“… 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.
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 […]
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
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 […]
There is magic to the mystery, but there is no mystery to the magic. – TJA
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
‘Beauty’, he says, ‘is that reasoned harmony of the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered but for the worse.’ —from The Chameleon’s Eye, by Caspar Pearson.
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 […]
Velazquez, like every great artist, tempered his method with doses of instinct. —From Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido’s “Technique of Genius”, Yale University Press, 1998.
“Sinking in” is the term used to describe what happens when a layer of paint loses its saturation. If you, like me, often use an earth palette, then this effect can easily be seen when a layer of Raw Umber or Burnt Umber has dried.
Alway a delight to find this kind of information.
Today I am less convinced that there is a formula for the color of flesh… but I do think there are strategies to be considered in terms of managing luminosity and temperature. What do you think?
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
I always enjoy have some idea of the kinds of pigments used to create a certain color, especially if multiple layers are involved. Here is a website I stumbled upon that has some nice presentations on this very topic…
I hope they will keep this up even after the show ends: Rubens: The Power of Transformation Note: I found this via the Art History News website.
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.
You follow rules to go somewhere.
You break rules to go somewhere else.
You ignore rules to go nowhere.
We need to be reminded: there is no beauty without rules and there is no better rule book than nature. —TJA
This special edition is dedicated to the study of Titian’s technique and style after 1540.
From the Natural Pigments website…
“To paint quickly while creating exceptional texture and volume effects, J. M. W. Turner and other English artists of his generation relied on the development of innovative gels.”
If you are doing research on unfamiliar names of pigments, then this is the resource you need: The Pigment Compendium by Nicholas Eastuagh, Valentine Walsh, Tracey Chaplin and Ruth Siddall.
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 […]
This special edition is dedicated to the paintings of Joshua Reynolds in the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection.
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