First Things’ Newest Blogger: Maureen Mullarkey

We are very pleased to introduce Maureen Mullarkey as our newest blogger. Her blog will take up cultural, artistic, and (of course) religious matters. Here’s a bit of her introductory post :

I am a painter, as was my father. He descended from a line of British bricklayers who had taken up gentlemanly arts at the Working Men’s College in London prior to World War I. I grew up with their skilled, delicate watercolors of old walls and construction sites. They lined the stairwell and hallways of my grandparents’ house, a two-story brick built by my Liverpudlian grandfather. They enchanted me; and left me with a lifelong reverence for the work of hands and the labor of craft—two subjects of concern on this log.

The log itself began in 2009 as Studio Matters, a follow-on to my Gallery Going column for the print edition of  The New York Sun .  StudioMatters.com  remains online, imbedded in those HTML mysteries under the hood of my website. Also archived in the essay portion of my site are all columns from  The Sun ,  The Weekly Standard , and selected essays from other venues for which I have written:  The Nation  (yes, that  Nation ),  Hudson Review ,  American Arts Quarterly ,  Art & Antiques ,  Newsday , and  The New York Times .

A recent review for  The Weekly Standard   is here . Please do browse. I invite you.

Mullarkey’s latest post is a pointed and very convincing criticism of the Vatican’s decision to enter the world’s most established art exhibition, the Venice Biennale.

Please bookmark and subscribe to her blog, which can be found here .