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Tag Archives: Technique

A Toe in the Water

I’ve been doing art sessions with a good friend’s seven year old daughter.  She wanted to learn about painting and I thought pan watercolors would be a good medium to start with – vivid colors, cheap, and not too messy.  Sharing her beginner’s joy with watercolors inspired me to try working with pan watercolors in [...]

Chaotic Landscape

  Drawing landscapes and plants is not my strong suit.  I love wildernesses and gardens, but I feel overwhelmed trying to capture their forms in drawing or painting.  They present a bewildering chaos of detail, a vast, borderless scale, and a range of color and tone that makes my palette look paltry.  My urge to [...]

Made Man

Dear readers, I’ll have another post for you here some time this week, but in the meantime check out my “guest post” on Daniel Maidman’s blog.  Daniel’s a figurative painter, of a more classical bent than me, and he’s also a stimulating writer, often considering artistic issues in the light of scientific and philosophical ideas.  [...]

Try, Try Again

Last week I posted about the master of the “naked portrait”, Lucian Freud, who often spent hundreds of hours over a period of many months on a single painting.  Naked portraits are also among my practices, but I lack the patience to spend so much time laboring over a single image.  I feel my best [...]

Vertical Panoramas

We’ve all gotten used to the terms “landscape” and “portrait” being used to designate the orientation of a rectangular display screen, printed document, or photograph, though there’s no reason a portrait can’t be horizontal, or a landscape vertical.  I live in New York, a famously vertical city of skyscrapers, but even here most of the [...]

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