On Dorothy Iannone

Dorothy is my education—I place myself in her path and experience beauty each time, am changed by that beauty. I’ve been attempting to write an essay of reasonable length about Dorothy’s artwork for eight months, since I went to Berlin to studio visit and interview her about art for an upcoming book project; that we spent hearty portions of that journey instead talking about Buddhism, drinking Darjeeling tea, and eating delicate miniature gold-leafed cakes that Dorothy taxied across town to obtain each morning as gifts, has left me reeling on the Dorothy path ever since, one that is at once astute, focused, and intense, yet paradoxically giddy with digression concerned with love and how people are altered by it. What’s arrived instead of an art critical essay, then, has so far been a prose poem about how I consider Dorothy my spiritual grandmother, and a set of clunky collages I stitched together and sent her with some tea to replenish her depleted supply.