Watch Me Paint: World-Class Art, World-Class Instruction
This is Janith’s second-ever painting, of tugboat reflections. Lynn managed to find a place to paint where her feet could be in the water. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Coghill. My favorite places to paint are harbors. I love boats of all kinds, I love the rise and fall of the tide, I love the work …
Romance of Autumn, 1916, by George Bellows. I’m leading with a painting that makes me squirm every time I see it, to make a point: if you judged Bellows by this single painting, you’d think he didn’t know how to mix or apply paint. But he knew exactly what he was doing, as his catalogue …
My great-grandfather’s landscape design portfolio, done in his late teens. On Friday I learned that I have a genetic mutation. My doctor gave me an assignment: to flesh out my vague family history with real names, dates, and medical diagnoses—in short, to create a pedigree for myself. Each of us carries two separate copies of …
A large canvas transferred from a 9X12 sketch. When working on a very large canvas in a normal-size room, I start with a smaller sketch (either in oil or graphite) and scale it up. There just isn’t enough space to stand back far enough to draw directly on the canvas. I realize many artists are …
Continue reading “How to scale up a small sketch to a large painting”
The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Winslow Homer I’m preparing a drawing of a wheat field with hail damage. I started by considering the greatest wheat field painting I know. Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field is surely one of the iconic paintings of American history. Homer painted this in the summer …
Meeting of Fronts, from Jeff Swartout’s senior show went to New York and was sold. Heady success for a young kid. One of the groups affected disproportionally by the 2008-13 economic malaise has been recent college graduates. About half of them scrape by either unemployed or marginally employed. It’s always taken time for kids to find …
Continue reading “The trials of a young art-school graduate”
This recipe doesn’t spell anything out for you; it presumes you understand how to bake. (BTW, confectioners sugar no longer weighs out at 2.5 cups to the pound. I’d guess it’s milled differently today.) In 1954 a woman named Doris passed this cookie recipe along to my mother. Its telegraphic style always makes me smile. …
This is your world without art. My little corner of the world was rocked yesterday by a report that a staggering number of young New Yorkers are deficient in math and languages, according to new state tests. The district in which we live—which was once among the very top schools nationwide—achieved a piddling 59.8% language …
Rising Tide at Wadsworth Cove, 16X12, oil on canvas. Available; please contact Lakewatch Manor for details. Saturday dawned fair and bright in lovely Castine, ME. I had a plan for my painting; I knew that low tide was at 9:21 AM; I had croissants and fresh local blueberries for breakfast. By 7:30, I was at …
Continue reading “Salvaging a fail (v. 2) and then messing up again”
Dessert from my last painting workshop, in the Adirondacks. I have every reason to believe the meals at this workshop will be just as good! Only six more days, and I’ll be in Maine teaching. I set out this morning to do my task-of-the-day, which was to determine which paintings go to Rockland with me …
Continue reading “This post is about food. And cooking. Seriously.”