The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.

Rosa Valado: Studio Visit
2024.5.11
A conversation with Rosa Valado inevitably goes to black holes, the creation of the cosmos, the interconnections between the tiniest creatures living on our planet and the macro forces of the universe. And so it was with great pleasure that I recently visited Rosa’s studio, where she melds her philosophical introspection with her physical art-making. Rosa is a polymath, an artist descending directly from the original alchemists, experimenting and transforming materials and ideas into luminous works of art. Turning dry pigments into paint, and new paper into decayed remnants through an inventive process she created, Rosa collages and paints, creating both huge and small-scale work that despite their scientific antecedents are emotional and transcendent. In one 12x8-foot painting, the diminutive bee is made monumental, towering over us as it expands to the whole canvas, sucking nectar from a flower, engaged in an activity that has gone on for centuries. Its bulging eyes, made to look like globes or the toroidal energy fields depicted in Rosa’s smaller work, are volumetric cages that simultaneously hold in and let out air, making the little insect morph into the magna energy fields of hurricanes, tornadoes, stars and all celestial bodies. We walk into Rosa’s large paintings, blend with their volumetric movements and flowing energies, glow with her inner light, and merge with the knowable and unknowable forces of life. For Rosa, there is no distinction between the infinity of time and space and the limitations of our human understanding, no distinction between our Newtonian sense of 3 dimensions and the 26 dimensions of contemporary string theory. She is a mystical quantum physicist in painterly artistic guise, who through her light-filled art helps us experience and marvel at how we ourselves are specs in the endless space and time beyond our human comprehension.