The sentimental person thinks things will last; the romantic person has a desperate confidence they won't. — F. Scott Fitzgerald "High culture is paranoid about sentiment," the late painter Thomas Kinkade once said. The undisputed "king of kitsch," he often compared his art to Walt Disney's. "My paintings beckon you...
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. — Ecclesiastes A fellow artist expressed to me yesterday her disappointment that realist painters—even of the caliber of Monet and Van Gogh—never add anything original to our...
Informally, I call many of my paintings depictions of "nostalgic food." Viewers who react to these paintings usually respond with cheer, and will immediately mention memories of childhood. Among other things, I've painted sandwiches, donuts, Twinkies, Peeps, and bottles of soda pop. Right now, I'm trying to capture...
The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle. — Bob Dylan Just in time for the 60th anniversary of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues"—which enshrined a vandalized pump within America's literary canon—an unknown artist in Denmark has vandalized a painting by one of nation's most...
We live in a political world. — Bob Dylan The notion behind this post came to me a week ago, but I felt no urgency to pursue the idea until late last evening, when POLITICO announced that the Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade. My...
Yesterday, I visited the studio of Philadelphia painter Laura Acton, all spanking clean for her May Day open house and sporting a fresh coat of gray floor paint. Laura paints vivid still lifes, landscapes and figures, and she had several years' paintings hanging on the four...
Ever since Plato, Western philosophers have studied art. So much so that in the 17th century, German philosophers, big on classification, saw fit to create a separate branch of philosophy they called aesthetics, a term derived from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning "about perception." The German philosopher, Georg...
Join me on Saturday, April 23, at Art Fest at Whitehall, in Middletown, Delaware. You'll see all my recent paintings and enjoy a chance to shop for fine art pieces and handmade crafts from hundreds of other Delaware artists. There's live music and food-truck fare is available,...
I'm ready to pack off to Ireland, home of my ancestors. Ireland's government has announced it will begin to pay 2,000 Irish artists $355 a week under a new universal basic income (UBI) program. There are no restrictions on how artists may spend the money. I'm guessing Guinness...
"Immersive exhibitions are a recent scourge," says artist and writer Sarah Rose Sharp in Hyperallergic. But one new show passes her sniff test. Now at the Prado, the show makes use of The Sense of Smell, a 17th-century painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul...