Monday Morning Art School: avoid the Velvet Elvis
How do you paint the sunset without it looking like kitsch? Sunset Sail, oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas, available. In class last week, a student said she’d painted the shadow areas of a sunset painting grey. “I wanted to avoid the Velvet Elvis look,” she said. As with so many things in mid-century America, …
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A little Dada goes a long way
No wonder people don’t take art seriously as a profession. Vilanova’s raincoat, hanging next to an exhibit about Picasso. Hanging it next to a large monochrome picture was great design… by the curator. An art heist in Paris has the art world laughing at old people once again. A 72-year-old, ‘elderly’ woman mistook an art …
Plein air painting on the cheap
If you’re trying painting for the first time, it makes sense to use less-expensive equipment and supplies. Here are corners you can cut. Early Spring on Beech Hill, 12X16, oil on canvas, $1449 framed includes shipping to continental US. In 2018, when I first wrote about plein air painting on the cheap, this pine tripod easel …
Monday Morning Art School: what we can learn from Wolf Kahn
Color is the dominant theme of our age. Autumn trees, undated, Wolf Kahn, from a commercial lithograph Wolf Kahnwas a mid-century American landscape painter who was influenced significantly by Abstract-Expressionismand Color Fieldpainting. The fog on Deer Isle, Maine led to an epiphany about color: “I began to let the color come through on my canvases,” …
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Why grisaille?
Your painting should be a carefully judged pas de deuxbetween reality and your own vision. That’s best worked out before you start adding a million different color variables. There are days when I just want to think compositionally, without any reality or detail cluttering up my mind. Monochrome is the best way I know to …