Monday Morning Art School: five compositional no-nos
There’s more to composition than just avoiding these no-nos, but respecting the bounding box is a good place to start.
My fall teaching schedule
My painting student from Austin is in Maine briefly. We hiked up Beech Hill together. This is a great way to socialize-the dog gets his workout, you’re outdoors, and you’ve earned a big breakfast at the end. “Everybody,” he told me, “is jumping on the Zoom teaching bandwagon.” That’s true, but I don’t much like …
Memory and judgment
“Sometimes I just have such a wonderful, fulfilling time painting a certain place, I conclude it must be my best painting ever, because I had such a good time,” a reader wrote. “Then when nobody seems interested in it, I realize I was just getting all those good vibes from the painting but other people …
Monday Morning Art School: scaling up a field study
“I’m wondering if you would do or have done a blog post about transitioning from in-the-field studies to larger studio paintings of the same subject. Or is it better to paint larger in the field?” a reader asked. If you have the time and stamina to do a large field painting, they’re a great experience. …
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Obsessed by baby trees
There were three titans of fin de siècle realism: the Spaniard JoaquÃn Sorolla, American ex-pat John Singer Sargent, and Swedish Anders Zorn. They were almost exact contemporaries and all three mined the same material-figure and landscape, heavily larded with the society portraits that paid the bills. Each was known for the assurance of his brushwork …