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 …
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 …