Death of history painting
At the end of the eighteenth century, art flowed along several currents. History painting, the primary current, was in its heyday and remained the undisputed champion until ‘history’ intruded into…
Transparent earth colors
Oil paint can be profitably judged for either its covering strength or transparency. This comports with some well known bits of studio wisdom: “fat over lean,” and “thick lights, thin…
Poem: The Poet’s Wife
Sometimes I post my poetry here on my blog. I still have the painting mentioned in this poem, which is I am showing here. The Poet’s Wife The poet’s tiny…
Review: Michael Harding oil paint
In the past, I used enough Michael Harding paint to add it to my oil paint reference. My initial rating was “good.” Later, I tried their titanium white and was…
Castles in the air
I knew a writer who wanted to transition from the technical documents that he wrote to pay his bills to fiction. His vision inspired a whole universe; not one novel…
They lost Jeffrey Sachs
Six months ago I would have described Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, as the consummate insider. For the past 30 years Sachs has taken…
Winner!
The first painting in my Amusement Park Series, Winner!, is moving along. I finished the underpainting and moved onto the overpainting, as you can see in this photo of the…
The problem with blended commercial oil paint
The ideal palette consists entirely of single-pigment colors. Such an ideal palette provides artists with total control over values and tones. This is especially important for artists, like me, who…