From aerobics to art class
Did I ever tell you about my brief career as an aerobics instructor? Turns out teaching an art class was a much better fit.
Monday Morning Art School: cloud painting
Clouds are not are flat little cutouts, and rendering them like that marks a painting as amateurish.
Top ten painters of all time
What painters have influenced you? Who did I miss on my list? Who would you have never included? And why?
Things that are real
The sun is shining and the soft ocean breezes are blowing, but too many of us are in our air-conditioned rooms experiencing life vicariously.
Monday Morning Art School: angle drawing
During last week’s workshop, Beth, Sharon and I were looking at a house on Pearl Street in Camden. I’d given them a lesson on two-point perspective and then said, “That’s just so you understand the principle. In real life, you’re going to measure angles rather than draw to a vanishing point.” That’s harder to do, …
Forgery, plagiarism, and transformative use: the money machine of art
Transformative use is judged on a case-by-case basis, which is why famous artists like Jeff Koons keep stealing from less-well-known ones. They can better afford protracted legal cases.
Critiquing my own painting
Formal critique of your own work allows you to disentangle yourself from your emotions and look at your painting’s strengths and weaknesses objectively
Midsummer
We read the story of our lives in buildings, cars and boats. Not only do they give us a sense of history, they’re changed in subtle ways by the people who live in or use them.
Midsummer was done from the edge of a cliff in Port Greville, Nova Scotia over two days. The topsoil being soft, I managed to slide over the edge with my easel, landing in a patch of alders about ten feet from the rim. Had nature not put that ledge near the top of the ridge, I’d have splatted on the road below me. The second day, I was more circumspect and I set up a few feet farther back.
Nova Scotia has a vernacular building style that’s peculiar to Canada and Britain. These are steep-roofed houses with twin gables. Sometimes they have matching window bays. They may be tarted up with gingerbread, or they may be very simple. They’re always proper, like a nice old lady in her best pantsuit. It’s not a common building style in most of the United States, but there are many examples in my part of Maine.
It was thinking about them that made me spend two full days painting these buildings from above. There is, in fact, something audacious about this kind of painting: it’s based on drawing.
“You must have taken mechanical drawing or drafting in school,” an artist said after she saw my sketch for Midsummer. Rather, I learned to draw when perspective and measurement were routine.
Monday Morning Art School: please learn to draw
Drawing is the cheapest and most liberating of all media. All you need is a sketchbook, a mechanical pencil, and a straight-edge.
I haven’t got room for another painting
A good painting can be the anchor for a series of rooms, for generations, in fact. Its color scheme is almost immaterial, as long as it is well-executed and exerts emotional pull.