I invite you to grab your sweetheart, don your mask and come see my exhibit of original oil paintings for sale at the Center for the Creative Arts' Annual Artisan Show, next Saturday, November 21, and Sunday, November 22. At the event—a weekend marketplace for fine...

15 November, 2020

Art speaks to everyone, but some people don't listen. ― C. Vallo I'm a fortunate son. As a kid, living only eight miles outside Manhattan, I had the chance early in life to experience art in a global art center—indeed, the global art center in the day. My parents many...

13 November, 2020

Selling your paintings is a lot like busking, a word that derives from the Italian buscare, meaning to "get." Painters, like buskers, sell their art not in hopes of getting rich, but in hopes of getting on, as in "I'll leave you to get on with...

09 November, 2020

In Next Avenue, I spotlight the work and careers of four "second-act" artists, proving seasoned folks can flourish if they follow their passion. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and enjoy! ...

07 November, 2020

Years ago, I discovered—quite by accident—that the ideal wedding gift for a couple you don't know well is a painting. Decades after the ceremony, when the couple has lost, broken, donated, discarded, re-gifted and forgotten all their other wedding presents, they'll inevitably still have yours, hanging...

30 October, 2020

I'm often asked what the term in my artist statement alla prima means. It's Italian for "at once." I painted "Jug and Friends," for example, all at once, in a two-hour time-span. I painted it directly, seamlessly, or, as the Germans say, aus einem Guss—literally, "from a single...

27 October, 2020

It’s not so easy writing about nothing. — Patti Smith A few years ago I met Noah Scalin, who launched his career as a professional artist by creating a skull every day for a year. "Creativity is a practice," Scalin said. His advice was simple: Pick something—anything—and make one every...

24 October, 2020

Deer-hunting season has begun in my neighborhood. You can tell by the intermittent pop-pop pop-pop of rifle-fire emerging from the woods nearby in the autumn afternoons. Hunting season is all year round for painters. We stalk not game, but pretty things to paint. The whole world is our...

21 October, 2020

Perhaps no other statement by a boss strikes greater fear than, "You can be replaced, you know." Now painters have that fate to fear. A new study in Frontiers in Robotics and AI suggests robots will soon replace painters. Electrical engineer María Santos and her colleagues taught a...

14 October, 2020

I spoke last week with an artist who complained that too many people who take painting classes are dilettantes. "You meet a lot of people who, frankly, are all doing the same bad painting over and over," she said. "They're not serious. They're just there." My own experience...

11 October, 2020