Author: Tim
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On Art Supplies
Great artists don’t talk much about their tools. The rest of us do, because we’re still discovering what our hands can do. Most of us never get to the end of this exploration of means – and that’s ok, because to create is its own reward, no matter what stage of development we find ourselves…
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Every sketch is a question about what God sees.
If you treat your sketchbook as a book of answers you’ll suffocate from the presence of the inner judge, who will demand a certain finished quality to those sketched answers. No, see your pencil as a questioning stick. It is a divining rod, doodling among the surface textures of what you see in front of…
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C.S. Lewis: “The scholar has lived in many times…”
The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the nonsense that pours from the press of his own age. – C.S. Lewis
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Forms, Interrupted: How Worship Happens
Liturgies are born as spontaneous formalities. They can be recorded later, but not then re-enacted. Each moment in the presence of God is a formal dance whose rules have been forgotten. Did you actually think that the moment before St. John saw an uncountable crowd around the Throne that some angelic ushers directed all to…
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As Close As The Window On Your Left
“Your best work may be closer than you think. You don’t need to go all the way to Africa or Italy to find subject matter worthy of painting. Your own backyard or neighborhood may be fertile ground for superior paintings. Mary Cassatt spent her career painting friends and family, and almost all of Vermeer’s paintings…
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Mary Whyte, on myths of color
“Artists do not see color differently or better than other people…So, you can’t say that you don’t have any color sense or that you don’t know what colors work together…there are no groups of colors that are better than others…and while we are debunking myths here, let me also add that there is no such…
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Mary Whyte: “I tear up about one in four paintings…”
“In real life, I tear up about one out of every four paintings, because I feel the image is composed poorly or the washes have gotten muddy.” – Mary Whyte, p. 83
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John Singer Sargent, on brushes
“John Singer Sargent said the two most common mistakes he saw his students make were using a brush that was too small and too little paint.” – p. 26, Painting Portraits and Figures in Watercolor, Mary Whyte. Watson-Guptill Pub., NY, 2011. In subsequent posts just “Mary Whyte”.
