Browsing: Letters

Letters
207 How to Build a Sky

Dear Artist, Perhaps it’s the same for you: when preparing for a show, the cohesion of it – the idea – often begins with a title. Over some weeks, I let a vibe of what I want to create as…

Letters
12 Sabbatical

Dear Artist, Yesterday, my friend Chuck Putnins, whose other life is anesthesiology, wrote, “Next year I’ll be taking 6 months off work from May 1 to November 1. During that time I want to get better at painting and develop…

Letters
26 Truth

Dear Artist, Imagine creating a perfect work of art at age 23, and then presenting it to humanity in new interpretations over your lifetime, alongside an assured and evolving artistic voice. Imagine presenting this perfect work again at 78, with…

Letters
19 Time to choose?

Dear Artist, Yesterday, my studio computer jingled with a question that concerns a lot of us. Antonia Mitchell wrote, “While I’m an established artist, I still have a problem. I’m continually compelled to experiment with different forms of art. When…

Letters
10 Provenance

Dear Artist, In May, a police detective called to let me know that one of my Dad’s paintings had been recovered from a stash of over 1,000 works of art found in three storage lockers around the Saanich Peninsula on…

Letters
14 Artist for life

Dear Artist, Yesterday Alexis Ramos wrote, “I’m impressed that you’ve worked as an artist full time for all of your life. What would you recommend to a young person like me who wants to make a decent living as an…

Letters
5 Courage

Dear Artist, The difference between courage and recklessness, writes social scientist, musician and columnist Arthur C. Brooks, is using your conscious brain to reason, not just your amygdala reactivity, or your fight-or-flight response, to feel the thrill or fear of…

Letters
11 The big three

Dear Artist, An excellent Quebec painter, Lorne Bouchard, once gave me some advice. He told me that a painter needs to work from three sources — from self-generated photo reference, from life, and from the imagination. “All painters,” he said,…

Letters
25 How to be social

Dear Artist, An artist friend wrote, “Are you very reclusive like your Dad in the art scene? Or do you network more?” In 2003, just as I was about to move to New York, I read an essay in The…

Letters
12 Finding your voice

Dear Artist, Recently, Judith Meeks of Toronto, ON, Canada, wrote, “I’ll soon be chairing a panel discussion called ‘Finding Your Voice.’ In your understanding, how do we translate our life experiences into our paintings and express who we really are?…

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