Monday Morning Art School: practice seeing values
Value is the most important dimension of color. Hereâs an exercise to help you see it better. On the left, color strips. On the right, monochrome approximations of those colors. Photo courtesy of Kyle Buckland. This weekâs exercise is brought to you by outstanding painter and teacher Kyle Buckland. He graciously allowed me to share …
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Am I too old for this?
If you want to do something, the time to start is today. Flood tide, by Carol L. Douglas A few years ago, I read about a retrospective show for a 103-year-old painter from Staten Island named Margaret Ricciardi. âShe canât still be alive,â I thought to myself. After all, she was born only three years …
Art for the masses can be a mess
Itâs just as bad as that Italian Alps painting your Uncle Louie bought from the back of a truck, but itâs really expensive. I’m not sure what the heck it’s supposed to be, but it’s a thousand dollars. Last week I saw a bloated bit of bad âoriginalâ art for the equally-bloated price of $999 …
Georgia OâKeeffe has an acne problemâand sheâs not the only one
Artists are, for the most part, practical chemists with no education in the subject. Pedernal, 1941, Georgia OâKeeffe, courtesy Georgia OâKeeffe Museum. All three paintings in this post have been identified as suffering from saponification. For decades, conservationists, scholars and even Georgia OâKeeffeherself assumed that the tiny bumps along her paintings were grains of sand …
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Fugue State
I may be the only plein air painter in the world who comes home and says, âI wish Iâd simplified less.â Late winter along the Pecos River, by Carol L. Douglas I know the rules of good design. In my studio, an informal formal analysis always runs in the back of my mind. I have …