As part of the show I am having this November at the Los Angeles gallery Iam8bit, they asked if I could document the process of making a representative painting. On my own, I’ve attempted to do this but have usually forgotten to actually photograph the work as I got into the painting process. Having an [...]
I grew up loving the mall. Shoppers World in Framingham MA was a singular destination in my formative years (an architectural curiosity, it was said to be the second oldest mall in America until it was torn down in the mid 1990′s and the dome in the late Jordan Marsh store was reputed to be [...]
This list is extremely biased and arbitrary and based only on my own experience of looking at art. I only count works or artists I have actually seen and I don’t pretend to have any kernel of bigger picture intent behind the choices. These works and artists are simply the pieces that have moved me [...]
Old on left • Rework(ing) on right Don’t we all have these projects lying about, whispering sweet guilt at their unfinished nature? It might be some involved yard work or a shelf that isn’t quite up on the wall yet. For myself and many artists there are various older ideas that had begun to take [...]
I ask and am asked this question a lot. There are clever and cleverer answers that run around the same solution that I have found consistently. One word comes to mind; Deadline. Art and artists often like to think they are somehow separate from the typical world and in many ways we are. What we [...]
Recent watercolors using lots of gum arabic! Sometimes, you need to talk a little shop and extol the virtues of the minutest detail of your working process. Today we celebrate Gum Arabic and by default, watercolor. For a little primer; I have become recently re-obsessed with watercolor after a few years away while playing nicely [...]
A goal for this summer was to reevaluate how I kept track of and followed up on goals. You need to plan to make plans! That initial goal has been accomplished and I now have a binder I keep with me as much as possible with a better organized system of keeping track of what [...]
Aren’t we all pack rats of some sort? Whether we hold trivia in our memory or the trivial in our closets it’s sometimes difficult to get away from the things we accumulate. That old one year rule, you know, “if you don’t use something in a year, get rid of it…” isn’t quite a truism [...]
“What kind of work do you make?” I hate that question. My answer is sometimes cohesive and usually not. If I’m remembering well I will have a card or two on my person that will show a small picture of what I make as a painter and the discussion can move on from there. I [...]
I don’t know how many other professions suffer under the weight of a feeling of needing constantly to reinvent or reinvigorate a perfectly good process of working. In my art making, every three years seems to be about a normal point of withdrawal from whatever approach I have undertaken, struggled with (usually mightily) and then [...]
Robert Ryman Ledger Mix 20% Cobalt Blue with 80% Titanium White and spread the mixture, 2 ounces at a time, in a circular motion onto your canvas. Make sure that every second swirl leaves a trace of the brush imprint for an impasto effect. Then, using the flat side of your fan brush… Kidding… I [...]
Different art forms are in effect different kinds of language. What we say doesn’t differ as greatly from person to person as the differences in what language we use and how we choose to use it. Each language has its own vocabulary and combinations of expression that help present an artist’s ideas to the world. [...]
“One can’t lead if you follow.” This is one of those sayings, like many aphorisms that has some weight some of the time. There is always a corollary for most aphorisms and for this one it might be “If you always lead you might not know where you’re going” or something like that. One of [...]
This week is time for a little fun as I am swamped with my first full week of teaching and I have very little time or energy to devote to a more meaningful essay. Since I generally consider myself mainly a landscape painter I feel eminently qualified to break down the top ten landscape painters [...]
