The job of an artist is to offer a sanctuary of beauty to an ugly world – Jeff Goins A few years ago, University of Chicago historian Tom Smith asked 27,000 Americans to evaluate their jobs. He found that, of nearly 200 occupations, painters scored fifth for...
Painting is another way of keeping a diary. — Pablo Picasso I dashed off Social Distancing last March, the morning I realized Covid-19 was not just some flu, but "really real." Since that morning ten months ago, 389,000 Americans have died of the virus, including a close family...
Others have no data for computing our orbit other than our past acts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Twenty years ago, a business coach recommended I read the now out-of-print Nichecraft. The book convinced me to specialize—a lesson I've carried with me into my move into professional painting. Specializing...
Crime, money, power, drugs—are all linked. — Matthew Vaughn Community activists in Los Angeles, peeved with the proliferation of art galleries in the once-poor Boyle Heights neighborhood, charged local developers four years ago with a sleight-of-hand they named artwashing, the first known use of the word. Disingenuous businessmen,...
An interest in things is and always was at the root of art. — John Sloan From as early as he can remember, self-taught Tennessee artist H.R. Lovell has loved things—the more ordinary, the better. "I might see things different as a painter that somebody else may have...
I'm rereading Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence and am struck by the scene in which the narrator begs Charles Strickland to explain himself. Why has the stockbroker abandoned his wife and children for la vie de bohème? "Do you mean to say you didn't leave your...
Though a living cannot be made from art, art makes life worth living. — John Sloan John Sloan was starving when he said what he said, so you have to forgive him. It is possible to make a living from art—and a decent one, at that. I...
No second-act artist more captivates me than the late still-life painter Robert M. Kulicke. His is a Horatio Alger story...
Realist painter Robert Henri called the communion of connoisseurs "The Brotherhood." The Thought Police would insist we re-label that "mystical bond," but let's allow Henri to slide. What he had to say is too important to get hung up over one Victorian-era word. According to Henri, The...