Three Abstractions in Search of a Conclusion
Any project that’s a fun project is already a successful project. My collaborators, pals, and students: Catherine Bullinger and Brad Van Auken. This being the dirty shirt-tail of a long winter, we inmates are longing for color. Three of us hit upon the scheme of collaborating on non-objective paintings. We would switch canvases each week …
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Playing it safe
As-yet-untitled landscape of New Mexico by Cindy Zaglin, acrylic on canvas. Light, bright, abstract, and ultimately it looks like the place felt. The working art world—as much as any clique—tends to be insular. Art markets are provincial communities that are inclined to distrust outsiders or new impulses. To really break out of the corner into …
Images of Old Maine
The image on the left was shot with a Canon SD850 IS and printed on a plastic banner in 2008. It’s about 20X24. The image on the right was shot with a 2.25×2.25 format Ciro-Flex in 1981 and printed a few years after that. Both are fading, but the image on the left has spent …
What is the nature of compassion?
Triste Herencia (Sad Inheritance) by Joaquin Sorolla (1899) In counterpoint to Joaquin Sorolla’smany light and luminous canvases of naked children playing on the beach, Triste Herencia (Sad Inheritance) is a dark painting of children in a dark sea. Examined carefully, the painting is a detailed catalogue of woes—blindness, club foot, leprosy, and above all, polio, which …
It’s not gonna snow forever
Spring really is just around the corner, I swear. I think the dead of winter is God’s way of telling me it’s time to paint the figure, so I generally lay off plein air in the coldest months. The last day I painted out-of-doors was the day before Thanksgiving. But watching spring snow falling outside …