We all know about the works that don’t go well and never find their way to completion. I have a strong memory of many paintings that ate up enormous amounts of my energy, time and expensive materials but just refused to turn the corner and come back into the fold of the finished. They are […]
Art
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E) All of the Above
“Everything I like about the art experience” is best expressed by this image of Dave basking in the Diebenkorns at Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center *** The Daily Beast writing about the Armory Show currently running in New York: A Sam’s Club for Art? Think of everything you like about the art experience: That it […]
Hedda Sterne: Beyond the Irascibles
Life magazine’s portrait of the Abstract Expressionist artists known as ‘The Irascibles,’ 1951. Front row: Theodore Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, and Mark Rothko; middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne. (Photo: […]
A Life of Loving Cézanne
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. –Paul Cézanne January 19, 1839 – October 22, 1906 A birthday commemoration to an artist whose work just keeps speaking to me. This love affair started when I was a teenager, and it […]
Painting Well
“Rag and bone shop” table surface in my studio The New York Times Book Review last week had a simple headline: “Why Criticism Matters”. The editors set the stage by describing our current age as one where opinions are “offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones”—by anyone, anytime. So in that context it is […]
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A Deep, Quiet Place
A recent shot of my studio table Some periods are creatively fecund, and some are not. After many years of being an artist, I have come to expect both the ups and the downs of a life in the studio. As I have observed many times on this blog, the nature of the work that […]
Up Against Oblivion
Sargy Mann, blind painter Here’s a story I have never encountered before. Sargy Mann spends 25 years as a painter and ends up losing his sight. But he decides to keep painting. From an article about Mann by Tim Adams in the Guardian: “After a bit I thought: ‘Well here goes,’ and loaded a brush […]
Bad Art Poisoning
The (in)famous Robert Benchley Maybe there is something more than wry humor behind Robert Benchley’s oft-quoted quip, “The world is divided into groups: those that divide the world into two groups, and those that don’t.” It is after all so comfortingly seductive, the beautiful symmetry of just two elegant and simple options. Like the essential […]
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Ways of Working
At some level, everything is of interest to the eye…a view of one corner of my studio space How do artists work? In a recent posting on Real Clear Arts, Judith H. Dobrzynski makes the case that as mysterious as the creative process is, it is that which people most want to know. And that […]
Courting the Presence
From Anna Hepler’s series, “Cyanotype 28,” on exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art. Hepler uses the idiosyncratic nature of a photographic process to explore how images can morph and disintegrate and, at the same time, expose the way light wraps a form and gives it a sense of presence. ____ In any kind of […]