Practice: this category of my blog includes all articles and videos that discuss the practice of making art.

Portrait of the portraitist

I’ve only had my portrait done on a handful of occasions—the first time being when my friend drew me to celebrate my sixteenth birthday (drawing shown here).  But I’ve never had a portrait painted of me until now…

The studio visit

While having other artists over to your studio might leave you with a warm and fuzzy feeling of peer acceptance, it’s not particularly useful for bettering your work.

Working the whole composition

Focusing on just one area of a painting at a time isolates it from the rest of the dynamic.  It makes for a very disjointed or even mannered look.  To make an integrated painting, the artist must work the whole composition.

How to write an artist’s statement

An artist’s statement is not meant to be a summary of everything the artist stands for.  It’s supposed to be a window into a particular body of work.

Drawing life

Recently, I spent a few weeks visiting with my grandmother in the retirement home in France where she lives now.  On the third day of visiting, I started to draw her on a whim while my mother painted her mother’s nails.

Surprise painting

Very rarely, a work will finish itself without my noticing it.  Though I wouldn’t want that to happen all the time, it is a delight when it does!

Free culture

The art world has lots to learn from the forced renivention of the music industry, and watching the documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto is a delightful way to study some of those lessons.

Painting takes time.

Painting is a process of applying paint and then responding to it, and sometimes it takes many months of doing absolutely nothing to the painting in order to get it right.

Helping myself

I’ve long struggled with panel as a support and working small has never been my specialty, but, by combining the two and painting miniatures on Masonite, I’ve found a new way of working and pulled myself out of a creative block!

A self-portrait made not entirely by myself

The fact that I can’t make a self-portrait without help probably says a lot about me—both as an artist and as a person—but I happen to think it’s a very good thing.

Tracing the lineage of optics

The artist David Hockney believes that many of the old masters, including the likes of Vermeer and Caravaggio, used optics—lenses, mirrors, and cameras (both lucidas and obscuras)—to create their astonishingly realistic paintings.  I’m inclined to agree with him.

The difference between style and hand

Style is only a part of an artist’s hand, and Abshalom Jac Lahav’s 48 Jews on view at the Oregon Jewish Museum right now makes that very clear. 

Page 16 of 20 pages « First  <  14 15 16 17 18 >  Last »