Life is Material

Four years ago I started using brush and ink in my exploration of drawing, inaugurating a new strand of materials. Material as object: pencil, scissors, brush, ink, Scotch tape. Material as idea: thoughts that become a book, for instance. You’re working on your materials when you think through an issue, when you look for a word, when you build a coherent paragraph. Do you have enough material for a blog post? We’ll see!

A brush behaves differently from a pencil. There are a thousand types of brushes in the world, but let’s say that I collected twelve brushes over the past few years. Wood, plastic, animal hair, artificial fibers. Each brush has needs and wants, thoughts, emotions. If you don’t pay attention to the brush, she refuses your initiatives. She appears to misbehave and disobey your will; she causes an accident, an error; she goes bendy, she breaks. But it was you who misbehaved; it was you who disobeyed the brush and caused an accident. The brush is willing to do many things, including things that you don’t know about yet. But she has her limits, her boundaries. “Yes, yes, yes, maybe, yes, yes, NO!”

Simplifying an elaborate linguistic discussion, “material” and “matter” come from the root “mater,” which means “mother.” Draw your own conclusions!

Materials suggest possibilities. A marker marks, a pencil pencils, a pen pens. A brush brushes, an eraser erases, a knife knifes! Hal-le-lu-jah! Red reds, green greens, blue blues. And they mix. I was in the middle of a creative initiative when the blue whispered something: “Purrrrrrrple.” I wasn’t afraid. Colors are forever whispering, singing, shouting. Blue was being perfectly reasonable; blue wanted to dance with pink, blue wanted to meld with pink. To the extent that I can, I’m at the beck and call of the colors, the brushes, the pencils, the papers.

I’ve long had some trouble with Scotch tape, that sticky thing wrapped in a sharp-toothed dispenser. I felt that they—the tape and the teeth and the dispenser—were out to get me. They ganged up on me. They just loved making a fool of me, laughing when I pulled the sticky thing all wrong and cut it all wrong and put it down all wrong. I finally thought I’d grapple with the material. I took a sheet of black paper and some Scotch tape in its spirally plastic case, and I started pulling two or three centimeters out, then cutting it, then laying it on the black paper, using a smooth steady rhythm and smooth steady motions. You know what I learned, don’t you? My enemies had always wanted to be my friends. I was the problem, they were the solution.

A sheet of paper can be fine or rough, thick or thin, large or small. Paper is charged with material qualities—again, not only the physical qualities of the material but the creative potentialities of the material. You wouldn’t write a note of condolence on a Post-it, would you? It’d be materially inappropriate. A university diploma lacks authority if it’s printed on cheap paper. Look around your home, and you might be surprised at the amount of paper and the varieties of paper surrounding you. Office paper, wrapping paper, toilet paper; books, magazines, pamphlets; ordinary paper, wonderful paper. Actually, paper is never ordinary to the observant eye and hand and finger. Paper is amazing, and it’s amazing that paper exists.

To make a drawing, I choose a sheet of paper, or I listen to a call from a stack of varied papers: “Pedro, pick me. I want to show you something.” Size, texture, color; there are many shades of white, of cream, of off-white. Colored paper, black paper. Square, rectangular. “Pedro, listen.” And the sheet asserts itself, offering its materiality to me as a gesture of friendship and love.

A specific sheet of paper invites a specific tool—let’s say a brush pen. A drawing is a record of their dancing dialogue. Where’s my agency in all of that? It’s quite paradoxical. I made the drawing; the drawing made itself. I chose the materials; the materials chose themselves. I was in charge; I was not in charge.

It’s a universal principle. No two pianists, for instance, play in the exact same way. You can see and hear it. Some pianists are addicted to being in charge and end up overwhelming their materials and their tools. The piano suffers, the composition suffers, the beating heart of music suffers. Disobedience and disconsolate dissonance leave their unsightly scars on the membrane of goodness.

Pay attention to the material. No, venerate the material, the matter, the mother! And become the loving and loved child of the Venerable Material.

The Beauvais Cathedral.

©2026, Pedro de Alcântara

Zoom In, Zoom Out

A microscope allows you to look at a single hair on the hairy nucleus of a hairy cell. This isn’t an evidence-based scientific fact, but a joke. Stay with the joke, and let your imagination zoom in on that squiggly hair, which looks “plucked,” to use an evidence-based word. I forgot to tell you that the cell comes from the root end of the tail of an Asian elephant, male, roughly 48 years old and as big as a New York City fatberg. You’re familiar with the fatberg: an enormous blob of congealed fat clogging the city sewers. I’m not making it up. The London Whitechapel Fatberg was 250 meters long and weighed 130 tons, the equivalent of 13 trillion human hairs.

How much information can you gather about that particular elephant by looking closely at the squiggly strand of nothing, plucked from you-know-where and very close to the you-know-what?

Zooming in is a useful skill, both for evidence-based minds (scientists) and evidence-denial minds (artists). Cell biology saves lives. Pluck the right hair, the precise one, the one out of 13 trillion, and the fatberg automatically deflates, allowing New Yorkers to sleep in peace, if they ever go to sleep. By the way, the scientists-versus-artists remark is gratuitous, and not supported by the evidence.

I’m not against fatberg deflation. But I think zooming in risks making you blind to the elephant, that living, breathing sentient being with incredible intelligence, creativity, social skills, and much more. The elephant, big; the elephant and his family, very big and wonderful; the elephant and his herd, gigantic and fascinating; the elephant and his herd, his history, his country, his continent, his universe, the Universe. There: we’ve just zoomed out, and the squiggly gossamer wisp doesn’t concern us anymore. We’re ready to apologize to the elephant for the fatberg joke.

Zooming out gives us astronomy, galaxies, planets, stars, the seasons, tides, and an infinity of unanswerable questions. Zooming out gives us context: the relationship between a thing and all other things. Zooming out gives us perspective and distance, both literal and psychological. When I zoom out of one of my worries, I gain perspective and distance. I see my worry differently. My worry might even disappear (up the rear end of the fatberg, of course).

Zooming in and zooming out are opposing forces, forever playing together and feeding each other. Good health is the balance of zooms, so to speak. You achieve it when you become adept at zooming in, adept at zooming out, adept at passing from one to the other, and adept at navigating their risks and integrating their strengths.

As I write, an oppressive heatwave is overpowering France and frying the brains of every French person, including dual nationals with French and Brazilian citizenship. When the weather is mild, the breeze fresh, and the night cozy, I don’t think that much about fatbergs. With any luck my next blog post will be more evidence-based.

©2026, Pedro de Alcântara

Completely Alone

It’s an art to be completely alone. The word “alone” comes from a root that means “wholly oneself.” We can interpret these words (like all words) in many different ways. Let me just say that “alone” is pregnant with ambiguities that aren’t identical twins.

Ah, I apologize! Let me start again.

Over the years and decades, I’ve often found myself completely alone in public spaces: parks, plazas, subway cars, castles, museums, beaches. Many of these experiences have happened in places that are often thronged by tourists, although I’ve also had multiple experiences of being completely alone in alleyways, empty lots, or industrial wastelands.

Avignon, in the south of France, has a fantastical history covering millennia. For a while in the 1300s it became the center of a political and religious fight, and the papacy settled there for a few decades. The Palais des Papes is huge, gigantic, enormous, and colossal—the biggest Gothic building in existence. It houses a museum which is also enormous. I went to visit it in winter, about 20 years ago. It was a chilly Monday morning, and for reasons that I can’t explain I found myself completely alone inside the museum. Even the guards disappeared. Gallery after gallery, corridors, stairs, art and artifacts, stained glass, tapestries: all mine, all mine, all mine; I owned the world; I was completely alone.

Would I have enjoyed someone’s company in this magical and marvelous setting? No; I needed to be completely alone; I needed to feel as if abandoned and imprisoned in an infinite maze; forces beyond my intellectual understanding wished that I be completely alone in the Palais des Papes; I needed to walk the corridors in a state of amazement; I needed to be amazed in the maze.

To be completely alone is a lesson, a meditation, a practice, a discipline.

To some degree, you can optimize your chances of being completely alone in a public place, a museum, or a monument by going there in the off season, when statistics tell you that there are fewer tourists around. Go very early or very late. I’ve been to the Louvre at 9 AM, right when it opens, using a semi-secret entrance for members. I’d rush in and go to a specific gallery that doesn’t house the Mona Lisa. And I’d be completely alone for half an hour or more.

Walking around a neighborhood, familiar or unfamiliar, be on the lookout for passageways, big doors half-open and offering a glimpse of a courtyard or garden, churches. It’d be a challenge to find yourself completely alone at Notre Dame, but Paris has more than 200 churches and temples, many of them beautiful and not thronged. The thing is, you can only enter an empty church if you enter it—I mean, you have to notice the church, stop walking, decide to enter. The church door seems closed; test it; does it yield to your gentle push? Go in. The temperature drops, the soundscape changes, you’re now in another world. And you might be completely alone in this other world.

Yes, I’m repeating myself putting an emphasis on “completely.” For this meditation, “alone” must be “completely alone,” otherwise you won’t be “alone.”

Not completely alone.

Busy Paris has a generally quiet moment: Sunday nights. Go to the movies at 10 PM, walk home at midnight, and you might be completely alone for several blocks, inside a cinematic dreamscape like no other.

What is the merit of being completely alone? The beautiful world is differently beautiful when you’re completely alone in it, so beautiful that you won’t have words to describe it or to describe your emotions when its beauty envelops you. Can a well-planned outing guarantee that you’ll find yourself completely alone? Probably not. Statistics and off-season initiatives only take you that far. Serendipity, chance, and Fate take you further than statistics. Has the Mistress of Mystery chosen you as destined to be completely alone at the beach? Some questions have no answers.

And some questions have clear answers. Isn’t it lonely to be completely alone?

No. It isn’t.

Paris, Dublin, Le Bourget, Vincennes, Oxford, London, Bern, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Le Mans, Villers-Cotterêts, Romainville, Le Havre, Minneapolis, Amersfoort, Terre Haute, São Paulo, Matosinhos, Tessaloniki, and points in between.

© 2026, Pedro de Alcântara

Wow Wow

A seemingly intelligent and accomplished person spent hours creating a two-minute video clip that will be seen by few people and bring its creator meager financial rewards. Hours!

Why, Pedro, oh why?

Below is the clip in question.

My wife and I don’t have children. We also don’t have a cat or a dog—I mean, a live, flesh-and-blood pet. But we do have stuffed toys; many; a whole menagerie. Lion, tiger, duck, elephant, and assorted ambiguous entities. Some are palm-of-the-hand little, others are big enough to encompass most of your belly and chest when you and the toy are reciprocally recumbent (r&r). The toys have names, personalities, quirks. When we audition new candidates for the menagerie, we test them for squeezeability, cuteness, sad-making eyes, and fluff.

Stuffed toys are charged with possibilities, both sensorial and symbolic. Wow, the pleasure of handling them; the pleasure of looking at them; the pleasure of listening to them. Yes, they talk. In their own language, of course, but we understand them easily. Wow. Do you know how they talk, those stuffed toys? They go like this: “Wow wow wow wow wow.”

I do think that everyone, everyone! everyone should have a menagerie in their homes: all children, all adults, everyone. Besides the multiple, deep sensorial pleasures that they bring into our lives, stuffed toys carry tremendous symbolic power: the symbol of our own animal nature, the symbol of childhood, the symbol of tenderness and love, the embodiment of Storytelling and Healing. Wow!

As it happened, my wife was traveling when I made the video clip. (I may be crazy, but I’m not dumb.) (I may be dumb, but I’m not crazy!) I took photos of some of our animals. I became a portraitist, a biologist, a psychologist. While photographing them, I got thinking about my home in Paris, the passage of time, the countries and cities where I’ve lived, the languages that I speak. (Wow wow!) I got thinking about the child within. Your heart has four chambers. They correspond to the baby, the 3-year-old, the 5-year-old, and the 7-year-old who together “beat the drums of your heart.” No inner child, no heartbeat!

Editing and organizing the photos, I pondered what it was like to be alone (for instance, when your wife is traveling). I pondered the difference between alone and lonely. And I pondered the play of opposing forces: “me by myself” and “me in company,” two different qualities, two essential energies. It’s an art to be alone, it’s an art to be in company. And it’s an art to meditate on these arts.

Taking photographs, editing them, stringing them into a video clip, adding a soundtrack: you learn a lot in the process of structuring a narrative. You must survey the collection of photos, make choices and decisions, handle technology. It’s a whole education.

I used the video clip and its materials in my online Drawing Lab. My students and I watched the clip and had emotions, then we made drawings and had emotions. We developed eye-to-hand coordination, plus brain-to-eye and heart-to-brain-to-eye-to-hand-to-paper coordination. We played with contour, silhouette, line, gesture, shape, size, perspective, color, and wow wow.

The workout was so fruitful that I made a second video clip, featuring two ferocious beasts that didn’t appear in the original clip. If the tiger and the elephant beat the drums of your heart, I’ll know that the time I spent producing these clips was perfectly wow wow.

With thanks to Amy, Anselm, Blaine, Katharine, Katie, Margaret, Mary, Michele, Sarah, and Tomoko.

©2026, Pedro de Alcantara

The Song of Stone

Recently I spent ten days in Athens, giving lessons, workshops, and a performance. I had a wonderful time in the wonderful city. The glorious National Anthropological Museum was just around the corner from my lodgings. Nested against it, with a separate entrance, the smaller Epigraphic Museum was no less glorious. I visited it four times during my stay.

Epigraphy is the study and interpretation of stone inscriptions. The Museum has an incredible collection of beautiful stones and stele, carved with ancient texts that show the linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical evolution of Greece starting nearly three thousand years ago.

The scribes and carvers who inscribed the stones left their mark, literally. Will this blog post here survive for two or three millennia? Predicting the future is an uncertain art, but I’ll go ahead and predict that in two years (let’s not mention the millennia again) this blog post will have sunk into oblivion, together with much of everything that we’re all doing right now.

You don’t have to read a word of Greek to appreciate a carved stone as a thing of exquisite beauty. Any stone represents all stones. At the Epigraphic Museum I “saw” Isamu Noguchi and Constantin Brancusi, I “saw” every tombstone in every cemetery I’ve ever visited, I “saw” every child who ever collected pebbles at the beach. Every stone eternally sings the Song of Stone. The Epigraphic Museum isn’t as silent as you think at first.

My wife came with me on my first visit to the museum, but after a while she had to leave to go to work. Then I found myself alone; completely alone; I was the only visitor in the entire museum. On two of my subsequent visits, I again was completely alone. On my fourth and last one, I witnessed a group of schoolchildren rush through the galleries. In front of an exhibit showing the evolution of the Greek alphabet, the children recited the alphabet out loud. They quickly exited the museum, and I was by myself again. Being alone in an astonishing environment, often in the middle of a bustling city, has long been a regular feature of my life. One day I’ll try to tell you more about it.

The museum workers (there were three of them) became intrigued by my presence. Two of them barely spoke foreign languages, but they weren’t bothered and spoke to me mostly in Greek. During my last visit, one of the workers approached me and said, “Come.” And he walked me through the storerooms and conservation workshops, which are behind locked doors and out of bounds for visitors. The workshops were bigger than the museum, crammed with artwork, work benches, tools, incalculable riches normally hidden from view. It was just the two of us in there, the stranger and the threshold guardian. The stones were singing, and we were dancing.

Afterward, another of the workers approached me and gave me a book from their stash. I mean, a gift; for free, offered with love and a smile. A moment later the worker gave me a gorgeous bag for my gift. And later again, the worker gave me a second book. A worker who spoke English then engaged me in conversation. She seemed a little puzzled that someone, anyone would keep coming back to the museum so many times in such a short period. “Are you some sort of professor?” she asked.

I babbled. You can’t ask the happiest boy in the world to explain his professional and creative identity.

“Είσαι τόσο μωρό,” she said.*

*”You’re such a baby.” She didn’t say that, of course. But she wouldn’t be wrong.

©2026, Pedro de Alcantara

The Art Show

At an art show you can “see the art” or “see the show.” Truth be told, there are hundreds of ways of looking at any situation, but for now we’ll embrace this either-or simplification.

One of the great Paris museums, the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, is housed in a huge 1930’s building perching on a hill overlooking the Eiffel Tower.

The museum contains reproductions of statues, porticoes, and other architectural features from historic monuments. On its top floor there’s a warren of windowless galleries with reproductions of frescoes. One of the galleries is under a high domed ceiling. Other galleries are reminiscent of monks’ cells, being “constrained and restrained.” Along these galleries, the museum put on a show of twenty-three Color Field paintings—large works in which the canvas is dominated by blocks or splashes of color. The artists included Robert Motherwell, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others.

The paintings were wonderful, the setting was exquisite, and the dialogue between the artwork and the physical space was inspired and inspiring. I visited the show three times in a period of two weeks. During the visits I was often completely alone. I would stand in front of a painting for ten minutes without bothering anyone. Discovery, pleasure, astonishment; meditation, perception, insight. I was so happy I could have cried.

Another great Paris museum is the Fondation Louis Vuitton, housed in an ambitious labyrinth of a building by Frank Gehry that opened in 2005 in the Bois de Boulogne. It tends to put on gigantic retrospectives of a single artist such as Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, and David Hockney. The shows are often too big, overwhelming, exhausting. And usually they’re quite crowded. The most recent show featured Gerhard Richter, a prolific, accomplished, and very famous German artist. I was familiar with his work and thought that I liked it very much, but the retrospective led me to change my mind. A French thinker once stated that "facility is nature’s most beautiful gift, provided that one never uses it." It feels to me that Richter uses and overuses his tremendous facility, to the detriment of meaning. Don’t get me wrong; Richter is a great artist and I did really love a handful of his paintings.

Gerhard Richter.

I visited the show twice. On my second visit I wasn’t willing to look too closely at the art, and I decided to turn my attention away from the art and toward the flow of museum goers, the endlessly varied faces and postures of the Parisians and tourists and little kids crowding every nook and cranny of the labyrinthine museum.

I focused on the museum guards, who have long fascinated me. Museum guard is a demanding job, not only because you’re responsible for the safety of the art and of the museum goers but also because you risk being bored out of your skull. Six or more hours of standing here and there, in airless or windowless environments, day after day, year after year?

I sometimes talk to museum guards and hear their interesting stories, but on this visit I decided to keep a sort of distance from them and surreptitiously take their portraits. It’s as if I was curating an art show of my own, perhaps titled RICHTER | GUARDS.

Richter famously transformed photos into paintings, and famously painted themed series of realistic portraits. Call me a fool, but I think my little photo essay here is vaguely and definitely Richterian. I’m glad I went to see the show.

©2026, Pedro de Alcantara