Category: Art & Artists
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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
-
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”.
-
Basho: “The one who writes three to five haiku…”
“…in his life is a haiku poet. Anyone who can write ten is a Master.” From: “Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing”, by Frederick Franck
-
Why write?
Why do writers write? The answers to this question have already become cliched, but I’m not so much interested in why they say they write, as in why they apparently write, which is a very different matter. By the way, none of these categories cut along the same seam as the “fiction / nonfiction” distinction.…
-
Alienation and the feeling of time
Activity slows the sense of time; passivity speeds it up. Spend a day making a craft you love and you enter a state described by artists, athletes, and saints in different terms, but is a contemplative state. This state is hyper-aware. The rush of passing time is suspended. It feels like finding one’s purpose and…
-
The Pursuit of Happiness Kills Stories
The ethic of fidelity creates stories. The struggle of living is a struggle to be faithful to something or someone outside the self. All else pales. Interesting stories are about overcoming the obstacles to fidelity, because the interesting questions about your life and the lives you know are always about fidelity. Will you be true?…
-
The Zen of Watercolor
The brush is a better artist than you are. The water is a better artist than you are. Just introduce the colors to each other then go get a coke. They’ll form their own friendships and you can sit in the corner and eavesdrop.