Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. — Franklin D. Roosevelt On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of painting en plein air outside the studio of N.C. Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, under the guidance of my realism teacher, Randall Graham. The afternoon was warm,...

04 October, 2021

  The soul grows by subtraction, not addition. — Thoreau The rare exception, I painted Beer Bottle alla prima from a photo yesterday. (I usually paint from observation.) I'm away from my studio, staying, Thoreau-like, in a cabin in Maine, and can't set up my subject easily. While still wet,...

16 September, 2021

Inspiration is for amateurs. — Chuck Close Old objects and the personal memories associated with them inspire most of my paintings. I'm content to call it nostalgia. Like weight-gain, nostalgia is an affliction of the aged and can rapidly get out of hand. I especially loathe the kind that...

21 August, 2021

All painting is accident. — Francis Bacon My small oil painting Nutella came about almost by itself and almost instantly—or at least it felt that way, coming on the heels as it did of a much larger painting entitled Yoo Hoo.  Nutella took less than two hours to paint;...

12 August, 2021

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. — Henry David Thoreau This week I had to print my Artist Statement for an exhibition and wondered whether it was up to date. I'd put a lot of work into it last year (as did...

05 August, 2021

I'm pleased to announce the release of my first e-book, Paint Licks. Paint Licks gathers insights by 30 painters, living and dead, into the whys and hows of painting. Download your free copy now. Share it with a friend. And let me know if you enjoy it....

31 July, 2021

With the aid of my trusty spatula, I am attempting to paint only in planes. I'm taking my lead from Cape Cod School founder Charles Hawthorne, whose wisdom is captured in Dover's diminutive Hawthorne on Painting. Hawthorne asked painters to "forget drawing" and "see color planes." By encouraging painters...

17 July, 2021

  Influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind. — Jean-Michel Basquiat Robert Rauschenberg once told art historian Dorothy Seckler it was okay to swipe from another painter because "one can use another man's art as material without it representing a lack of...

10 July, 2021

Attention is the beginning of devotion. — Mary Oliver Oil paint was made for depicting flesh. — Willem DeKooning Compared to, say, watching a fireworks display, painting is a decidedly jumbled way of perceiving. Watching fireworks is just that—watching. Eyeballing a show, a spectacle, a rebus (from the Latin non...

30 June, 2021

It is better to be fervent in spirit, even if one accordingly makes more mistakes, than narrow-minded and overly cautious. — Vincent Van Gogh It's juvenile to think so, but a fortune cookie has provided my new mantra. I paint for the most part alla prima in oil,...

27 June, 2021