Monday Morning Art School: more interesting greens
We take a snapshot of a dancing, glowing landscape and what we end up with is a wall of dull green. We need to insinuate that original energy back into our picture. Bracken Fern, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, available, Carol L. Douglas Michael Wilcox published a watercolor pigment guide called Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green. …
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Love and friendship
A friend is a friend, and love is love, no matter if it comes by airmail or through the internet, or in person. My mother and her cousin Gabriel on her last trip to Australia. My brother gave me a thumb drive containing about 500 scanned slides from my childhood. They’re very interesting, but they …
Busman’s holiday
Good technique means laying off the weird experiments, and pouring your creativity into the narrow area that matters—the content itself. My current canvas. “Has anyone ever bought a house and not thought the previous owner was nuts?” my daughter Laura asked me. Our current home is the exception to that rule, but we bought it …
Monday Morning Art School: why study art history?
Understanding the major movements in western art will make you a better painter. Yo Yos, 1963, Wayne Thiebaud, courtesy Albright-Knox Art Museum. This, I think, is the first Thiebaud canvas I ever saw. Wayne Thiebaud passed away on Christmas Day at the age of 101. Thiebaud is best known for his pop-art still lives of …
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Christmas Eve memories
It wasn’t Santa Claus but it was magic nevertheless. Santa toy, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 in a narrow silver frame, available this month through Camden Public Library. We were raised without Santa Claus, my parents believing that it was bad to lie to children. Furthermore, my mother was inept at gift-buying. It was the …