Monday Morning Art School: an exercise in color
This exercise teaches you to think of the three aspects of color as separate properties. Water lilies (Yellow Nirwana), 1920, Claude Monet, courtesy the National Gallery, London. Much of Monet’s work was experimenting about the nature of color. When we ask people, “what’s your favorite color,” we’re using the word color in a simple way, and …
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Radical feminist of the Victorian era
Cropped-haired, chain-smoking, pants-wearing lesbian, she was a darling of Victorian collectors. The Horse Fair, 1852-55, Rosa Bonheur, Metropolitan Museum of Art Henry James, who invented the fictional New Woman of the 19thcentury, made his heroines pay a price for their independence. Was that accurate? Recently I wrote about les trois grandes dames of Impressionism and …
Reflections of a recovering coffee addict
Love may be an addiction, but it’s at the heart of everything we do. Happy Valentine’s Day! Birthday, 1915, Marc Chagall, courtesy Museum of Modern Art Yesterday I quit drinking coffee. This wasn’t my choice; it was on the advice of my medical professional. He’s loads of fun; this regimen also precludes alcohol, sugar, wheat …
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Nocturnes, fear and longing
Now the outsider is us, alone in the dark, excluded from whatever is going on in that beautiful spot of light. Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1896, James McNeill Whistler, courtesy Fogg Art Museum Last week my husband was studying a beautiful nocturne by the Taos painter Oscar E. Berninghaus. The dim light …
Two fine painters taken by cancer too soon
Both will be remembered as far more than the sum of their work. We should all aspire to that. Jorge, by James Asher, courtesy of the artist’s website. When I met painter Jim Asher, he and his wife, Joe Anna Arnett, had just learned that he had untreatable esophageal cancer. One would never have known …
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