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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. ― Jorge Luis Borges Covid-19 is killing people who haven't caught it. I just read the lament of a colleague whose out-of-work client committed suicide last week. That man won't...
These are days you'll remember. — Natalie Merchant While 2020 is the year everyone wants to forget, I'm among the lucky few who think it's a year of wonders. With so much time on my hands to paint, I feel I've reached a fresh plateau unimaginable only twelve months...
Chaos, for me, breeds images. — Francis Bacon I've always been an über-neatnik. My studio—kept neat, clean, and in apple-pie order—reflects that. I worry sometimes my innate tidiness hampers me. Compare the condition of my studio to that of the great British painter Francis Bacon. Besides paint tubes, Bacon kept over...
Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes. — Oscar Wilde Blame Trophy Communism: in our everybody-gets-a-trophy culture, self-criticism is hard to come by. Which means a lot of weak work gets off the drawing board. If you're a Trophy Capitalist, on the other hand, you don't...