Browsing: Letters

Letters
0 Tool kit

Dear Artist, Jim the plumber — a man with a high profession by any standards — travels with a complex kit. He drives a full van. Pipes, pumps, ball-cocks, flapper-valves, and roto-rooters fill out a palette for his subterranean artistry.…

Letters
0 Timeless and timely

Dear Artist, Near where I live, there passes an ancient pathway called the Semiahmoo Trail. It was first used by native peoples — the Semiahmoos — then by gold seekers, and later — not much more than a hundred years…

Letters
0 Discriminating connoisseur

Dear Artist, Last night, I was visiting an old friend who is a bit of an art collector. He has a dozen or so of mine. Above our scotch, on a high, dramatic wall, I noticed a huge new painting…

Letters
0 Making adjustments

Dear Artist, The more I go at this game the more I realize it’s a business of making adjustments. Many adjustments are pretty darned minor — even trivial. It seems to me it’s the trivial stuff that makes the difference.…

Letters
0 Creative peaking

Dear Artist, We artists experience a phenomenon called “creative peaking.” There are two main types: “macropeaks” and “micropeaks.” The first are the big ones, the life ones — like Mozart was said to have peaked at age 16. Micropeaks are…

Letters
0 In praise of supports

Dear Artist, Supports. I’m not talking about the people who support you while you’re having fun with art. I’m talking about the stuff we work on — canvases, panels, cards, papers — generally referred to as “the support.” Recently I…

Letters
0 In praise of wild places

Dear Artist, In 1934, Ansel Adams took a break from his work on the effects of the Great Depression on humanity and visited King’s Canyon, near Yosemite. This event, and the photography that followed were to result in a refreshed…

Letters
0 In praise of crazy

Dear Artist, Some people think she’s crazy. She’s a bronco-busting, motorcycle-riding, video-making, sky-diving, giant-picture-painting kind of girl. She makes loud noises in social situations. “Man, look at that tree,”she shouts. She can laugh like a logger and giggle like a…

Letters
0 Artists’ Requiem

Dear Artist, Over the past months there have been a few letters from artists with remarks about the situation in the Middle East. My first instinct was to leave the political stuff out of these letters and our Painter’s Keys…

Letters
0 Count your blessings

Dear Artist, Termites that have been dormant over the winter issue from a small hole in the corner of my studio ceiling. When I “Raid” them they withdraw momentarily. Today, apart from the perennial easel-struggle this is the main distraction.…

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