Dear Artist, Wow! That was quite an experience. After submitting my painting for your input in the previous letter, this Inbox jammed up. (On Friday morning, more than three thousand emails came in before breakfast.) Reading and gisting many of…
Dear Artist, Painters who give workshops will know what I’m talking about. You can walk into a room with a bunch of folks busily painting, pick up almost any work-in-progress and, after a minute or two, put your finger on…
Dear Artist, When Wisconsin-born economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” he was reacting to the over-the-top wastefulness of a gilt society. Veblen died in Palo Alto, California in 1929, just three weeks before the stock-market crash and the…
Dear Artist, The reason so many people in so many cultures prefer a landscape painting to other art is that in the Pleistocene and earlier times, pastoral images were part of finding something to eat. So suggests philosophy professor Denis…
Dear Artist, If you’ve ever wondered just how good an artist can be, take a look at some Irwin Greenberg watercolours. Irwin has maintained a steady flow of quality work over a lifetime of teaching the “Old Hat Painting Class”…
Dear Artist, Yesterday I took part in an advisory panel. This is where a couple of somewhat respected artists take a look, one artist at a time, at the work of up-and-comers. For each half-hour interview, my accomplice Janice Robertson and…
Dear Artist, Phan Ke An, 85, painted more than 20 portraits of the late Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. In 1948, An was drawing cartoons for the party newspaper Su That (appropriately “The Truth”) and was singled out for…
Dear Artist, I’m laptopping you from a shady spot beside a placid lake on the Royal Palace grounds in Hue, Vietnam. King Tu Duc (1829-1883), whose tomb lies behind a nearby wall, retreated here for most of the 36 years…
Dear Artist, The other day I was visiting a former painter who just happens to be an old friend. This fellow had some considerable success as a young man in New York and other places. At age 32 he shut…