Entries by tja

“To Excel the Past…”

“… we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it; on the contrary, we must feel it under our feet because we have raised ourselves upon it.” — from the essay, “The Other and the Self” by José Ortega y Gasset Thanks, as ever, to the inimitable Charles Weed.

“Last Words” on Painting

There is one thing about painting––you can be a student to the end of your days. You can never learn all you want to know. There is no end to adventure and experiment. There is always a problem to be solved and there is intense pleasure all the time in trying to solve it. From […]

The Flat Tint

If anyone doubts what a flat tint will do, let him see the shadow of a rabbit on the wall, which he can make with his hands. W. H. Hunt, from Talks on Art, 1890

Yarn Weaving

A Kentucky Limner in a King Arthur-less Court Until that pivotal moment, anyone wanting to record, commemorate, memorialize, honor, exalt, celebrate, immortalize, or simply capture a basic likeness for the purpose of posterity or for warming the cockles of a betrothed, had to come to us. But then, there it was, upon the stage it […]

Book Note of the Day: Preservation of Breadth

John Burnet’s Practical Hints on Light and Shade in Painting, published in 1880, opens with the following quote: The highest finishing is labor in vain, unless at the same time there be preserved a breadth of light and shadow. From Reynold’s notes on Du Fresnoy

Book Note of the Day: The Royal Road in Art

There is no royal road in art. In this department of life, as in every other, the student must serve before he can govern. He must learn to construct, to draw, to paint, to observe, and select. —From the preface of Alfred East’s, “Landscape Painting in Oil Colour,” Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1908 This […]

pLog Pith XVII

If the big things aren’t right, the small things won’t matter.Make it so that small things matter. Updated on October 16th, 2023: If the big things aren’t right, the small things won’t matter.Make it so that small things matter… and matter in a big way! – TJA

Track the Lives of the Old Masters

There is a very clever new website called eVasari: you can trace the timeline, travels and pictures of many different artists… even several together. Attached is a search I did that shows how the lifetimes of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian overlap. Really cool. You can find it here.

pLog Pith XV

We need to be reminded: there is no beauty without rules and there is no better rule book than nature. —TJA

“Flesh Spheres”

In January of 2014 I made my second trip to visit Odd in Norway.  It was during that visit that I first met the Italian painter, Roberto Calò, and together we began experimenting with underpainting, flesh tones and color temperature (including the turbid medium effect), through a series of spheres. I would now call those […]