My great-grandfather Ramey had a fierce personality. Even in his 90’s, he had no time for nonsense, epically from unruly children such as me. My grandmother ascribed her father’s fierceness to his harsh childhood. Orphaned early, his adopted family treated him as little more than a servant. One day, my grandmother’s oft-repeated story went, her…
I’ve seen blood moons before, the red moon that appears during Fall evenings, but I’ve never seen a red moon in the morning until today. When I first saw the moon, it was so bright and fat, I thought it was the sun above Lake Erie. But it is the red-colored moon. I ran to…
Christmas was wonderful again this year. One of my gifts was a new palette. My homemade one is decrepit, as you can see in this photo. I prepared the new palette–a glass-covered reproduction–by removing the reproduction and painting the backing neutral gray. The old palette, including the frame, is the same size as the glass…
I want adventure. When I started, art was an adventure. When I confronted a landscape, a figure, or whatever, it was an adventure of discovery. I saw it for the first time. Each time I started a painting, I had that experience. Guess what? I still do! You might think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.…
I’ve been using flake white from Utrecht a lot. Lately, I’ve run into the same problem, namely, tubes with excessive oil content. When I open a fresh tube, a lake of oil pours out. That is what happened with the last tube I opened. You can see what I mean in this photo. I placed…
Stiff paint, stiff muscles, stiff brain. This describes my afternoon. I finished a painting this morning and celebrated with a piece of pumpkin pie leftover from Thanksgiving. Back in the studio, I started working on this large painting that is in mid-career. Not in the starting stage but nowhere near the finishing stage either. I…
In Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, the protagonist studies painting for two years in an atelier school in Paris. At the end of that time, he screws up his courage to ask the master if he actually has talent. The master tells him that his talent is modest; he will never rise above mediocre. This…
I’m a Nikon fanboy. My Nikon D750 is the best piece of gear that I’ve ever owned. Of course, good consumer that I am, I’m lusting after the Z 7 ii that Nikon announced last week. I’m not a pro photographer–far from it. Actually, I have a confession to make. When I was starting out,…