Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
My eBook Update
In case you're wondering where I went - the answer is "nowhere." I am busy writing a book on "The Nuts and Bolts of Classical Oil Painting."**
My focus: Painting is a Craft that you need to master - before you get to the "art" part.
My aim is to write a basic textbook for someone who doesn't know a darn thing . . . except that they wish to paint in a classical realistic manner.
So many of us are visual - and need to be shown, rather than told, "how to make it look real." (There are rules for this, you know).
The format of this blog maddingly does not allow me to go into the detail I wish. So I am writing/illustrating an ebook to teach classical realistic painting.
So far it's a technical nightmare - but I'll eventually figure it out.
Stay tuned.
** This is only a working title, suggestions welcome.
Obvious Advice (for the Oblivious)
I keep this painting around the studio to remind myself that some lessons are really painful.
This is a detail of an oil sketch I did many years ago. In those days I was a bit too "casual" with my work and set this painting on the floor next to my easel to dry.
One day I discovered that I had managed to splatter paint all over it - which was dry and could not be removed.
Still . . . I left this work on the floor until a week later - my full-time-dog and part-time-art-critic evidently mistook this piece for a fire hydrant.
Sarge (named after John Singet Sargent) never did that again - thank heavens.
So the point of this story is: Treat your work with the respect it deserves and don't leave it laying around where it can get damaged.
Some of My Favorite Ready-Made Frames
Every artist wants their work to look good. And here is a way to do it if you are on a budget.*
*"Budget" is a nicer word than "cheap and lazy" like, er . . . me.
I like a ready-made frame. I tend to paint on "standard size" canvas in order to fit my work into a ready-made frame.
Some standard sizes below:
I have gotten a lot of my frames from JFM.
The purpose of a frame is to visually separate the painting from the wall it is hanging on.
I like a wide gold frame - at least 4" wide to do this - just because I paint in a classical style.
Sometimes I choose a frame by placing my painting in a frame in Photoshop. I like to "try it on" before I buy if possible. Like this recent reject below:
I'll have to keep trying "Doris 'Granny D' Haddock" in frames until I find one I like....maybe something with a touch of silver perhaps?
There are many framers and frame companies - but fast, elegant and relatively inexpensive appeals to me.
FRAUD ALERT: Djordje Prudnikoff
I am not pleased.
Not one bit.
I just got an email from (con)artist and world-class braggart Djordje Prudnikoff who sent an email to his "group" shamelessly complementing his own work ~
- and then he signed my name!
I did not send anybody this email.
I do not support this good-for-nothing shyster who used my name without my knowledge or my permission.
I am stunned that any artist would do such a moronic thing.
How to Draw an Ellipe by Eye
I moved this up from an earlier posting as I have had so many questions about how this is done.
Knowing how to draw an accurate ellipse "by eye" can be an extremely useful tool...i.e., from rendering vases and teacups - not to mention its use in portraiture.
Here's how it is done:
Determine the outside dimensions of your ellipse with a rectangle.
Connect the corners of the rectangle with straight lines (CC).
Where these lines intersect is the center, point B.
Divide line BC into thirds by eye and mark with dots.
Point D is the outermost dot and will be moved verrrry slightly outward so that it is a little less than 1/3.
Mark the center of the sides of the rectangle (Point A).
With a dotted curved line, the elipse will only touch the rectangle at Point A and pass through Point D.
Thank heavens this works with any perspective view too and that is when you REALLY need it.
NOTE:
When drawing a circle or any curve, it will always be easier to be accurate if you use a dotted line rather than a solid line first.
Happy St. Patrick's Day
St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.
I wonder if we could get him to stop by the House of Representatives? The Republicans just cut NPR's funding.
Kiss me! I'm Irate!
I like to listen to NPR in the studio when I paint. I am in rural New Hampshire where the hate talkers rule the airwaves 24/7 (Limbaugh, Hannity, ad nauseum). NPR saved my sanity.
Losing NPR really gets my "Irish up."
Your Name Tastes Like Purple - or - Living With Synesthesia
By Teri Floyd*
In my head, the letter N is green. The number 5 is blackish gray, and in his early 20s. The month of February is lavender colored and covered in ice.
So in case you haven’t guessed, I have Synesthesia.
I’ve had it all my life, I suppose. People who are experts on such things say that we are born with it, that it is a brain disorder.
The wires in your brain get crossed, and you experience all five senses simultaneously. They overlap where they should be separate.
Everybody who has it has a different form of synesthesia with minor undertones of other kinds. Mine mainly exists with letters and numbers. I see numbers, letters, words, etc in color.
All of my letters and numbers have different colors, personalities, textures, ages and gender. I literally see them as living beings. Colors themselves also have gender. When I was a child often I’d play ‘house’ with my crayons instead of dolls.
Seriously, I’d have red and blue get married or green and orange have a sordid affair. My Grandma used to think it was so funny. It was just normal to me. Words have colors – for instance, my son’s name, Callum, is a bright, sunny yellow with flecks of baby blue, particularly in the L’s.
The inside of my head kind of feels like a Jackson Pollock painting. All splotches and globs of brightly colored paint, roads leading nowhere, just an explosion of thick, goopy color with a nonsensical message.
Convergence, 1952 by Jackson Pollock is my favorite painting. Probably because it’s the colors of my name. Yellows, a hint of orange, lots of black, and a little fleck of blue peaking out; all of it streaked into oblivion. My name looks just like that; it did long before I ever saw a Pollock painting.
I also have synesthesia with regard to music. Certain songs bring vivid colors into my head. If I listen to ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, by the Beatles, my head fills with alternating flashes of mustard-yellow and bright, silvery white. It has a distinct pulse and a gritty, sandpapery feel.
David Bowie’s voice always invokes a bright sky blue that sometimes turns darker, or has shades of gray, depending on the mood of the song. Rap music invokes a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes all spiralling through my head at warp speed.
Artist Gene Davis gives us all a taste of synesthesia as he paints the street leading up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I prefer one sole theme, which is why I think I don’t usually care for rap music unless it’s really unique or exceptional (for instance, Lil Wayne’s voice is a silvery gray with purpleundertones that I find really pleasing).
Classical music takes me through a landscape of color, shape and feeling. Usually I close my eyes when listening. It’s like having my own personal DVD of Fantasia playing through my head whenever I listen.
Usually when I tell people about my synesthestic experiences they look at me like I’m some crazed hippie. I probably am a crazed hippie in reality, but what I experience is more than just psychadelic. It’s spiritual.
My synesthesia is so ingrained into me that if I lost my ability tomorrow, I would feel as if I’d been blinded or deafened.
Occasionally I experience the other types of synesthesia that have to do with taste, sensation and smell, but only occasionally. Smells and tastes definitely invoke a distinct color in my brain.
For instance, the smell and taste of fresh garlic makes my head fill with bright, vibrant green. Diet drinks with their saccharine sweetness always appear in my head as being a shimmering, blinding silver.
It can be strange, having synesthesia. If I’m out to dinner with a friend, and they scrape their fork on their teeth, my brain fills with unnamed metallic colors, and my ears roar with the sound of it. I can’t stand it.
I can taste the metal on my own tongue and it is unbearable. It can cause obsessive compulsive behavior sometimes. Occasionally the sound and taste of silverware is so loud in my brain that I have to use plastic cutlery when I eat.
Synesthesia certainly enriches my life as an avid reader and a writer. It always helped my poetry and as I become better at essays and stories I find that it enriches them, too. Certainly F. Scott Fitzgerald was synesthetic. No-one can read The Great Gatsby and tell me that he wasn’t. I think that is why I feel so decadent and wistful when I read his books.
I’ve read Gatsby dozens of times and never tire of the language and the way his words flow in an endless barrage of color. Many artists and celebrities are synesthestes, including Tori Amos, Eddie Van Halen, Frederick Nietzche, Stevie Wonder, Vladimir Nabokov, and many, many others.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful to have synesthesia. I have had it so long that it is like second nature to me now. I often forget that I do have it, and just go through life assuming that people are experiencing the same sensations as I do.
I see the months of the year like a giant rolodex, spiralling through an open space. They all have colors, genders, ages and personalities. I also benefit from having a somewhat photographic memory with directions, phone numbers, addresses and names, because I see them as a pattern of colors.
It all tastes blue to me.
A Tapestry of Artsy Quotes
An artist's career always begins tomorrow. ~James McNeill Whistler
William Morris (1834 -1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and passionate socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement.
His colors reflect the beauty of an earth palette.
William Morris Self Portrait
His chief contribution to the arts was as a designer of repeating patterns for wallpapers and textiles, many based on a close observation of nature.
I have included some of his works here along with a little mid-winter art inspiration.
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ~Pablo Picasso
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ~Twyla Tharp
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ~Stella Adler
Painting is silent poetry. ~Plutarch, Moralia: How to Study Poetry
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci
It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet. ~Kojiro Tomita
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~Amy Lowell
To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. ~Schumann
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. ~Pablo Picasso
I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. ~Henri Matisse
The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent. The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artist. ~Robert Brault
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton Cooley
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. ~Theodore Dreiser, Life, Art, and America, 1917
The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. ~Paul Strand
All art requires courage. ~Anne Tucker
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. ~Oscar Wilde
Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. ~Edgar Degas
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. ~Henry Moore
Pictures must not be too picturesque. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. ~André Gide
Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art. ~Wynetka Ann Reynolds
But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy. ~The New Yorker
Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. ~Fran Lebowitz
Great art picks up where nature ends. ~Marc Chagall
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~G.K. Chesterton
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike
The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. ~Henry Miller
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. ~Oscar Wilde
Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown
The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme. ~Robert Brault
An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them. ~Andy Warhol
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. ~Kenneth Tynan
God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~G.K. Chesterton
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike
The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. ~Henry Miller
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. ~Oscar Wilde
Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown
The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme. ~Robert Brault
An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them. ~Andy Warhol
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. ~Kenneth Tynan
God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. ~Georges Rouault
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919
There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening. ~Aaron Howard
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. ~Georgia O'Keeffe
Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money. ~Ernst Levy
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. ~John Anthony Ciardi
As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. ~Pablo Picasso
The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~Pablo Picasso
Sometimes, to pursue a new idea, the artist must forfeit his deposit on an old idea. ~Robert Brault
I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~Henri Matisse, Notes d'un peintre, 1908
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. ~George Jean Nathan, House of Satan
Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. ~Meghan, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and emotions on a page. ~Sara, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking... a small glimpse of what they hold inside. Little secrets, regrets, joys... every line has its own meaning. ~Sarah, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is your emotions flowing in a river of imagination. ~Devin, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is an adventure that never seems to end. ~Jason, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is pictures straight from the heart. ~Ben, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered. ~Robin Tyler
Art is the triumph over chaos. ~John Cheever
All great art comes from a sense of outrage. ~Glenn Close
Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life. ~Jean Paul Richter
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy
One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie. ~Mark Stevens
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things. ~Pablo Picasso
Art hath an enemy called ignorance. ~Ben Jonson
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. ~Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon. ~Agnes Repplier, Points of View, 1891
Art disturbs, science reassures. ~Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit
As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. ~John Lubbock
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. ~Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, 1971
Art is spirituality in drag. ~Jennifer Yane
The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair. ~Robert Brault
Coloring outside the lines is a fine art. ~Kim Nance
Reflexes and instincts are not pretty. It is their decoration that initiates art. ~Martin H. Fischer
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. ~Willa Cather
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. ~George Santayana
Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization. ~Lincoln Steffens
Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~Elbert Hubbard
An artist's career always begins tomorrow. ~James McNeill Whistler
The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. ~Pablo Picasso
Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum. ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~G.K. Chesterton
Artistry is an innate distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the five senses. ~Robert Brault,
Grammar stops at love, and at art. ~Terri Guillemets
The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world. ~André Malraux
The following are also William Morris images:
An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it. ~Paul Valéry
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. ~Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, 1915
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. ~Oscar Wilde
An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. ~Jean Cocteau, Newsweek, 16 May 1955
The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is. ~Alfred Tonnelle
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus
For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one. ~William McElcheran
O, how much simpler things would be, if eyes could paint or brush could see. ~Robert Brault
Art is a kind of illness. ~Giacomo Puccini
A great artist is always before his time or behind it. ~George Moore
A man and his art are like a fool and his king. ~Corri Alius
A painting is what you make of it, besides which, 'Moon, Weeping' has a better ring to it than 'Paintbrush, Dripping.' ~Robert Brault
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ~Claes Oldenburg
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres. ~Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt. ~Odilon Redon
The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else. ~Robert Brault
The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. ~James Russell Lowell
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~Aristotle
Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul - and you answer. ~Terri Guillemets
Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. ~Jean Cocteau
Picasso would give up cubism just to capture your curves. ~Konfal Blyther
Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ~Leonard Bernstein, What Makes Opera Grand?
There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination. ~Robert Brault
Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild. ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno
A portrait has one advantage over its original: it is unconscious; and you may therefore admire without insulting it. I have seen portraits which have more. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die. ~Thomas Carlyle
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. ~George Bernard Shaw
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. ~Michelangelo
Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. ~Jules Feiffer
All the other colors are just colors, but purple seems to have a soul. Purple is not just a noun and an adjective but also a verb - when you look at it, it's looking back at you. ~Uniek Swain
Architecture begins where engineering ends. ~Walter Gropius
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. ~G.K. Chesterton
Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier. ~Marie Laurencin
Art is Man's nature. Nature is god's art. ~James Bailey
The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression. The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality. ~Robert Brault
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ~John Ruskin
Art is what we call the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist. ~ Seth Godin
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
