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...

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...

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long. — W. Somerset Maugham Who in his right mind spends three hours over a cup of coffee? That's what I did yesterday. "Cuppa Joe" (oil on canvas, only 5 x 7 inches) took...

It's heartwarming to hear family, friends and neighbors ask "How are you doing?" and mean it. So far, so good, is my answer. I'm asymptomatic, taking all the recommended precautions, and adding a few of my own (such as sniffing Stubb's Bar-B-Q Sauce every morning, to test...

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...

Originality always happens as a byproduct of the search for the answers to a technical or aesthetic problem. — Robert Kulicke When you paint a pear, how original can you be? It depends on your definition of "original." Like a rose, a pear is a pear is a pear. And,...