The Desert Discovery Guide invited us to enjoy three zones along a trail that led out from the Scottsdale Senior Center: a hummingbird nest, a saguaro and bat sanctuary, and a butterfly garden. I foresaw bliss ahead, an afternoon of hummingbirds, bats and butterflies, all in one swooping, fluttering place. We just had to follow…

  • Savage Girl at the Bookstore

    It’s funny. As an author you work and work on a new book, you write, revise, get copyedited, read galleys, proofread again and again. You see the finished product, it arrives at your doorstep in a box of 20 advance copies for you to do with what you will. On publication day you know the…

  • I Brake for Knit Projects

    If I had to choose between these knitted winners, it would have to be the animal heads. No, the full-body suit. No, the meat. Definitely the meat. After this short commercial break, we bring you back to the Oscars, live.

  • The Dressmaker’s Studio

    I pay a visit to the dressmaker. Not just any dressmaker. A time machine artist. A bespoke 21st century fashion designer with the soul of a Victorian seamstress. Cynthia Ivey Abitz is her name, and the clothes she designs are magical. Gil knew I wanted one of her garments, a sweeping, floating coat called the…

  • Parisian Time Machine

    Here is an amazing story that concerns the Nazi invasion of Paris, a fleeing woman and the apartment she left behind. Not opened for 70 years, when the door was cracked it revealed a person and a style of life in a time capsule you have to see to believe. I think I’ll just hand…

  • Charles Marville’s Old Paris

    It was a day of Old Paris in New York. The Metropolitan Museum had an exhibit, Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris, showcasing a Frenchman who was one of the first people to turn a photographic lens on the world, starting in the 1850s. I think the word “evocative” might have been coined to describe Marville’s…

  • The Voice on the Page

    I’ve been thinking about voice. Not the voice of Miley Cyrus, or Roseanne Cash, or even the Russian-born soprano, Anna Netrebko, who belted out the Olympic anthem at Sochi last night. She really shook the rafters. No, I am trying to get a handle on voice in fiction. Writing a new novel about a girl…

  • Big Ol’ Brick of Books

    A brick of books. Author copies. Twenty-eight, to be exact, sitting where UPS dumped the box, in the fresh, deep pile of snow at the head of the driveway. The cardboard was soaked around the edges. But the books were dry, miraculously. That novel is watertight.

  • An Elegant Silhouette

    I saw something intriguing at the Winter Antiques Show. A silhouette, definitely old, refined looking as all such silhouettes are, but somehow mysterious in the way the cut-out man held an unidentifiable object up against his body. It reminded me of the 21st century art of silhouette-artist Kara Walker. Walker has exploded the conventions of…