Go outdoors and enjoy the weather
“’The trick,’ said I, turning on my stool with coffee cup in hand, ‘is not to adopt a siege mentality.’” All flesh is as Grass, 30X40, oil on linen The above quote is from novelist Van Reid. He was musing on the winter. I copied his essay here and I hope you will read it …
Monday Morning Art School: the opacity of paints
To understand refraction, just remember that hideous invention of the 1970s, the wet t-shirt contest. The Logging Truck, 16X20, oil on linen, on exhibit this month at Camden Public Library. Opacity (or ‘hiding strength’, if you prefer) is a simple way of describing a paint’s refractive index. Opaque pigments refract, or bend, more light. Transparent …
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What is essential?
That’s a question that operates on both the technical and the spiritual planes. Beautiful Dream, oil on canvasboard, 12X16, $1449 framed. Tom Root recently attempted to make a pithy saying about simplification. “It’s not simplification, it’s essentialization,” he wrote. While that’s unlikely to be printed on tee-shirts, it does get to the nub of the matter. …
Imagination without follow-through is mere fantasy
If not now, when? If not you, who? The Late Bus, 6X8, oil on canvasboard, $435, available through Camden Public Library this month. “Imagination without follow-through is mere fantasy,” pastor Quinton Self said on Sunday, making me almost drop my sketchbook in a shock of self-recognition. I have a good idea nearly every day. I’ve …
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Monday Morning Art School: color harmonies and accidental color
Color harmonies are easy enough for a kindergartener to understand, but devilishly difficult to apply in paint. Landscape at Saint-Rémy (Enclosed Field with Peasant), 1889, Vincent van Gogh, courtesy Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields In music, an accidental is a note that is not part of the scale indicated by the key signature. (The sharp, flat, …
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