Third time’s a charm
My sketch for painting of lye tailings in Rockport, ME. After attempting this twice and failing dismally both times, I decided to back off and look at a painting that’s currently on the easel of my friend Brad Marshall. This unfinished painting uses a tremendous diagonal to set the stage for a scene of Lake …
Snow Day!
Winter comes from the Arctic to the Temperate Zone, 1935, Lawren Harris One snow day is perfect: a surprise, a gift from nature, a moment out of time. More than that, and it gets tiresome, the kids start squabbling, and everyone feels housebound. Our visit from the so-called Polar Vortex this week was perfectly timed. This …
Even failures are not a waste of time
Can’t quite cope with that diagonal bisecting the picture, but I’ll try again. When I do a drawing like this, I try to remind myself that even failures are not a waste of time, because one needs to pass through the problem to arrive at the solution. How I managed to convert the lovely diagonal …
The genius isn’t inside the camera
An artist drawing a seated man onto a plane of glass through a sight-vane, from the fourth book of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Measurement. Last month, a number of people sent me Vanity Fair’s pieceon engineer Tim Jenison’s painstakingly-complex recreation of Johannes Vermeer’s The Music Lesson. Jenison faithfully built the room and objects depicted …
Something sketchy
Sketch for painting, 9X12, #2 pencil on vellum. Having assembled my reference photos for my upcoming project, it is time to do something with them. I am still only good for about three hours of work a day, but I mean to take advantage of those hours. The apple tree was an icon in our …