Dear Artist, Everybody knows about Gustav Klimt’s women, not the least of which is his dazzling 1907 gold-on-gold portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I. It sold in 2006 for $US135 million — the highest price ever paid at auction. But something else…
Dear Artist, When we think of Chinese art, we might generally think of pirate factories and their websites cloning Western artists and selling the stuff for peanuts. We need to think again. China is collecting and buying art big time,…
Dear Artist, In “Lake Wobegon Days,” Garrison Keillor writes, “I grew up among slow talkers, men in particular, who dropped words a few at a time like beans on a hill, and when I got to Minneapolis, I was not…
Dear Artist, On a small beach between towering rocks around the corner from Cabo San Lucas in Baja, Mexico, I set up, shaded and alone except for an occasional beach walker and the skimming pelicans. A 20″ x 24″ proceeded,…
Dear Artist, After my last letter, where photographer Andre Kertesz lost and later found his old negs, a pile of emails came in asking for advice on digital archiving. “What technology, what storage, what’s best?” you asked. Others kindly offered…
Dear Artist, If I had to do it all over again I would have been archiving from the get go. I’d be photographing and cataloging from about age ten. In those days that sort of thing didn’t even cross my…
Dear Artist, Yesterday I returned to my old school.The Art Center College of Design is now located on extensive acreage above Pasadena, California. It’s a long, black, state-of-the-art building bridging a gully — a Darth Vader presence in a sylvan…
Dear Artist, I’m laptopping you from beside a life-sized statue of Voltaire by Houdon. It’s in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Variations of the piece exist in other places around the world, so seeing it again is like…
Dear Artist, In the Thought Garden outside the Acupuncture Center, I strike up a conversation. Marie tells me she’s in for “calmness, nicotine and fertility.” She’s a sinewy Hollywood type who looks like she could make herself into a pretzel.…
Dear Artist, While it’s possible to create interesting work without attention to order, for most of us it’s difficult. Consciously or unconsciously, our personal sense of order is vital to both style and creative satisfaction. For example, painting from foreground…