RUINS

I’m William Collen, and I like to think about art and aesthetics—specifically, the ways in which artists get their point across through the choices they make in their art. Thus my writing usually takes the form of analysis of specific artworks, or things artists have said about their work. I don’t try to thoroughly ground my interpretation of an artwork within a cultural moment or within an artist’s career arc, although I will do both those things from time to time.

Since I’m a Christian, I will also bring matters of faith to the fore occasionally; one of my major preoccupations is how Christians, specifically, can approach the art world—a place which can often seem foreign and unfriendly to Christian sensibilities, but which doesn’t turn out to be as hostile as some Christians think.

My aesthetic tastes run towards the decorative and the clever as opposed to the profound and the propositional—to the beautiful more than to the good or the true. Of course, everything I say about my own views and ideas can probably be contradicted by a passage form my own writing.

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