My artist statement takes over 300 words to describe what I hope to capture in my oil paintings. What I wish to capture, in as few words as possible, is average everydayness. The term—a favorite of mine—comes from philosopher Martin Heidegger's colossal book Being and Time. Average everydayness...
Twenty years ago, I attended a lecture by the renowned architect Frank Gehry. Meek and plain-speaking—like most Canadians—Gehry described his signature design process: "First, you get the building right. Then, you make it weird." Gehry meant a building must be structurally sound and functional first; a Gehry...
I invite you to grab your sweetheart, don your mask and come see my exhibit of original oil paintings for sale at the Center for the Creative Arts' Annual Artisan Show, next Saturday, November 21, and Sunday, November 22. At the event—a weekend marketplace for fine...
Art speaks to everyone, but some people don't listen. ― C. Vallo I'm a fortunate son. As a kid, living only eight miles outside Manhattan, I had the chance early in life to experience art in a global art center—indeed, the global art center in the day. My parents many...
Selling your paintings is a lot like busking, a word that derives from the Italian buscare, meaning to "get." Painters, like buskers, sell their art not in hopes of getting rich, but in hopes of getting on, as in "I'll leave you to get on with...
In Next Avenue, I spotlight the work and careers of four "second-act" artists, proving seasoned folks can flourish if they follow their passion. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and enjoy! ...
Years ago, I discovered—quite by accident—that the ideal wedding gift for a couple you don't know well is a painting. Decades after the ceremony, when the couple has lost, broken, donated, discarded, re-gifted and forgotten all their other wedding presents, they'll inevitably still have yours, hanging...
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...
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...