Dear Artist, There’s a question that pops into this inbox practically every day: “How can I speed up my operation? I’m taking too long with my work. I know I need to be more efficient, but I’m somehow blocked.” Part…
Dear Artist, There’s a big dust-up coming to the US Congress. It involves moving the goalpost on copyrighted works of art. It’s about “orphan works.” These are works of art where no one seems to claim copyright — or where…
Dear Artist, One snowy November afternoon I happened to be in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and I knocked on the studio door of Norman Rockwell. He took his time coming and when he did he was in his smock with a pipe…
Dear Artist, About a hundred years ago when three-colour “process” printing was being perfected, some artists, particularly illustrators, wondered if they might paint like that too. One of them was the American Maxfield Parrish. Marveling at the richness derived from…
Dear Artist, Back in 1978 Colin Martindale of The University of Maine put some electrodes on some students’ heads and made an art-shaking discovery. Subjects were asked to create stories while the electroencephalogram recorded their brain waves. Creativity, he found,…
Dear Artist, Over the imagining of the next painting and the next — songs of the Winter Olympics: Luciano Pavarotti, John Lennon, Peter Gabriel. Thousands of youthful faces flushed with breathless energy for the heart-stomping competitions. There’s hope. Any dreamer…
Dear Artist, Recent studies of young people in the act of choosing music have shed some light on how the art game works. Teenagers in an online study were asked to rate a wide choice of unknown bands and new…
Dear Artist, Yesterday, Rita Roberts of Monte Vista, Colorado wrote, “It seems that I have a much greater need for things to make sense than that of the general population. Is this a common trait among artists? Might this be…
Dear Artist, Yesterday, Deborah Ridgley of Cincinnati, Ohio wrote, “I just submitted a body of work to a club and got rejected. They said something like, ‘You obviously have talent — however, we did not like your backgrounds.’ I’m trying…
Dear Artist, No matter what our style, medium or subject matter, our work takes its cues from nature. Nature determines our accepted norms of beauty and is the basis of our ideas of design. These aesthetic semi-laws find their source…