Aurora Borealis
Aurora Borealis, 1865, Frederic Edwin Church Strange, fiery forms uprise On the wide arch, and take the throngful shape Of warriors gathering to the strife on high,— A dreadful marching of infernal shapes, Beings of fire with plumes of bloody red, With banners flapping o’er their crowded ranks, And long swords quivering up against the sky! …
Artistic license
The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Winslow Homer I’m preparing a drawing of a wheat field with hail damage. I started by considering the greatest wheat field painting I know. Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field is surely one of the iconic paintings of American history. Homer painted this in the summer …
Let’s all raise a glass!
Tom and Catherine Bullinger will open The Victor Brewery to the public this Thursday. Catherine Bullinger was the first person who ever signed up to take painting lessons with me. She still takes them today. She has an MBA and a very responsible corporate job, so when she told us that her dream job was …
Awkward Family Portraits
Portraits of HRH Queen Elizabeth (2010), HRH Prince Charles (1998) and HRH Prince Philip (1998). Rupert Alexander managed to make them look like three troubled executives from a not-too-reputable family business. Much hay was made over the remarkable resemblance of Paul Emsley’s Kate, Duchess of Cambridgeto the Breck Girls, but it is by no means …
Paintings from Mother Russia
Silence, 1890, Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy If we think about Russian artists at all, we tend to remember 20th century expatriates like Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall. But before the Russian Empire collapsed in civil war in 1917, it had a fine tradition of landscape painting. Trees in the Snow, 1908, Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy My late student, Gwendolyn …