Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window, To be your Valentine. — Shakespeare According to medieval folklore, women should rise early on February 14th—the day the birds mate—because a gentleman always weds the first lady he runs into. Valentine's Day was...
The world is divided into two classes—invalids and nurses. — James Abbott McNeill Whistler My troublesome, months-long recovery from a broken ankle would be much more vexing were it not for my wife's ministrations. If I'm able to paint and write while being laid up, it's all her...
Creativity takes what it needs from the person who possesses it and discards the rest. — Peter Schjeldahl New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed that, for viewers, subject and medium always transcend a painter's thoughts and feelings. I think that's why, after just a few weeks,...
Home is the nicest word there is. — Laura Ingalls Wilder A collector recently told me she's buying my painting Entenmann's Trio because it reminds her of home. "I grew up in New York," she said, "and have fond memories of boxes of their cakes on our kitchen...
In every moment, in every thing, eternity is present. — Wols Painting trains you to find the "ungraspable abstract" in things, the eternal forms obscured by ordinary perception, and to render them as your emotions dictate. It's both those qualities—the eternal and the emotional—that make good paintings so...
We don't make movies to make more money. We make more money to make more movies. - Walt Disney Let's be honest: I paint to make money. But that's the least of it. I paint better to see the world because, as Wittgenstein said, "the world is all that...
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...