Our inheritance
My great-grandfather’s landscape design portfolio, done in his late teens. On Friday I learned that I have a genetic mutation. My doctor gave me an assignment: to flesh out my vague family history with real names, dates, and medical diagnoses—in short, to create a pedigree for myself. Each of us carries two separate copies of …
Psychology as art
When I was a teenager, my father would occasionally give young men who came visiting a psychological profile called the House-Tree-Person (HTP). This was slightly less weird than it seemed, since Dad was both a psychologist and an artist. The results were usually quite prescient. He pointed out the priapism in one guy’s drawings; frustrated …
Even great painters have bad days
The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies, c. 1896-1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot This morning I came across Tissot’s The Harlot of Jericho and the Two Spies, above. Tissot was a fine painter, but one has to wonder what he was thinking to portray Rahab as a man in drag, with a 5 o’clock …
Spring is just around the corner
Spring plein air painting of an upstate farm, by little ol’ me. On this last day of February, when it’s 2° F. and blowing, it’s good to recollect that spring is just a moment away. Officially, it starts in twenty days. Unofficially, here in Rochester the snow pack should be melted by the end of …
Sometimes metaphor is an uphill battle
Winter lambing, underpainting, by little ol’ me. If you were properly brought up on James Herriot, you know that a late winter blizzard can play havoc with lambing. This is not just an historical oddity; last spring a mid-April blizzard in Northern Ireland killed 17,000 lambs and sheep. Cold is not their only enemy. Weak …