Wow. Skateboarding and Plein Air Painting Prohibited! Leave-no-trace has long been a camping phrase, but evidently some plein air painters need to take a lesson. Oregon has clearly had enough of painters coming to enjoy the scenery and leaving a potentially toxic mess behind. Plein air painting has had a great bandwagon following that lacks [...]
Local or Regional – Splitting Hairs
Two kinds of artist can be part of any specific geographic location, one Local, the other Regional. Local is the most common. This is the artist who paints of a quality and subject matter that satisfies the common tastes (Eiffel Tower) (Carribean) (Statue of Liberty) (Chicago Skyline) of a region and its tourists. Charleston has [...]
Service after the Sale
I was once told by a prominent director of conservation from a prominent museum that Contemporary Art is known as Job Security in the conservation field. Easy to understand given artists’ haphazard or uninformed materials choices or the informed decision to go with temporary materials. Having just purchased a replacement dishwasher, I wonder whether you [...]
Red-Headed Step-Children
The problem with many portraits is two-fold. Namely, the artist and the sitter.
Pride in Craft
“Carpenters were once craftsmen who knew how to make, adapt, and tune their tools to reflect their individiual needs and quirks. Carpenters are now machine operators, factory workers without the factory, assembing modular units. Pride in craft is lost.” -Jan Sturmann from the essay entitled “Hand Tool Reflections”. You can find it in the book “The Hand-Sculpted House” by Ianto Evans, Michael Smith, and Linda Smiley.
Letter Writing
Letter Writing There was a time when we wrote letters not emails – when we kept journals not blogs. What would we know of Vincent if he emailed Theo? Even if we had the lawyers’ and media’s snoopers find the emails in some cast-off hard drive, we would have lost the drawings in those [...]
You Should Know Tom Thomson
Tom Thomson was born in Ontario in August of 1877. He went missing in July 1917. Eight days later, his body was found in Canoe Lake with a head injury and fishing line wrapped 17 times around his leg – rumor has it. Rumor also has it his fiancee was pregnant. That’s the grocery store [...]