Monday Morning Art School: why this subject?
Create clear priorities and a compelling reason for people to engage with your painting. Lobster fleet at Rockport Harbor, by Carol L. Douglas With modern cameras, you can snap a view and think through why you liked it later, cropping and manipulating the photo to enhance the subject. When drawing, you have to set pencil …
Continue reading “Monday Morning Art School: why this subject?”
Sustainable art
An artist, an engineer, and a paint company are working together to repair acid mine damage in southeast Ohio. Photo of acid mine runoff at Truetown by John Sabraw. Environmentally-ethical choices can be very difficult for the artist. The toxicity of paint rests not in its binders, but in its pigments. Copper, cobalt, cadmium, and lead …
Figurative does not mean figure
Where do you fall on the continuum from representation to abstraction? I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928, Charles Demuth, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art English (my daughter never tires of telling me) is a descriptive, rather than proscriptive, language. Words mean whatever most people agree that they mean. That’s why English is …
Monday Morning Art School: the color of Spring (part 1)
It’s time to assemble the proper pigments to paint beautiful greens this spring. Fog over Whiteface Mountain, by Carol L. Douglas. If March didn’t exactly come in like a lamb this year, it at least came in like a sheep. Don’t be fooled. Some of our most brutal winter storms have been known to happen …
Continue reading “Monday Morning Art School: the color of Spring (part 1)”
Women in the wild
Women are the majority of plein air painters, but some are afraid to be outside working alone. The Alaska Range, by Carol L. Douglas Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont was a landscape painter who traveled around Italy painting ‘views’ at a time when nice women were expected to be chaperoned in public. She made a tidy …