Watch Me Paint: World-Class Art, World-Class Instruction
Happy New Years! 6X8, Carol L. Douglas Yesterday I wrote that I was surprised that I’d met my goals for 2014, with the exception of selling my house (deferred so my son could finish high school in Rochester).Here are my goals for 2015: 1. To do a better job with this “accountability partner” thing. I …
Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1888, Paul Gauguin. If still life couldn’t express emotion, Van Gogh’s sunflowers wouldn’t move us. I have a young Facebook friend on the other side of the country who likes to draw. I try to give him pointers long-distance, but that isn’t always easy. His problems are less technical than emotional. …
Death bringing cholera, Le Petit Journal, 1912 Collywobbles has been in use in English since 1823. It’s either a fanciful formation of cholera morbus or colic (in this case meaning dysentery), depending on which dictionary you consult. For previous generations in the west, cholera was a common killer. The story of how cholera was shown to …
Continue reading “Holiday gift guide #5—the gift of fresh water”
The Canadian National War Memorial (also known as The Response), was originally built as a WWI memorial. It was designed by British sculptor Vernon March but modified in 1982 and 2000. It is a stunning evocation of wars throughout time. Because the National Gallery of Canada has one of the world’s largest collections of Group of Seven paintings, I’ve made …
The idea of “warm” and “cool” colors was first posited by the English miniaturist and teacher Charles Hayter. The illustration is from his treatise, Perspective, published in 1813. The way we perceive color is greatly influenced by our experience. We all know that fire is hot and ice is cold, so we perceive reddish orange …
Selbstbildnis, mit der Hand an der Stirn (Self-portrait, hand at the forehead), etching, 1910, by Käthe Kollwitz, Forty-five years ago, I was at a school pool in Niagara County, New York, when my sister had a brain bleed. She died. With us were my friend S. and her mom, although at the time they …
Still life composed by Tarryl for my amusement. My fellow painters here are all down-staters. A few weeks ago I wrote about dĂ©paysement, the sense of disorientation one has on arriving in a strange place. I have to confess I’m feeling that again. I’m in Saranac Lake, NY, for the Sixth Annual Adirondack Plein Air …
Red Truck at the Lumberyard, 10X8, oil on canvasboard, sold. Saturday, I did Waldoboro’s Paint the Town with a student. It was his first plein air event and his painting sold. “The true gift of the evening was the buyer telling a story about how much it reminded her of a very special time with …
My neighbor clearing a fence at 6 AM, before the bugs came out. In Leisure: the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper posited that leisure is the foundation of culture and that our bourgeois world has stamped out leisure, Pieper wrote this before the construction of the welfare state. If he’d lived to see it, he …
With the palette I outline below, you can get anywhere you need to go on the color wheel. I’ve been using RGH paints for several years. I like them because they’re relatively inexpensive, they have a high pigment load, and they don’t add driers. In addition, they’re made in a small workshop in Colonie, NY. On …