The Dalai Lama is coming to Atlanta on the 20th. Emory is hosting, but I hear he conducted a ceremony at Oglethorpe the last time he visited. I've had the pleasure of hearing two separate accounts of that event from two very different men: Chuck Wingo, bookstore manager, and studio art professor Alan Loehle. These guys are so incredibly unlike, but I'm pretty sure that they both used the word "spiritual" in reference to the Dalai Lama.
I think that it's about time I see Alan's paintings in person. He works comfortably in that dizzying vacuum between photorealism and the surreal, creating images with the lucid character of a Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud. He loves doggies.
In person, Alan Loehle is a bit of a Harrison Ford type, masculine in the manner of an old Western. If you talk to him for few minutes, you immediately get a sense of his impressive force of personality. I am also convinced that he is a madman. When he starts to talk about art, or anything else that he's serious about, he gets that little spark of crazy in his eye. It's a little frightening. And endearing.
**
3 comments:
The Dalai Lama will participate in two conferences at Emory, speak to the Buddhist community, and deliver a public lecture in Centennial Olympic Park. The latter free event is on Monday, October 22. see www.dalailama.emory.edu for assorted details.
I also highly recommend Glenn Mullin's lecture on the following night, October 23, as Mullin is a trickster scholar whose take on matters Tibetan is always delectably surprising. You will remember Mullin from his frequent appearances at Oglethorpe, where I saw the Dalai Lama when he dedicated the Olympic show of his personal sacred objects in 1996. I heard His Holiness on his first appearance in Atlanta, at Emory, some eight or nine years previously.
I'd like to see the free show. Try not to get employed between now and the 22nd.
I'll try. ;)
Post a Comment